There is also the issue of phone manufacturers that want to customize
Android in order to control the user experience. Since it is an open
source application, they are free to do as they wish, even if it means
running a version or two behind the official Android release. This is
common in the open source world, for instance, KnoppMyth and other
specialized distributions of Linux tend to lag behind the official releases.
What might be useful is to come up with a finite range of releases that
developers should be expected to support. It also might be a good idea
to create some kind of notification system that alerts developers as to
changes in Android that might affect their applications. Google could
set up the marketplace so they could get a list of applications, and
hence developers, that use given features. When those features are going
to be changed in an upcoming release, an automatic email could be sent
to alert the developers. That might make it easier to ensure our
applications aren't tripped up by the latest release.
It might eventually be possible to introduce a compatibility mode so
older applications could run in the latest versions of Android, but I
suspect that is a ways off since it is likely memory intensive.
It's a complicated issue.
Alessandro Pellizzari wrote:
Il giorno sab, 16/01/2010 alle 20.06 -0800, Alberto ha scritto:
So how do we fix this? I'm pretty sure you guys have already thought
about this and I wouldn't be surprised if a solution was coming soon,
since it''s such an obvious problem. However, here's my two cents, the
solution is very simple, a desktop application for syncing/updating/
media playback/android market/amazon mp3, lets call it Android HQ or
Android Home for the sake of argument.
The updates would be available to consumers as soon as they're
released, instead of months, years, or never depending on carriers.
This way most users would've the latest version as well as the
developers would have the latest SDK, developers would be able to take
advantage of the new APIs each updates bring and innovate faster,
instead of spending time supporting older versions.
I quite like your idea (but please make it cross-platform, or at least
for Windows, OSX and Linux, and open source), even if I prefer mounting
the SD card as a mass storage and manage it myself.
But I think the main problem today with manufacturers upgrades is with
kernel drivers.
If all the kernel drivers were open source, I think now we could have
them integrated in the official kernel, and upgrades could be smooth.
But a recent implementation of Android 2.0 for the Samsung Galaxy had to
revert to "backport Android 2.0 to 2.6.27 kernel" because of missing
driver sources.
It is the same problem plaguing Linux on the desktop. We need hardware
developers to release hardware tech specs.
Bye.
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