Also look at Adobe. If you bought CS5 then support for it essentially stopped 6 months after the purchase as they moved their focus to CS5.5. When Lion came out it had multiple incompatibilities with CS5, but Adobe wouldn't give any support since they had just released CS5. 5.
Good! A comment! Thanks!
That's just the thing... Adobe CS is a perfect example.
You don't buy a two-year
contract on Adobe CS5. Actually, I do (we have Adobe's Cumulative Licensing Program (CLP) for Creative Suite at my office, which is a two-year maintenance contract for their software), and guess what?
I get the updates. I got CS 5.5 for "free", because we were still under our Maintenance Agreement when it came out.
Even if you don't buy the contract, you also get a number of patches from Adobe and (seemingly constant) security fixes, even long after the next "major version" comes out. You get them at the same time as everyone else, and you get them for all of your computers.
Android phones are just the opposite.
You DO have to buy a contract. Or, I should say, everyone in the United States does, in practice, because (1) you often have to wait a long time post-launch to buy a "contract free" phone and (2) the contract free phones are still carrier-locked and you get no discount on your monthly bill so there is absolutely no advantage to this other than you don't have an ETF hanging over your head. If you do this to avoid the ETF, you're usually screwing yourself because the difference in price between the subsidized phone plus the ETF and the contract-free phone is usually in favor of the former, not the latter. You're better off buying the contract and then breaking it and paying the fee.
And then you don't have service on your device. So, it would only help in theory if you want to switch carriers, but you can't switch carriers and keep your phone, because the phones are carrier locked in many cases (or physically different), and even if you do manage to switch and keep your old phone: You still have to pay for the same priced plan as everyone else, so what did that whole charade just gain you?
So, you have a contract, but you DON'T get updates for the course of the contract period.
Many Android phones haven't even ever gotten one update, and basically none have Apple's record. HTC left that terrible security vulnerability unpatched on tons of their phones for a long time (imagine the screams had it been Apple?), and some of them still probably aren't fixed if they're "too old". Besides, it doesn't much matter if you "should" get support. The competition's phones are killing it, and they do it. Say what you want about overall Android market share, the iPhone is still the top selling handset at three of the four major carriers (every one where it is carried) in the US right now, and probably will be throughout a good hunk of 2012. And that 2 year and 5 month old iPhone 3GS? In the top 3 at AT&T...
Also, regarding the rest: I reject any suggestion that a user hacking the firmware is appropriate for a cell phone in general, but certainly not for the mass market. This means that the vast majority of people just never get the updates, ever.
Hacking a phone with firmware provided by "some dude on a forum" is a good way to get your identity stolen. No thanks. That's the same as Jailbreaking an iPhone, and if that's the standard, then the iPhone is just as open as the Android phones, and Cydia is a huge marketplace. Oh, and to my knowledge, only HTC has committed to not locking down their phones against third-party ROMs, and even that doesn't apply to most of their phones already in the market. Has that changed recently?
A smartphone is a computer. I don't really even use the "phone" feature of my phone very often. It is one of many features. It is a computing platform, not a "phone". If Google wants it
treated like a platform on commodity hardware, then they need to support it like a platform on commodity hardware, and release builds directly. Make the vendors abstract the hardware using a HAL if it is hard. We've been doing it with PCs for a bazillion years. It also has real, serious, implications for the software development community, which is why the Android Market has always had trouble attracting non-free, high-quality, 3rd party Apps. And now we get the Tegra Zone nonsense (now with new non-compatible Tegra3 games coming, adding to the insanity)?
For vendors that DON'T have the Google-certified apps (where Google has no control), then fine. That's on those vendors, and they should be ashamed of themselves if they don't support their devices. If they just downloaded the source code and slapped it on their hardware without Google's blessing, then there is nothing to be done but to blame the handset maker. But for the ones with the GMail app and the Google Market and Google Maps (you know, the ones that sell, not the so-called "open" ones)?
That's Google's fault. They don't care enough to fix it, and the handset makers certainly don't care and don't have the resources or design chops to do it right.
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Topic: Galaxy Nexus (Read 3365 times)