Google's handling of Android bugs is unpleasant and difficult to swallow. The QA seems minimal and little or no attention is paid to user filed bugs. The barometer on the Nexus 5 is still broken after a year+ of software updates. Infuriating. The bug with hundreds of stars is marked obsolete! The barometer is still broken.
I'd like to debug and fix it but other things have priority, and I don't feel confident that if I were able to fix, that my change would be merged. Oy!
Edit: I should mention, they did fix part of it after about 6 months in the wild (the part where the barometer crashed all the sensors). What they haven't fixed is that the barometer doesn't actually reliably work.
Edit #2: Interestingly, I might have to eat some of my words. I'm just testing on 5.0.1 for the first time and haven't been able to reproduce the issues present from 4.0 through 5.0. Maybe it's actually fixed in 5.0.1!! Of course, I've only been testing for 10 minutes and it could still surface. For reference, the remaining bug is that the barometer periodically reports seemingly random values. 5mb, 730mb, 1004mb, 740mb, 300mb, 3mb, 750mb, etc. Now it seems to be stable and generally reporting the same values. Interesting.
Edit #3: A pastebin showing that it seems to be working after a few minutes of use. http://pastebin.com/RdBqbWzC
Most major companies, to me, seem to be following Apple's example and forcing a shorter support lifecycle for each device, expecting users to simply replace their "obsolete" device with the newest one.
Among major companies, Apple did a better job with supporting old devices. Google Nexus devices become completely out of date after 2 years (too slow to run latest software, and too hard to get hardware repair support). Software wise, Apple could have done a better job as the newer version of iOS is indeed bloated and doesn't run well on old devices. On the other side, Microsoft did great job on supporting Windows XP for over a decade with wide variety of hardwares.
This is the same Microsoft that completely abandoned Windows Phone 7 users, saying phones such as the Nokia Lumia 800 would not be upgradable to Windows Phone 8. That announcement was made 2 months after I received my Lumia 800. I will never purchase another Windows phone. On the other hand, my parents iPad 2, purchased in 2011, has received dozens of software updates over the last four years from Apple.
My iPad 2 [edited] still able to get the latest update from Apple, although that iPad shows lags running the latest iOS (probably because of the new UI).
I think the major problem with Android is the unstoppable fragmentation. With low-end and high-end devices born every quarter, I find QA a nightmare. On the other end, if a bug can't be fixed after a year on a flagship device like Nexus 5 means there is something wrong with bug prioritization.
Yep. It became a real shit storm when they changed the driver system somewhere around Vista/7 and people found they could no longer use their old(-ish) printer with their new computer. Then again, that same backwards compatibility has been a major contributor to all the security issues over the years.
The difference is that the browser is now the center of computing for most people; things are thrown away quickly if they're not actively updated and 20 year old web pages render (mostly) just fine. Compatibility for an OS isn't needed near as much for most people most of the time only need an OS to launch a web browser. Hence Chrome OS.
There's a reason Windows XP has stuck around for so long... most people don't need anything beyond XP. Sure they need security updates and new drivers, but these things are in the background. XP had, essentially, everything anybody will need for the next 50 years.
My Nexus 4 (released Nov 2012) has officially received the Lollipop upgrade and is working very well. I barely have reasons to replace it.
Apple does indeed a better job at supporting older devices, however new iOS releases are basically unusable on devices older than 2 years. I have for example a 2-year old iPad 3 and iOS 8 is usable on it, but for iPhone 4S or IPad 2 the upgrade turned usable devices into unusable ones.
The real problem is they're still selling it brand new (in the form of the non-retina Mini) and with Apple's policy of supporting devices for 2 or 3 years that means the device will get six years of updates, even though it's already aging badly at this point.
My Nexus 4 isn't working well and I regret getting it. The speakers pops, it lags when playing audio, and most importantly, the camera bug is still not fixed. I can't make video calls on my phone because it could reboot at any second.
Bduerst also mentionned updates that "almost bricked" his phone. I think the standards for "almost bricked" and "unusable" are incredibly low in this comment section.
I still have an iPhone4S in a drawer; it's visibly slower than when it was under iOS6 and even compared to a 5S it's night and day, but compared to other middle range android phones that's still decent. Side to side with a Moto G for instance, it's basically the same reactivity, but no one would call the Moto G an unusable device.
The moto g didn't cost over $1160 over the course of two years (partly for amortized monthly costs, plus higher costs for the plan)... moto g on, for example Simple Mobile is $40/month plus the cost of the phone. Pricing may be slightly different, but when I compared when I got my N4 a couple years ago, the plans I was looking at for my phone would have been around $70-90/month or more, with any iPhone, plus the initial out of pocket... compared to a moto g out of pocket today, that's a lot more.
That's quite a big difference. I've been pretty happy with my Nexus 4, and hoping to get a full third year out of it... since the Nexus 5 isn't a huge bump, and the N6 is way out of the ballpark on pricing imho. I've been recommending the Moto G LTE for most people lately... it's a usable phone without a lot of extra monthly expense.
The Moto G is under 250 unlocked and the first gen is one year old. The 4S went for a bit less than 700, is now 3 years old and resells for roughly 200. I don't think comparing the performances of the two under the most recent OSes available is biased.
One is a new device, the other is used. Comparing them when they were new would be where I was talking about.. even today I'd suggest a moto-g over a 4S unless you have other apple hardware already.
