Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora

I think "most people" run their vendor-supplied Android version and apply whatever updates trickle down from the mfgr. and carrier. Under that model, I've never had an update (as opposed to a version upgrade) break anything, and I don't carry or own a backup phone.

So far as the version upgrade goes, the Eclair upgrade for the original CLIQ broke some things, but that was largely because the Moto team did yeoman work forcing 10 lbs. of manure into a 5 lb. bag.

Android has more smartphone preinstalls than anything but iPhone. Non-Android Linux has fewer smartphone preinstalls than blackberry or symbian. The number of consumers who reformat their phone and install a different OS is too small to measure, so in the short to medium term compatability is entirely a vendor issue.

This may change as the platform matures, but as yet we've seen no sign of it. Right now we're in smartphone version of the "ROM Basic" era of PCs, where all the apps are java blobs running in Dalvik and nobody really cares about native code. The PC outgrew ROM basic as it commoditized and people started pushing the limits of the hardware, but to get there the platform had to open itself up to third party vendors who didn't get distribution through IBM.

As long as installing apps goes through Google's app store, it's Dalvik all the way down. And as long as "people who don't have smartphones" is a bigger market than "people who have inferior smartphones", saying that X is an incremental technical improvement over Y will get lost in the noise. And by the time that stops, we'll have a winner.

Feel free to complain about how Google's version is less important than aftermarket Cyanogenmod while iPhone passes 50% and locks in the network effects. Did you know iPhone sales have surpassed Microsoft's entire gross revenue? Sure, Apple's being dickish, which will obviously hand the market over to Linux the same way Microsoft's repugnant behavior handed the desktop to DR-DOS, OS/2, BeOS, and Linux. Obviously they're doomed. (And of course _technical_ inferiority prevented Windows 3.1/95/98 from ever amounting to anything, and network insecurity immediately gutted XP's market share.)

But somehow, I'm not finding these arguments persuasive.