Fabrice Desré schrieb:
The situation with updates on b2g is far from being ideal. On one side,
phone manufacturers have little incentive to ship updates for a long
time. On the other side, users legitimately expect to be able to get the
latest version of the OS for as long as their phone works. I think a
reasonable target is to support devices for 2 years.
There is a third side: Our brand is being diluted if it's used on a lot
of devices out there that run heavily insecure versions of our software
because no updates have been delivered for a long time.
We routinely ship updates for sometimes grave security issues every six
weeks for our browser-only products, many of those vulnerabilities also
affect those phones that sit there proudly with the "Firefox OS" brand
printed on them but sadly without any patches for those issues.
We should not routinely have our brand on potentially insecure products.
That said, as Gabriele and others have pointed to, it's at least right
now a lot of effort to get official updates shipped by the OEMs, and
that's why updates on the mobile market are so drastically lagging.
Regulators try to make lives more secure for users by requiring those
certifications, but end up making more insecure by making updates so
hard. Interesting, isn't it?
I fully think that in the long run, we will need to work out how we can
bring the always-up-to-date culture we get used to elsewhere also to the
OS on those devices. And enabling users to switch to something that gets
them fast updates for Gecko and Gaia is a very good first goal for that,
it's awesome we are discussing that!
(As a note, some time ago, I wondered if we could work around the issue
of not being able to publish device images by hosting images/packages
that only contain the open parts, and with a "lean" script with few
prerequisites that would pull the proprietary parts from the device,
merge them into the open-only downloaded piece somehow and then flash
the resulting full image to the device. That would allow even Gonk
updates for those people who want them and have user-flashable devices,
without requiring them to do a full build themselves.)
KaiRo
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