What's your point of comparison regarding to android devices ? I had an iPhone 3G that I updated all the way up. And I also had a LG L7 bought new under android 4. I found the iPhone 3G more reactive and usable in every single aspect.
This is sort of a weird complaint to have, since "cool" doesn't at all have the connotation of "robust long-term support"; in fact it's almost the opposite, since being "cool" is a more in line with things like "move fast and break things".
That doesn't mean that backwards compatibility and long-term support isn't a good thing for the consumer, but it really has nothing to do with the concept of "cool".
This is a common but completely unfair criticism of Apple. Plenty of people complained when iOS 7 was made available for the iPhone 4 (because the hardware was too slow to run it properly). And Apple still sells and supports relatively ancient hardware (the iPad mini) as a result of their current strategy of selling last year's model as the second-best option.
The reason people complain is because iOS updates are a horrible kind of bait and switch. You update the OS because you think its awesome, but are unable to downgrade when you find that in reality, its slow and bloated.
The most infuriating thing in all of this is that my iPhone 4S is STILL a fast device. The CPU hasn't shrunk since the time I bought it. Apple has decided that I am unworthy of restoring my phone to the state it was when I purchased it.
Yup. I had 1 iPhone, my first and last Apple product.
My mom just got an iPad mini, was infuriated when she discovered she can't buy Kindle books from the Kindle app like she could on Android.
The artificial restrictions Apple places on developers and users are ridiculous. And Android 5 is the first release where I can say that Android is unequivocally a nicer experience than iOS...
Say what now? I just opened my Kindle app and the store hasn't gone anywhere.
Are you maybe thinking of Google blocking Amazon from including the Amazon Appstore in the Amazon shopping app? That's a different issue and,
more importantly, that doesn't really affect what's possible on Android, just how convenient it is. After all, anyone who wants to can download the store Google blocked from Amazon directly.
Just like how if anyone wants to purchase a Kindle book on the iPad, they can do it via Safari (they could make it more convenient by pinning it to the home screen as well)
Actually, no. Being able to purchase a book over a web browser and installing a native application store on your device are very different things.
I think you can argue that a browser itself is an app store (you download and execute (web-)apps with it). But Apple does not allow the installation of different browser engines, so you can still not install an app store on your device.
I understand what you're saying, technically they are different things.
But not to my mother.
I would guess (and only guess, I haven't tried to look for any numbers) that the percentage of people who go out and install an alternative app store, let alone Amazon's, is quite small (especially once you take out the HN audience)
Most of the criticisms of brand-new OS updates being "slow and bloated" are from extremely impatient users (or professional clickbait critics) who don't even have the good sense to wait a few hours or a day or two for the processes that can make major upgrades a bit sluggish on ALL devices to complete, such as rebuilding databases, the fact that OS updates often result in dozens or even hundreds of app updates that have to download and install and in some cases update their own databases, etc.
Certainly, they do not wait for the first x.0.1 release, or for the release that usually closely follows the initial release and which is specifically intended to optimize performance on the oldest devices that can still support the latest OS. This was seen for iOS 7 and once again for iOS 8.
I don't think it's a valid comment, or a comment made in good faith, to say that iOS updates are a "bait and switch". That's just silliness and flies in the face of all the facts. The facts say, very loudly, that Apple supports its older devices MUCH better and for much longer than any competitor. It's not even close.
Now, if you are unable to acknowledge reality, and expect that a brand-new OS, designed to take advantage of devices that are about 10x as fast as three-year-old or four-year-old devices, isn't going to be quite as snappy on older devices, then in my opinion, that is on you as a user. Blaming Apple for trying to give more features to users on new hardware is ludicrous. Apple expends considerable engineering effort keeping those devices working as well as possible. The iPhone has been out for seven years. There's now more than enough history out there for users to know that if you install major iOS updates, you cannot easily downgrade. (It's not impossible, it's just a huge pain.)
I'm sorry but this is simply untrue. Every time I have hardware 1-1.5 generations behind (which is not always, I've done it both ways) the OS upgrade makes it somewhere between noticeably slower and painfully slow. I've recently used an identical model side-by-side that was not upgraded and it is vastly snappier. this has nothing to do with waiting for x.0.1 or app updates. In this case we are talking about iOS 7 on 4S, I'm refusing the iOS 8 upgrade for obvious reasons. I've seen others have similar problems in previous iterations whilst my newer hardware was fine.
People are fond of overstating Apple problems and I'm grateful that the opportunity to upgrade exists at all. However it is a fact that it often destroys the performance so the ability to revert seems very reasonable. I also find the extent of the degradation puzzling.
>There's now more than enough history out there for users to know that if you install major iOS updates, you cannot easily downgrade.
Certainly, that is your version of reality. Only a small minority of users have any clue about downgrading.
>I don't think it's a valid comment, or a comment made in good faith, to say that iOS updates are a "bait and switch".
>that Apple supports its older devices MUCH better and for much longer than any competitor.
Well, it depends on your viewpoint. How can you 'support' a device by incrementally making it slower with each passing release? If all they were releasing was bug fixes and patches, and features which didn't adversely impact performance then YES I would agree with you. Or hell, I'd even agree with you with the current situation if Apple allowed downgrades.
Seriously, I mean don't you think its totally messed up that Apple has to give its permission before you're able to downgrade the OS to speed it up when its their own update that slowed it down ? Its ridiculous and should not be accepted as the norm.
> you cannot easily downgrade. (It's not impossible, it's just a huge pain.)
