This was never an issue with 1.x. The SDKs were all released before OTAs started rolling out to what few phones were in the wild.
It was an issue with Eclair. The 2.0 SDK was released on 27 October 2009, and the original Droid hit the streets less than 2 weeks later, on 6 November. Given the big leap that Eclair represented, that just wasn't enough lead time, especially given Verizon's big marketing push for the Droid. Things got worse with 2.1, which went on sale with the Nexus One on 5 January 2010; the SDK wasn't released until 11 Jan. We were pretty steamed up about that one, as I recall. Froyo was a step forward again; the SDK was released right after I/O 2010, on 20 May. I can't find an exact date for when phones in the wild started getting it, but IIRC it was first OTA'ed to the Nexus One sometime in June, and no actual handsets were released with Froyo for a couple more months after that. Gingerbread wasn't too bad either, with the SDK coming out on 6 December 2010, and the first handset (Nexus S) hitting the streets ten days later. While this may look similar to the Eclair situation, it actually wasn't as bad for devs; it wasn't as big of a leap in the platform, and the Nexus S had much lower early sales than the original Droid, especially in the context of the wider ecosystem. IMHO, the initial Honeycomb release was the worst. The SDK was released on 22 February 2011, and the Xoom came out just 2 days later. But it's actually worse than it looks from the pure dates; because 3.0 was such a jump, and also because the emulator was (is) so unusable. It was months before many devs could realistically even try their apps on it, much less develop for it. So in context, the 3.2 update is pretty much par for the course. Google could unquestionably do a much better job with this, but the developer community has been saying that for a long time now, and there's little (if any) sign of improvement. It's clearly just not a priority for the decision makers in Mountain View. String -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Discuss" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/android-discuss/-/XY3Sw5rg-CwJ. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-discuss?hl=en.
