

It’s time to start paying for Android updates - mrsebastian
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/122395-its-time-to-start-paying-for-android-updates

======
parfe
No. The time has come for phone manufacturers to cease locking down phones and
preventing one click updates.

Imagine a world where you had to buy a new desktop because the vendor provided
you with Windows XP service pack 1 but decided the machine would no longer be
supported? That situation does not exist, thankfully, because PC vendors never
had the nerve to lock owners out of their own property.

The cell phone industry still thinks they should control every little
interaction on the handset, forcing their bloated UI overlays, restricting
features, and nickel and diming customers. I refuse to entertain the notion I
should be giving these people more money for the sole purpose of formalizing
their control my property.

I run ICS on a Samsung Galaxy S. Samsung officially will not support it
because their resource intensive "improvement" called TouchWiz can't run on
the older handset when ported to ICS. Meanwhile some kid, for free with spare
time, managed to build a fully functional ICS version I run without issue.

At this point in time, locked bootloaders only exist to keep customers on the
hardware upgrade treadmill. It needs to stop.

~~~
bryanlarsen
The article specifically says that phones should be unlocked. You wrote a nice
little rant that everybody agrees with so you got a lot of upvotes, but
completely orthogonal to the original article.

~~~
parfe
No, I do not advocate just unlocked bootloaders, but freed operating systems.

The overhead of these phone manufactures comes from their horrible
customizations and differentiation practices. I find the idea of paying $10
for the privilege of updating the OS just so I can get the new version of
Sense, or TouchWiz, or MotoBlur, or whatever Sony runs now repugnant. I think
this idea pushes the market in the wrong direction.

The fact that volunteers create functional ICS installations shows that it
doesn't take time or money to get ICS itself running. The vendors themselves
add cost by leaving their taint on every interaction I have on the phone.

And the article itself says "OEMs that want to engage in paid updates should
have a bootloader unlock solution for users that want to update on their own."
with no reasoning at all besides it would make the writer feel warm and fuzzy.

~~~
jshen
"The fact that volunteers create functional ICS installations shows that it
doesn't take time or money to get ICS itself running."

????. I'm certain it does take both time and money. The volunteers are
spending time on it.

~~~
parfe
It indeed takes time to build and release. I should have been more specific
that I meant the orders of magnitude more time, 6 months, it can take to get a
new minor version from the vendor, vs 6 hours from a kid working on a Saturday
night building a major release.

The volunteer worked a non-zero amount of time. Thanks for pointing it out!
I'll make sure to carefully guard my language in the future for fear of being
unclear.

~~~
jshen
No worries, I assumed that was what you meant, and I completely agree with
your main point. I got a droid after my iPhone 3, and I don't think I'll be
getting another android phone because of this problem.

------
squarecat
Aside from the strong note of Android OEM apologist emanating from this piece,
the fact that this idea isn't /entirely/ preposterous speaks volumes about the
sad state of the platform. What Google releases and what most buyers
eventually experience are as different as day and night.

As a long time devotee and early-adopting "evangelist" (especially Maps,
Gmail/Apps, Picasa, and eventually Android) it seems we are witnessing
Google's decent into terminal failure to grasp the concept, and value, of
"customer"...

~~~
bunderbunder
I think that Android OEMs deserve some apology, if anything so that folks can
better understand the realities of the situation. People want updates like
Apple provides with iPhones, but given how vastly different the business
structures are in the Androidverse, that may not be realistic.

Apple provides updates to old phones because it has a strong financial
incentive to do so: They don't just sell phones, they also operate an app
marketplace for those phones, and they get a cut of the sale price of every
app sold through that marketplace. So they want to keep all their users buying
apps, even the ones with old phones. Part of doing that is giving existing
users a reason to stay checked-in - and pushing new features to users of old
phones through OS updates allows them to do that. They also want to have as
much "awesomeness" in the app store as they can get, and one way they can
facilitate that is by minimizing the hurdles that might prevent developers
from using all the latest and greatest features in their APIs. On that front,
the biggest hurdle imaginable would be if only a minority of the platform's
users had the ability to run apps that depend on the latest API. So Apple
_really, really_ wants to keep old iPhones up to date as long as they can, not
out of some sense of corporate altruism, but because doing this maximizes app
store profits for them.