Cool, please point the entire world to a working bootrom exploit for the 4s. We've been waiting for a while :)
It's not a choice between no software updates for old hardware, and bad software updates for no hardware. At least in theory, Apple could have made an iOS 7 update for the iPhone 4 that actually worked well on that hardware. It's not "unfair" to complain that Apple does a bad job of supporting hardware after only a couple of years, when your counter is that they release OS updates that don't work well on them.
I wouldn't say it's completely unfair. Using proprietary data/charging cables and changing the design every so often, obsoleting whole generations of products seems like behavior consistent with my criticism.
Apple introduced the Dock connector on the iPod in 2001. The same connector was used for over ten years, before it was replaced with the lightning connector in 2012.
The MagSafe connector was replaced after 6 years by the MagSafe 2 connector, also in 2012.
Both of these connectors where replaced for good reasons. The Dock connector was not reversible, prone to break, and was easily clogged with dust. It was also too big for smaller form factors. The MagSafe connector was often confused with USB and also too thick for thinner devices, and it used a low charging voltage (less efficient).
Switching to a new design is often inconvenient, but also often necessary. To ease the transition, Apple even provided adaptors for compatibility with older chargers.
When it comes right down to it, people hate change. "It still works, so why change it!?" is a popular saying among most users.
You're right, though. In this case, there definitely had to be an update to Apple's charging cables. Now that we're 3 generations into the new Lightning Connector, it's less of an issue for most people.
Apple has a huge majority of users who are basically into fashion. I usually buy the newest things and give away the old stuff, even if its just charging cables or an extra monitor.
The connector for iPods, iPads, and iPhones has only changed once. And the old 30-pin dock connector was in use for 11 years. 11 years now counts as “every so often”?
As for macs, the original MagSafe connector was in production for 6 years, before it was replaced by MagSafe 2 in 2012…
There have only been two apple charging interfaces for iPods, iPhones and iPads (excluding the shuffle), and the new one was necessary (if I understood correctly) to take advantage of faster USB3 data transfer rates.
Lightning doesn't currently support USB3, unfortunately. It did get rid of a lot of obsolete old interfaces that were present in the 30-pin dock connector pinout, though, and opened up possibilities for new devices (like the HDMI adapter).
The saying used to be that something was designed for obsolescence. I no longer believe that's the case, I believe new devices are programmed for obsolescence. That is to say, the device used to work, but with new "updates," the device becomes more decrepit, and less useful, not better and more useful. I've had Apple devices that worked fine until the "update" (which was mainly targeted at the latest and greatest, not my 1 to 2 year old model) came out, at which point the device that was still quite useable, becomes almost unusable. I don't recall which software update it was, but my iPhone 3g was a great example of this. I've recently noticed the same thing (rather my completely non-technical mother has) on her 2 year old iPad and iOS 8.
The joys of software. They can now be used to artificially shorten a products life cycle, without having to even design in obsolescence from the get go.
For me, latest iOS+older iPad completely killed it. It was the last major upgrade, which added the animations. My iPad was the first gen with retina, and the animations were slow and jerky. I eventually enabled some accessibility mode which killed them, but other aspects of the user experience are less than stellar. Wifi is now intermittent.
My Nexus 4 is growing a little decrepit, but not nearly as bad. I was considering a Sony, but they seem to lag on support for newer OSes as well, so now I'm thinking about a newer Nexus, but I'm really not sure.
My new litmus test is to look at 2-5 year old devices from the brand, and see how they work before buying a new one.
Yes, this is exactly what is occurring with my mothers iPad (and I think her's is the same first gen retina). And frankly I can't do anything about it. But ever since she's installed iOS 8, wifi has been incredibly flakey. Of course, it's not Apple's fault, she just needs to buy a new iPad.
I'm not a gadget geek at all. I'm more of a cheap bastard/ "if it ain't broke.." and basically buy and use technology until it breaks or it won't do the job anymore. My Linksys WRT-54G I've had for at least 8 years just died the other day. For me it was good enough, no reason to change. My iPhone was good enough (until the updates made it unpleasant, I still used it, and eventually the hardware itself did die).
I really don't recall, but I'm guessing it was a major update. I believe this because I think I remember it being for the newer phones (iphones 4/5?) and that the update didn't include certain features on the 3g (this was a while ago for me, so I don't recall many details, sorry)
But at the same time, there was no "Warning: This will actually slow down your phone and make the user experience suck." I'm okay if a phone can't support certain features that the latest model includes. But the fact that an update actually made my older phone worse off, was quite the disappointment.
where on earth did this comment originate. I have a iPad2 which was "born" in 2011, show me any equivalent tablet appliance that is still running the latest OS ... ? i hate these sort of bile loaded responses, stay with the article and drop the hardly clothed bias. We are all consumers, don't let the marketeers trick you into thinking you have to choose one over the other. Poor device update support remains much more of a problem for google and android than it ever did for apple regardless of what your favoured tech Inc. is ..
This was the standard practice since before Apple. eg I used to upgrade my Sony Erricson handset every 12 months.
In fact ironically, these days many people upgrade less frequently because network providers are only selling contracts for 18/24 months rather than the 12 months they were 10 years previously.
does pressurenet even work? i can't find any news about it, the site (http://pressurenet.io/) is down for at least a couple of weeks and it looks like nobody else is using it since my map is always empty (which may be an artifact of the site being down). all this is a little bit disheartening.
This should be just another wake up call to the fact that Android just isn't open. Unless you're inside the OHA your view doesn't count, and even then you have to go along with Google's vision of the future.
