HALF-WAY THROUGH this afternoon, my phone updated itself up with a new look. It’s a Galaxy Nexus, one of the few models of Android phone that Google licenses and sells directly to end-users, so when it released the new “jelly bean” version of its Android mobile operating system, the Nexus got a direct update just a few hours later.
For those who use Apple’s iPhone, such upgrades are hardly news. Most iPhone users will be getting an upgrade themselves, some time this autumn, when iOS 6 is released by the Californian company.
For the majority of Android and other smartphone users, though, updates are as rare as first-class upgrades on a flight. Phones keep the operating system software they were primed with when you first bought them and that software stays with them until they break.
Because upgrades – and the software that runs on phones – used to be entirely controlled by the phone companies, it is still common for them to manage the process of rolling out new versions, which happens once in a blue moon.
The usual reason given for such control is that it is their network, so devices connecting to it should only run software that they control or understand. In truth, though, phone companies don’t really seem to care. Even security flaws barely merit an update.
Phone companies have no real incentive to push upgrades to their users, as long as you keep paying for calls and occasionally splash out on a new phone.
Google’s Galaxy Nexus is sold outside the traditional mobile phone contract. Mine is plugged into T-Mobile’s US mobile phone network, but it is not beholden to that company. Instead, it gets its upgrades from the heart of the Googleplex itself, just as the iPhones pick up their software from Apple direct.
In its original vision of Android, Google didn’t intend to sell its own phones. It also didn’t envisage rolling out its own updates. The whole point of Android was that it would be open source, so that mobile providers and manufacturers could mint their own variations on the original Android theme.
But, as with so much Android, Google has quickly realised the limitations of this strategy in comparison to Apple’s iron-tight grip on its iPhone ecology.
The biggest issue, as developers have repeatedly noted to Google, is fragmentation. Initially, coders worried that there would be too many varieties of Android phone. Programming for different screen sizes, hardware keyboards versus touchscreens and processor speeds would mean not only more complex programs, but also the expensive requirement for coders to test on a wide (and growing) range of hardware.
The limitations of Apple’s “you can have an iPhone in any size as long as it’s Steve’s” meant that its app makers have had very little variation to cope with.
Google software design anticipated this challenge to a certain extent and coders (with the exception of game-makers, who tend to push phone hardware to its limits) have learned to live with a jungle of alternative Android implementations.
No, Google’s real problem has been with version fragmentation. When Apple upgrades the operating system behind the iPhone, every iPhone that’s capable of running the new software gets that new version. The vast majority of iPhones walk lockstep into the future.
Most Android devices get left behind by phone manufactures and mobile companies. There are still original Android 1.0 users out there. More than two-thirds of the Android devices being used are four versions older than the latest iteration running on my phone.
With that kind of spread, developers are loathe to depend on new Android features that will only be usable on a few phones. Nobody is going to use the fancier parts of Google’s “cloud messaging” feature, for instance, because only a tiny number of Android users will have an operating system that supports that.
Most of the new features of Android dodge this problem by being slicker versions of old features. A “jelly bean” phone feels faster and has fancier notifications, but it’s one thing for Google to introduce brand new features and quite another to get developers to use them.
That would not matter, except that Google is facing serious competition in the mobile marketplace this year. Apple is determined to keep upgrading its phone and tablet software. Microsoft is, finally, due to make an appearance in the market with its advanced new mobile software. To compete, Google needs to cat herd all of its Android manufacturers and developers into the future – and to do that, it needs modern Android versions running on a large numbers of phones out there.
Google could just give up on both phone network operators and manufacturers. It already owns Motorola. While Google’s management have promised to keep a Chinese wall between the Android team and Motorola’s mobile division, it could decide to drop such niceties in order to compete with Apple, which has no such qualms, and Microsoft, with which a scared Nokia is tightly hugging for security right now.
Motorola this week announced a cheap Android phone that could be just the ticket: the Atrix HD. It is running an old version of Android, with no indication of when it might upgrade. Google can’t even cat herd its own set of cats.
