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Get updates longer!Get updates longer!Posted Jun 29, 2012 11:04 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091)In reply to: Android 4.1 Jelly Bean: faster, smoother, more delightful (ars technica) by cabrilo Parent article: Android 4.1 Jelly Bean: faster, smoother, more delightful (ars technica) The only way to be sure that your phone is going to be updated is to buy an unlocked phone and update it yourself. If it is popular enough then independent distros (CyanogenMod or even Replicant) will probably support it for a long time. I have a Nexus S, and Google is still updating it. Hope to get official 4.1 soon! Otherwise, it's time for CyanogenMod.
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Get updates longer! Posted Jun 30, 2012 8:17 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
the problem is figuring out ahead of time if it's going to be popular enough.
I purchased an unlocked tablet, and have effectively been orphaned because of lack of vendor support and documentation (video and camera)
This is in spite of there being a bounty of >$1000 for someone producing a working android 4.1 build for the device.
Get updates longer! Posted Jun 30, 2012 8:24 UTC (Sat) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] That is certainly one of the characteristics (and sore points) of the Android ecosystem: only the popular devices survive, and the others get orphaned quick. Those that get updated by vendors in turn become more popular, and so on. In the end there are only a few viable devices.From my limited and anecdotal research, that is one of the reasons why HTC phones have largely stopped being popular: they are locked and are not updated by the manufacturer. And in a very short space of time! In a sense, market forces favor unlocked, updated devices, which is good; but the market is notoriously difficult to read in advance.
Get updates longer! Posted Jul 3, 2012 8:21 UTC (Tue) by rich0 (guest, #55509) [Link]
Agreed. I bought an HTC Vision in part because Cyanogen mentioned that he had bought one and liked it, and I figured that this would make support a bit more likely.
However, there is still no official CM v9 build for this device. Andromadus is the closest to the CM experience as there is, but is moving along slowly. I think one of the issues is that the modding community has essentially become fragmented by the large number of phones - when there were only a few phones the effort to keep them supported as long as possible was MUCH more concentrated.
A further complication is that the more prolific developers tend to get new phones very often funded by donations. That tends to mean that much of the development effort gets focused on the latest and greatest phones.
Obviously the free software developers don't owe anybody anything - the community benefits from whatever work they donate to the cause. However, these sorts of factors make it unlikely that any new phone is going to have the support that the HTC Dream originally enjoyed (I hear you can get ICS for it), despite the huge hardware limitations on the Dream (a bit of a hacker's target as a result - plus just about all the devs have one lying around).
The Nexus phones by far have the best official support, however you'll only get ~18 months of releases if you buy one the day they come out. Since Google sells them until a new one comes out and they seem to come out about annually, if you happen to buy one the day before the next one is announced you will be lucky to get updates for a year. The downside to the Nexus phones is that they tend to be unsubsidized - though that can vary by carrier.
Get updates longer! Posted Jul 3, 2012 9:23 UTC (Tue) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
the problem is made significantly worse because the developers tend I have seen tend to not be willing to do anything to push their work upstream (not even just being willing to interact with Greg K-H via e-mail)
This means that any work done to get a device working with one version of Android is completely lost when the next version is released (by which time there are new devices out for the more prolific developers to work on)
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