End users might think they have it bad, but the development experience is basically an exercise in dealing with whatever hyped up shiny unfinished turd is floating down from on high. It's a shame because some aspects of the system are really damn good, but there is just so much crap.
Having seen all this develop has persuaded me that the future is lower level APIs. On the web that means asm.js, Canvas, indexeddb etc. (discarding HTML and CSS), and on Android it means C++ and OpenGL and staying the hell away from as much of the higher level parts as possible. (Bonus points for increased code portability). The reason for this is the lower level ones seem to reach stable predictability much faster. It is better/easier to bundle any high level UI toolkit in the application itself than to have to support rendering on four different versions of the toolkit.
I'm not sure what you think "open" means. You're still free to fork Android and do what you want with it. Google's negligence in fixing a variety of issues doesn't change that one bit.
Its open collaboration versus open source. Even at that a lot of Android is still free software, distributed under the Apache license, but being free does not mean Google needs to accept bugs or interact with users at all on their part, it is just the users ability and right to observe and modify the code they run.
Forking the SDK is explicitly not allowed, but the killer is if you want to make one device which carries the Google Apps you have to agree that all Android devices you make will. (i.e. you are forced to bundle Google Play Services on all devices). This is why Amazon do what they do and it remains a separate ecosystem.
That is not true. The SDK's source-code, like much of Android, is licensed under the APL 2.0 license. The SDK license you're referring to and that has restrictions applies to the binaries, as packaged and distributed by Google.
I seem to recall that there is some fairly stringent marketing elements involved as well. If you carry the Google apps, you can't put them deeper than one level below the launcher or something.
The existence of the Kindle with Amazon's android fork seems to be good evidence to the contrary; another company took the code and made their own fork. Sure, upstream might not be making changes to support Kindle, but it's open so they can apply those patches.
Enterprises are able to pay huge maintenance fees. Single consumers are not and game theory teaches us, that they are unable to unite to get it (free rider problem).
So I fear, that we need stronger consumer protection for software products. I do not know the situation in the US, but in the EU we have a mandated 2 year warranty for almost every product with very few sensible exceptions (food and the like).
We need the same for software. Features that are advertised have to be guaranteed. Of course software has bugs, so the law has to be about software getting fixed, not being perfect. Actually that is the same with physical products as they do not have to be replaced, they can be repaired, so this does not even make a difference.
There has to be some lightweight definition of non-functional requirements. This one is difficult and dangerous as the big players could unite and regulate the small ones out.
Related to that, double or triple the warranty periods. This is not so much an issue with smartphones and the like, as they become obsolete by superior successors or fashion, but with stuff like printers, vacuum cleaners or electric toothbrushes. Of course, this would hurt companies like hell and will never happen. I imagine in the long run, it would actually be super beneficial to those, who remain, because it would create a brand "Sold in the EU" much like "Made in Germany" with all the mythos of the deregulated Autobahn but the highly regulated warranties :D
> Related to that, double or triple the warranty periods.
I'm not convinced that this solves anything. When you buy a 50 euro/dollar vacuum do you expect it to have the same life expectancy as the 500 dollar vacuum made with higher quality parts? If the company is required to provide a 6 year warranty for a machine that they estimate to last 2 years, they will simply stop producing the cheaper vacuums, meaning everyone who wants a vacuum has to now pay 500 dollars. My knowledge of Vacuum cleaner economics is limited, granted, but I can't see how this works out well in the longer term for anyone, other than the people who would have anyway purchased the more expensive product (that normally comes with a lifetime/extended warranty from the manufacturer anyway)
That's why Australian consumer law says that things should remain working for a 'reasonable' amount of time.
The law makes distinctions between a manufacturers warranty (e.g. Apple says it's devices come with a 12 months warranty, which is true and legal.) and, and the manufacturers/retails obligation to resolve defects (Apple will repair/replace devices for free even after that 12 months).
The law is purposefully vague around this (I believe it says products should last for a reasonable period of time, depending on it's price and perceived quality), and different retailers/manufacturers honour this in different ways.
This lead to some interesting situations, like Apple covering mobile devices for 24 months since purchase OR last repair/replace date, so it's actually possible to get infinite warranty on a device if you get to replace every 24 months.
You have to adjust the price for the cheap vacuum cleaner in your mind. You are actually talking about several of them, because of their reduced lifetime.
Prices do not necessarily reflect the actual costs of the product directly sometimes not even remotely. Printers or game consoles for example are hardly or not at all profitable. The main purpose of prices is to differentiate the product classes, otherwise it would be harder to tell, which one actually is the higher class product. So that part of the pricing would not move at all.
Economics of scale. The higher quality parts will be produced in greater mass and become cheaper.
Innovation. If there is a need for cheaper vacuums, somebody will eventually find a way to build one.
Finally, the main point: Planned obsolescence [0]. Products are actually designed to break directly after the 2 year guarantee. One could argue, that designing costs would actually fall, due to the obsolete step.
The software is not what is being sold; it's the hardware. The software is free.
Let me paint a slightly sillier picture; imagine your law existed and one man wrote a small toy project in his free time 5 years ago... some company (e.g. Samsung) starts shipping it as part of an appliance they sell. If there are bugs in the software then is the original man obligated to fix them? Is he breaking the law?
Open source software just isn't compatible with laws mandating that it be maintained in a given way and it makes little sense, in my mind, to create such laws.