On Android, on the other hand, there is absolutely none of that. The only time
Android OEMs see any money is when you buy a new phone. They don't care if you
can run ICS+-only apps, because they don't see money from the app store. They
don't care if you keep buying new apps, because they don't see any money from
the app store. They don't even particularly care if you prematurely decide
your phone is janky and outdated and you need a new one on account of no OS
updates, because. . . oh wait, they do care there. They want that to happen,
because the only time they see money is when your current phone gets tossed in
the dustbin.

Meanwhile, as the article points out, providing updates to old phones is quite
an expensive process. Especially if you're doing anything beyond pushing
patches.

So. . . given that the incentive structure built into the Androidverse serves
to heavily disincentivize OEMs from providing iPhone-style support, the
question remains: Why on earth, then, should they?

~~~
yardie
I believe the only reason 3GS owners got iOS 5 was because of iCloud.
Normally, Apple is quite happy to leave the oldest hardware editions in the
dust with nary a care.

So they issue iOS 5 to every supported device and, lo and behold, iCloud has
80 million users overnight. It doesn't matter that most people think iCloud is
useless, what matters is they frictionlessly transitioned 80 million people
onto their servers. Now that they have those users they can figure what to do
with it.

I don't believe Apple is doing this out of altruism for users or developers. I
think they are honestly going after Google, Microsoft, Dropbox, et al. at the
same time. And the most effective way to do that is to have...80 million users
on day one.

~~~
projct
It's important to note that unlike older phones and Macs, Apple is still
currently selling the 3GS.

The original iphone and the iphone 3G stopped receiving updates 3 years after
release[1]. It's important to note, though, that in both cases the update
cycle continued for a significant amount of time after the devices were no
longer available in stores.

The original iPhone received its last update 1 year and 6 months after the
device was discontinued: iOS 3.1.3 was released February 2, 2010 while the
original iPhone was discontinued July 11, 2008.[2][3]

The iPhone 3G received its last update 5 months and 18 days after being
discontinued. In this case, given that it had the same specs as the original
iPhone except for the 3G modem, I think that iOS was rapidly becoming too
resource intensive to continue updating for this device, considering that by
2010 the majority of the hardware was already 3 years old. That said, iOS
4.2.1 was released November 22, 2010, and the 3G was discontinued as of June
4, 2010.[2][3]

Contrast this to Android where some flagship phones don't even receive
security updates after even a year (the chart in my references only includes
notable Android devices, and ignores cheaper ones that go after the free w/
contract market etc.)

Paying for updates is not the solution. Unfortunately, unless Google or
consumers grab the vendors by the balls, the only thing that I honestly think
will do _anything_ at all about this situation is a rather nasty worm that
manages to do some serious damage to devices that haven't gotten timely
updates. I don't want to see that happen, it would really hurt Android's
reputation in the eyes of those who won't understand that the HW vendor is to
blame for the problem, not Android the OS.

[1] Chart of device updates published some time ago:
[http://theunderstatement.com/post/11982112928/android-
orphan...](http://theunderstatement.com/post/11982112928/android-orphans-
visualizing-a-sad-history-of-support)

[2] iPhone discontinuation dates and final iOS version:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_iOS_devices#iPhone>

[3] Release dates of iOS versions:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_version_history>

------
orbitingpluto
The following is a wishing metric:

"If it charged just $10 for access to the update, that would be $150 million
if only half of all users wanted an official update."

Few would pay for an update. Especially when the phone is likely to have even
more bloatware added each update. Those who would want the update would
install a custom rom, especially if it was unlocked by default. The only
incentive to upgrade is when someone can't run the next big game.

More importantly, that new handset locks the customer into a new contract.
That's the priority. Hopefully some egghead executive will realize that
offering software updates, replacing batteries, and reducing monthly fees for
loyal customers can earn them even more money.

Along a similar thought, I have very little desire to pay for Android software
because developers have a habit of screwing their customers. I have purchased
games with zero permissions to avoid adware in the past, only to have updates
add a plethora of unwanted and unneeded security permissions.

