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Android Security Updates are Now Mandatory

Zarathustra[H] said:
I think that can be solved through drivers and power profiles and instead using a unifoed binary build controlled directly by Google, pushing updates directly to handsets.

The customization of the Android OS for each device is it's biggest problem and needs to go away.

IMHO the problem is that the idiot marketeers at all of the handset makers want to differentiate their product based on useless software features rather than just competing based on who can makethe best hardware.

This needs to stop.

They need to adapt the desktop OS model where the binary builds are identical from device to device and the wireless carrier and hardware maker have absolutely no say in the software running on the device at all, other than providing drivers and maybe choosing to include some preinstalled apps.

Once this hurdle is overcome Android will become far superior to where it is today.
Click to expand...
Unfortunately a lot of Android's issues with updates stem from the Linux OS that it's based upon, specifically the driver side things. The drivers and/or kernel modules are built against a specific version of the kernel and if you try to make those drivers and modules operate with any other version of the kernel things fall apart. There's no... shall we say, ABI or application binary interface that drivers can use to plug themselves into the kernel like drivers can easily do on Windows. Linux, by its very open source nature, expects drivers to be included in the main line Linux kernel source tree. Unfortunately most for profit businesses (Qualcomm and Broadcom, for instance) would never in a million years allow everyone to see their crown jewels because then they wouldn't be able to make any money.

Sadly, open source and the business world (where making money is the name of the game) rarely see eye to eye.
 
And then you have the fact that Android was built in a very monolithic sort of way. If you want to add some to something in Android you practically have to hack the source code to do so. Windows however, regardless of how bad it's been lately, is pretty damn easy to add stuff to. You can add File Properties tabs all with nothing more than adding a DLL and a few registry entries and you can add right-click context menu additions with nothing more than registry entries. Not so on Android. Hell, you can skin the whole stinkin' OS with WindowBlinds if you want to. Again, not so on Android. If addressing that isn't enough for you, both Firefox and Google Chrome allow you to add stuff and change the whole behavior of the browser with nothing more than extensions. Again, not so on Android. This is where I think that Android failed big time, failed in the sense that they didn't make it modular so as to allow things to be added without having to hack the code.
 
trparky said:
Unfortunately a lot of Android's issues with updates stem from the Linux OS that it's based upon, specifically the driver side things. The drivers and/or kernel modules are built against a specific version of the kernel and if you try to make those drivers and modules operate with any other version of the kernel things fall apart. There's no... shall we say, ABI or application binary interface that drivers can use to plug themselves into the kernel like drivers can easily do on Windows. Linux, by its very open source nature, expects drivers to be included in the main line Linux kernel source tree. Unfortunately most for profit businesses (Qualcomm and Broadcom, for instance) would never in a million years allow everyone to see their crown jewels because then they wouldn't be able to make any money.

Sadly, open source and the business world (where making money is the name of the game) rarely see eye to eye.
Click to expand...

This doesn't seem to stop the likes of Nvidia from keeping up with a current closed source binary distribution driver for use with Linux.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
This doesn't seem to stop the likes of Nvidia from keeping up with a current closed source binary distribution driver for use with Linux.
Click to expand...
Because maybe nVidia gives a crap, it's obvious that the likes of Qualcomm and company don't.
 
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