You realize, that this is also the case for physical goods? If Bosch ships a shitty part to VW and VW sells it to consumers, VW has to replace or repair it and VWs lawyers try to get something back from Bosch.
So if Google ships shitty software to Samsung or Samsung uses free shitty software, but sells a device, claiming it has a barometer, which does not work due to shitty software, Samsung has to replace the device or repair the device in this case through a software update.
all my bugs from android 2.3 (still heavily used in the us and out) up to android 4.2 were closed as obsolete.
several are somewhat fixed on 5.0 (most by removing the feature) but nothing about support even nexus devices from 2.5 years ago.
3 were security ones confirmed by a few comments.
I've been getting obsolete emails on my low profile bugs since November all the way to Dec 25...
Google just gave up. i think nobody there care about users after yahoo stole JBQueru. they now focus exclusively on profit and easy/fun work (i.e. full focus on new versions because maintaining old, stable software is the job of interns)
For me it seems that Google is trying to apply their web methodology (frequent small changes) to the mobile world, and running head first into the issue of not controlling the deployments (OEMs and carriers do).
But thanks for the CADT link, seems to sum up the line between old school nix and the more recent something-X attitudes.
Your post reminds me of how silly the way our society protects certain categories is.
"Attention-Deficit Teenegers" could be viewed as offensive to some, as it uses a medical diagnosis as a pejorative. Perhaps the author could argue that they are referring to typical teenage behavior, and not ADD, but that would to me be a completely ridiculous and artificial distinction.
So either we can't make fun of stereotypical teenage behavior (which is a slippery slope since about a lot of HN posts make fun of, or are directly hostile to, people in their early 20's) or have to admit that some medical categories are also things we can joke about.
Your post is a bit silly in that you're talking about bourgeois truth, when revolutionary truth is what governs the part of "society" you're referring to. Important person makes bad ethnic or medical condition jokes? No problem, he's advancing the causes of the "revolution". Desire to trash an adversary, or just revel in your SJW power to damage or destroy at a whim? Take something innocent like this and make a felony jaywalking case of it.
The last device sold by Google that now runs an Android release of 4.2 or earlier was (afaik) the Nexus S - which was released in 2010. I think it's reasonable to stop support for a particular device after something like 4 years.
Yes, there are other 3rd party manufacturers that sold devices based on such outdated versions up until recently. But why should it be Google's task to provide updates for these devices? That sounds like something that the manufacturers are supposed to do.
> There are places where a device running Android 4.2 are the best one on the market.
Where? With the possible exception of China [1], after the Moto G and Android One, I'd expect that you could get a KitKat (or better) entry-level device pretty much anywhere.
[1] where there are entry-level KitKat devices, I'm just not sure of their quality since some major entry-level manufactureres (e.g. Xiaomi) are still on 4.2, not to mention that I wouldn't expect Google to go out of their way to support Chinese devices since they don't come with and generally can't use most Google services.
Almost all Xiaomi, OnePlus, Gionee, Oppo phones are running KitKat.
Xiaomi is running 4.3 on their cheapest device which would be the last device to get KitKat this month. Almost all their devices are running KitKat for a long time and they had released an unofficial testing ROM for 5.0 a week after the code was pushed. Xiaomi phones do come with Google services. Their flagship devices are expected a 5.0 early 2015. I would say they move faster than most brands.
I went from iPhone to their $100 model and find almost nothing that I could do before that I now cannot. Even in terms of performance and polish. Actually I can do slightly more thanks to Android Wear, but Xiaomi has less to do with that.
Where people don't have the opportunity to look up online to see what are their options are, but good students come out of those situations nonetheless.
Most them are on 3G network and reception of a wifi network is an accident.
I believe the Google TV platform uses 4.2.2 or earlier (i.e. 3.2) Those devices are still on the market, and it may technically be the manufacturers' responsibility to upgrade, but none of them have.
> I think it's reasonable to stop support for a particular device after something like 4 years.
Right, because 4 year old electronics might just as well go into the landfill and if someone is dumb enough to use them still we don't care if they have a security liability in their pocket.
Of course you need to support your devices longer than 4 years. You need to support them as long as their design life, and if your design life is only 4 years then you're not aware of the trickle-down effect of hardware once bought.
That depends on whether you see Google's role in the Android ecosystem as primarily an OS vendor or as a hardware vendor. In the latter view, your position certainly seems plausible.
However, if one sees Google as an OS vendor, then, considering that 60% of Android phones are running 4.2 or older (according to https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html), supporting somewhat older phones would seem to be desirable.
They do support them as much as they are able to through play services.
The fact remains is that many of those phones are unlikely to receive updates through 5.0.. How are you supposed to support them if the hardware vendors are unwilling to update them?
As an OS vendor, it is still in their interests to drive android forward and minimize effort wasted on antique versions. They have Windows XP as an instructive example of the risks of allowing themselves to continue supporting an OS too long
It's extremely frustrating to have an issue thread full of agreeing constructive comments from users marked obsolete with no comment from the developers, when the issue is still annoying many users. It definitely gives the impression that Google gave up or does not care about users.
If the maintainers of the official alarm app don't like this feature, can't you just use a custom app? Or is it something fundamental to the notification system?
This isn't a bug, it's a feature for indication that an user has an alarm set, so it minimizes the possibility of going off at unexpected time, the user wasn't aware of. Imagine if having mobile connection indicator wouldn't be shown because someone would say it wastes space, resulting in possible charges.
It's very frustrating that there doesn't seem to be anyone at Google who looks at bugs. It's all about creating "cool" experiences without the tedious work of fixing bugs.