Paid apps should not be allowed to add security permissions without giving the
option for refunds and/or an honest Google code review.

~~~
wmf
A customer with a six-month-old phone is never going to buy a new phone and
extend their contract. If OS updates aren't available, they'll just tough it
out. Thus offering updates for such phones seems like all upside.

------
makhanko
May be we are barking at the wrong tree, carriers and device manufacturers
that is. Case in point - Google's own Nexus S phone which has not yet received
official ICS update! Either google intentionally holding it back hoping to
sell more Galaxy Nexus phone with ICS installed or most likely the ICS
leapfrogged at the expense of its backwards compatibility with the existing
hardware. Google should wake up and smell the roses before it's going to be
too late to repair the damage. Next time they announce a major OS update
consumers will not even care because by the time they see the update on their
phone, the next iOS version will be announced and pushed to iPhones on the
same day.

------
saturdaysaint
This sounds ineffective. To most consumers, a software update is an annoyance
whose benefits are often hazy. Look how hard they procrastinate _free_
updates. So expecting money for an update to a device that's often replaced
within a year or two is a non-starter.

The most effective thing Google can realistically do is ship desirable
Motorola phones that get updated to the latest Android version the day of
release.

------
salem
If newer versions of Android monetize better for Google, then Google should be
paying handset makers a bounty for each of their phones that is upgraded to
the latest OS to encourage them to push the update. Otherwise it is likely
cannibalizing their revenue from selling new phones (or at least they think it
will), and they have little motivation to invest in updates.

------
CountSessine
Galaxy Nexus owner here. I'm still the only person in my office (a tech
company with lots of geeks) who's running ICS. It's really lonely here on
Android 4.

I don't think that paying for updates is going to help matters - that's just
another good argument to get an iPhone. Instead, I think Google has to start
giving device manufacturers a cut of the Android app store revenue. Others
here have pointed out that handset makers have no incentive to keep their
customers using the latest version of Android. If they wanted to make sure
that their customers were still buying Android apps, keeping them on an up-to-
date version of Android would be more important.

~~~
rogerbinns
There is also a comparison to the GPS industry (Garmin et al). They charge a
fee for map updates, charged for traffic and only ever provided new
functionality on new devices. Nowadays the market is shrinking - who wants
such crippled devices - and the usually sold models include lifetime maps and
traffic.

------
Zak
It seems to me that less in the way of UI tweaks and more standardization of
drivers would solve the problem. Does anybody really buy a phone for Touchwiz
or Motoblur? Could some of these tweaks be delivered as apps that can simply
target Android releases instead of specific devices (with some sort of basic
DRM to keep the average consumer from installing them on other manufacturer's
devices)?

It shouldn't be so hard; the PC industry got this mostly right decades ago.

------
eli
That seems like a tall order. You want them to charge for updates, but also
make it easier for you to install updates without paying for them?

------
kinleyd
I think we should start paying for Android updates, but only by donating to
the after-market Android community like CyanogenMod. These are the folks who
bring the latest Android goodness to devices long abandoned by their makers.

------
ebbv
Having to pay for Android updates would be a good reason to switch to iOS --
where updates are free.

The 3GS which was originally released with iOS 3 almost 3 years ago is still
able to update to the most current iOS 5.1 for _free_.

~~~
makhanko
And this is exactly the reason why paid Android upgrades is a terrible idea -
Apple has set a gold standard for updating OS and paying for Android updates
will make the situation even worse for Android users.

------
drivebyacct2
Ah, b0o seems to be hell-banned, but quite frankly, I agree. I've donated over
$300 to various overlay maintainers for CyanogenMod.

Why? Because, time and time and time again, they manage to do in 2 months what
it takes carriers/manufacturers 8 months (or really, never) to do: update the
software on my Android phone to the latest release.

I kept both my Droid and Fascinate for a good 6-months or more extra because I
was able to load CyanogenMod on it. They both were on higher versions of
Android when I decommisioned them than they will ever see official builds for.

Give me an unlocked bootloader, follow the terms of the GPL and I'm happy. For
regular users, if you want fast updates, buy Nexus or buy Apple. I'm a big
Android guy, but honestly, if you want fast updates and the Galaxy Nexus isn't
available for your carrier, and you're not willing to install CyanogenMod...
just buy an iPhone.