Um, as the comment thread in the bug demonstrates, it isn't that simple.
Android does support downloading .ics files, you just need to install a third-party app to handle the calendar integration. Is that ideal? Of course not. But it is bog-standard prioritization to close issues that have easy workarounds in favor of issues that don't (and that's before you get to the possible patent complications someone mentions late in the thread).
More generally, I'd argue that this is a missing feature in the proprietary Google Calendar app, and not an OS issue at all.
At some point in a long living project, you have to declare some bugs are #wontfix. You are just lieing to yourself if you think you will ever get to the end of the bug backlog. It also can become an anchor, the team is focused solely on fixing bugs here and there instead of moving the ball forward (and hopefully fixing more fundamental problems along the way). I've made the call to mass close tickets like this. It's never fun, but sometimes you have to do it.
These ticket seem to fall into two buckets.
1) Pre Android 5.x bugs. I can understand why they don't want to invest here. Effort is definitely better spent trying to get more devices onto Android 5.x
2) Feature requests for apps. I bet a lot of these are either on a roadmap for a future version of Android, or are simply never going to be added.
Then mark them as WontFix with a comment explaining why. Marking Obsolete without comment and restricting further comments is a huge slap in the face to your biggest supporters (those who went through the trouble of trying to contribute positively by filing/commenting/starring the bug).
Yup. They did the same thing with Chrome a couple of years back - just had a bot go through and close everything older than some threshold en masse. As you might expect, I don't bother reporting Chrome bugs any more.
Suppose the Chrome team closed everything older than some cut-off date but explained why (perhaps on a blog) and encouraged people to open new tickets about issues that carried forward to currently supported versions.
Would that gesture have kept you motivated to report bugs?
IIRC there was something (unconvincing) on a blog, and they did (nominally) encourage people to open new tickets for issues they cared about. No, that didn't keep me motivated. Words are cheap; actions speak louder. If they really wanted to encourage people to open tickets, they wouldn't robo-close them.
There are a lot of ways they could have avoided that mess. Keepalive anything with recent comment traffic is one that springs to mind, since those comments are often along the lines of "yup, still an issue as of version X.Y.Z" or "Hey, it's been N years, any word on a fix?".
Auto-closing is not an issue and could be implemented in community-friendly fashion. Just make a bot post "this ticket is dated, leave a comment if it's still important and revelant" then wait a few days and close only ones that don't get much attention. Simple and user-friendly.
It's a "we're sorry, for whatever reason this issue is not getting traction. We are closing it because whatever the issue or reason is, whether it's on our side or the reporter's side, or something else, this problem is not effectively handled by this issue".
Closing as WontFix would inspire a thousand proclamations of "Google is never going to fix X!" when they may very well address it in the future.
I don't think what Google's done is ideal, I agree they should add a comment. However "Obsolete" is probably better than WontFix unless they really did analyse the problem and explicitly decide not to fix it.
> At some point in a long living project, you have to declare some bugs are #wontfix.
The hell you do. If it was worth reporting it is worth fixing. Bugs are symptoms of underlying trouble and if you care about your product and about your users you fix them.
If you don't users will stop reporting bugs, you product will remain buggy and eventually users will move to other, less buggy products. Fix your bugs.
This reminds me. Google has the (rather great) Google Moderator tool - so why aren't they using it on a site where Android fans can ask Google properly for features? Using that "issues" list for features is such a pain.
Right now if the community wants a new certain feature or they really hate one of the already implemented features, it has to make a big fuss about it on r/Android, an unofficial feedback channel.
The purpose of this (arguably horrible) tracker is not to ask for features but to report bugs.
I am not sure that Android fans should be their target group for their future developments either. This is a very niche group and I highly doubt that their preoccupations closely match those of the average Android user.
>At some point in a long living project, you have to declare some bugs are #wontfix
Sure. Those are your absolute failures though, and should be regarded as any other failure by your team. When they're "won't fix because it's icky/not fun/goes against our prior fundamental assumptions", at least.
I'm not sure if you guys actually even looked at what these requests were but most of them are irrelevant and rightly so... obsolete/irrelevant features. To choose one particular example that stood out to me from the first page with 198 stars:
https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=1140
I wont even get started on how much information this is lacking for it to be actually executed. The point being that most of the ones in the list have not even been touched in over a year and more closely resemble a Christmas wishlist than actual issues. They should be closed since they are cluttering up the workflow of real problems and it would be a waste of an engineer's time to respond to them all adequately.
If they are still relevant a year later maybe you should go through and do something productive like creating a new issue with updated details.
Good job cherry picking that ticket! Also right in your comment "first page with 198 stars", let me direct you to the title of this post "Many Android bugs with 500+ stars closed as obsolete on December 25". 198 !>= 500, if YOU ACTUALLY EVEN LOOKED at what these requests are you would see a number of them are VERY relevant:
> If they are still relevant a year later maybe you should go through and do something productive like creating a new issue with updated details.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if the people filing these bugs or replying to them just gave up after waiting multiple years and switched to a custom ROM that does address the issue or even switched OS's.
Sadly the battery issue is painfully generic, and the built in battery UI hopelessly inaccurate.
I have experienced that the UI claimed that Play services were eating battery. But when i brought up a good old top report and looked at CPU time i find that Facebook was blocking the CPU from reaching sleep state.
killed the Facebook process and the problem went away rapidly.
And recently i have seen Plume having a similar issue. I can actually observe the CPU time rising when it is nowhere to be found outside of the top readout (no entry in the task switcher etc). But checking the Android battery readout i see nothing about Plume being a battery hog.
I think that's the real problem. A tool designed to help you determine what is chewing up your battery seems to be fundamentally broken and is not being addressed.
I also wouldn't be surprised if they have switched phones and are no longer experiencing the issue. For instance the phone burning battery while idle was made obsolete over a year ago and no comments have been made in the last year either. Maybe it should be marked as obsolete.
I do support for an app with several million downloads. While it may not make sense on a technical level, it's really powerful for your app and your users to reach out and explain this. For us this is a quick two line reply that the wish is on the wishlist and may be picked up later. Many of the wishes you get are completely logical, some are for very specific use cases, and some are completely off topic. We still track them in a list, and each ticket becomes a vote (we happen to use Trello). It gives us a great view of what users want, miss and would like to see. And yes, our engineers also answer support emails.
I think this would be great if they could do that.. but when it comes to millions of users I dont think even google can handle that much feedback publicly without falling seriously short. It's amazing they are able to address as many issues as they do, after all there are like 14000 open issues right now in that tracker.
You're focusing on the wrong numbers. "Millions of users"? You're talking about 14000 open issues, a FRACTION of which were closed.
The android team is large and the closed bugs surely have been reviewed by the team before being closed (otherwise they're just closing randomly in which case: WTF?). So really, doesn't it make sense to give an actual reply for even just the more popular ones? We're not talking about millions here, we're talking about dozens...
I think the real issue is that nobody[1] really cares about ad-hoc networking, especially in anything linux related. I recall times when NetworkManager team, back then the only "nice" tool for wifi, outright claimed they don't ever care about ad-hoc (or even static IP).
Similarly, barely anything appears to support ad-hoc, and I am not sure if many current users recall that it exists at all…
[1] an obvious hyperbole, but that's the feeling I get
They actually open them in the browser now, at least it worked with Chrome, who imported the .ics with Google Calendar website. Still hilariously clunky though and surely confusing to the user.
It's not a shock; if anything I'm surprised they didn't shut down the issue tracker altogether. It's been little more than a glorified pastebin of generally poor-quality, unreviewed reports.
Perhaps this is a sign someone's going to start triaging things, but I'd doubt it..
This is very unpalatable, and makes me reconsider whether my next phone will, again, be an Android device.
This sort of "fuck you" attitude towards legitimate feedback and valid bug reports from users doesn't bode well for Google, and indicates that any talk of "openness" of Android is just that - empty talk. If the Android development process is going to be a 100% closed, cathedral-type endeavour, I might as well get an iPhone.
Well, the only reason you can make this criticism in the first place is because Android has an open issue tracker. You can't criticize iOS for doing this, because you can't see their issue tracker.
I can just as easily change my search query and show you all the bugs that were in fact fixed [0]. That seems to counter the claim that "the Android development process is going to be 100% closed". I'm not saying one OS is better than the other, but your comment seems more like angry ranting than a well thought out response.
> You can't criticize iOS for doing this, because you can't see their issue tracker.
At least they're honest. I can't be bothered to report bugs for most software I use, because it's enormously time-consuming and usually does nothing. Even for a relatively receptive Free Software project, I have to successfully argue that it's a bug, that it's not caused by some peculiarity of my system, that it's still present in the latest development version, and that the fix I propose is better than whatever poorly-thought-out fixes the "core developers" might think of on the spur of the moment. Better to work around it and move on.
You say that as if iPhone is the only alternative, while in fact there (will soon be) lots of alternatives. Right now there's the Jolla, which I personally own (and it's fantastic), but soon we'll also see the Neo900 which will be almost as free and open as you can get, and on the horizon Firefox OS and Ubuntu phones are looming.
While all are worthwhile ventures they are all too late to the market to make a difference. We are now in the middle years of the smartphone market. The time for new entrants ended in 2010. It's iOS and Android locked in a struggle that neither can completely win from here on out.
What does that matter? All I personally want is a good and open phone, and right now I've got that, and it looks like we'll have even more alternatives in the future. Just giving a heads-up to other hackers...
Since many of these bugs are also simultaneously raised by OEM's they are closed internally without feedback. And feedback to what bug, they are so many for the same! Also lot of them are feature enhancements and are really opinionated actually to work on. It could be better but it's not that bad. You won't believe the hoops you gotta jump to get anything done. Too many stakeholders in AOSP!(which has both pros and cons). I work on the AOSP for an OEM.
That's a shame. I had 1285 (USSD API) starred, which would have allowed for some interesting carrier-specific apps. Do any mobile OSes let apps get a USSD response?
Managing any project with thousands of contributors is very hard - namely, duplicate bugs, low quality bug reports, bugs that are no longer valid given OS or version changes, etc.
I can't imagine how hard it is to manage something on the scale of Android, where it's so consumer-oriented, half of everyone with a phone (roughly) potentially could be using the bug tracker.
There may be some interesting room to build a bug tracker that can better semantically sort, and ensure better quality bug reports - templates for bug reports are a start, but there are very few if any good triage tools for the people on the other end of the system.
In this case, yes, there should have been at least a canned template response such as "if this still affects you,..." etc, but even that is difficult - with 50 people replying to a bug report, it's a good way to get 50 duplicates.
Ultimately, it's a sign where open source project management practices get increasingly hard the larger a project gets, and while it may be possible to keep up with the contributors, keeping up with userland can be an even larger feat.
In some ways, proprietary software has a it a LOT easier, and I don't envy the task.
While not every project can hire 15-30 extra people to manage and prune a gigantic issue tracker - Android probably can, and probably should, given the spirit of what it is.
Longer term, I still think we can do a lot better with bug tracker technology to provide more semantic views into what's there and needs to be done - eliminating the need to keep things pruned in this way. But we are no where close yet.
StackOverflow provides a good example of how this could work. They identify duplicates as you type the questions and have many moderators dedicating time, for free, on cleaning things up.
Of course that doesn't solve the difficult matter of actually fixing the bugs, but I'm sure the Android developers would sincerely appreciate it. Closing duplicates or reports with little information sets a standard for the bugs that do get fixed.
We target 2.3/3.0 and have required very few workarounds/hacks. iOS is a hell of a lot worse - there are various bugs either introduced or "fixed" (requiring a workaround) in each release.
We may be writing very different kinds of iOS apps, but most of our SDK upgrade problems stem from (often accidental) misuse of Apple's APIs, or a documented change that Apple made.
Hardware supports it, but Google for some unknown reason just disables software support, it did it in the past with 4.3 BLE support and apparently nothing changed.
I saw several email alerts come through as these were being closed. 3 of them were submitted by myself and at least one I would say is still relevant in Android 5.0 That said with the history of how bugs have been handled there I wasn't very surprised.
EDIT: The original title of this post was "Someone silently closed 37% (19/52) of Android bugs with 500+ stars on Dec 25th" (it has been involuntarily changed by the mods).
Here's the list (all marked Obsolete silently by e...@google.com):
If you guys are really interested, the profile you linked has a list of projects. Glancing at the "vogar" project which it says is owned by e...@google.com (first I happened to pick), you can see links to the blog of Elliott Hughes. His site indicates he's a Google employee. So, not exactly proven, but seems to fit the bill.
I know Android devs have a internal bugtracker, so there are two bugtrackers at least (internal and external). This horrible external bugtracker on Google Code is maybe not as relevant as you might think. I can imagine it is a pain in the *ss to sync them.
What's even more infuriating is that devices with LTE like razorg get delayed multiple weeks if not months with software updates. Still waiting on Android 5 with what I thought is the 'better' device compared to razor.
Yes, this one is especially annoying. I created an Android app for the Brookstone rover once, see https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.almende.ro... and I got some bad reviews for my app because people don't understand that they have to root their smartphone to enable ad-hoc capabilities. It doesn't only make Google look bad, it also reflects on others.
Well, that's kind of a minor feature and it's understandable that they might decide not to prioritize it. But there are many serious bugs out there that are being ignored.
It would also be trivial for them to ad, as several third-party builds support it and a couple patches have been offered over the years. It's almost certain there's a business/policy reason they don't want to support it.
Sharing a PC's wired connection via ad-hoc WiFi is still a pretty common use case. Mesh networking for communication in emergencies would be an awesome use case, but it depends on a lot of people using it for most of its benefit, and the installation procedure starts with "first, root your phone".
This is just official confirmation that they don't care -I wonder why they did it... if you want to be silent just keep doing what you've been doing so far: ignoring the reports.
Many developers know that many important bugs remain open after many months and Google doesn't care at all, but the average Joe has no idea.
The original title "Someone silently closed 37% (19/52) of Android bugs with 500+ stars on Dec 25th" is fairly accurate. Silently not only means without adding a comment, but also hoping no-one would notice which is why Christmas Day is chosen. It reminds me of a year ago, also under cover of Christmas Eve, when one of the 5 despots of Groovy, the programming language chosen by Google to power its Gradle-based Android builds, launched a weekly mailout newsletter from his own personal website, putting announcements there ahead of the community mailing list, and soliciting for subscribers in a clear attempt to take over.
It's unfortunate, but Google pretty much ignores most outside bug reports and a bot marks them obsolete automatically. Rather than improving things, the situation has actually gotten worse and worse over the years and they started adding tags to prevent people from commenting. Even if Google rarely fixed things the comments were often pretty good for working together with other developers to come up with work arounds.
Had a phone from 2010ish. Recently switched to a Motorolla G smartphone with latest Android on it.
I am absolutely amazed how far Android has come. It feels so smooth and good. I thought about jumping to iPhone but my view of Android has changed drastically.
(My old phone was Galaxy Nexus and it was rife with randomly restarting during calls and sluggy OS).
I'd like to debug and fix it but other things have priority, and I don't feel confident that if I were able to fix, that my change would be merged. Oy!
https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=62938
Edit: I should mention, they did fix part of it after about 6 months in the wild (the part where the barometer crashed all the sensors). What they haven't fixed is that the barometer doesn't actually reliably work.
Edit #2: Interestingly, I might have to eat some of my words. I'm just testing on 5.0.1 for the first time and haven't been able to reproduce the issues present from 4.0 through 5.0. Maybe it's actually fixed in 5.0.1!! Of course, I've only been testing for 10 minutes and it could still surface. For reference, the remaining bug is that the barometer periodically reports seemingly random values. 5mb, 730mb, 1004mb, 740mb, 300mb, 3mb, 750mb, etc. Now it seems to be stable and generally reporting the same values. Interesting.
Edit #3: A pastebin showing that it seems to be working after a few minutes of use. http://pastebin.com/RdBqbWzC
Edit #4: If you're curious why I care, it's for PressureNet to make a better weather forecast :) https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ca.cumulonimbu...