Google never should have opened it up for hardware manufacturers. They should have just made the OS and licensed it out like windows. Then hardware manufacturers wouldn’t be able to release crappy forks that never get updated.
I disagree. If google hadn’t opened up, manufacturers wouldn’t have bothered. We also have great UIs like oneui with useful quality of life features not found in stock android. Not to mention a longer update cycle than even Google the developer of android.
This assumes that Android would have anywhere near the reach it does now because of it’s openness.
Google actually is enabling hardware manufacturers to control the end to end experience by allowing them this level of control over their own ecosystem.
The difference is … they’re not Apple. No Android manufacturer operates at the scale Apple does. Licensed Android won’t change that any more than it will change all of the Windows 7 and 10 licenses that still live on in the real world.
It would also put the onus on Google to produce all the device drivers and compatibility layers needed to support the breadth of hardware currently available. This would slow the entire market down.
Hardware manufacturers on average do a shitty job keeping their fragmented operating systems up to date. My iPhone has gone through many major version updates. If hardware manufacturers don’t want to quickly, or ever, update they should have just shipped their phones with stock Android, and allowed us to update it to whatever is the latest.
Stock Android wouldn’t include the kernel drivers and compatibility layers needed to run your phone. I think you’ve missed the point.
They didn’t really have a choice. They were building on open-source software and Linux and Arm are somewhat bad at abstracting the hardware. So this means that the manufacturers must homebrew their own distro for their hardware, instead of just publishing drivers like windows hardware does.
They’ve been working on fixing this, but fundamentally they built their castle on sand. And if they hadn’t, they probably never would’ve gotten anywhere at all and we’d all be on Blackberry or WebOS or WinPhone or whatever.
Windows Phone and webOS were amazing. Not just for their time, but even today. Major advancements in mobile OS’ came from WebOS like multi window task managing and my favorite feature of all came from Windows Phone. The most perfect on screen keyboard man has ever made. Specifically with audio. It had click sounds that were specific to a region of the keyboard and it was a low tone that was audibly pleasing. I wish we still had the same levels of competition that we did back in the day. Link to a video about the pleasing typing sounds on windows phone
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Link to a video about the pleasing typing sounds on windows phone
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
You guys really just said that Linux and open source licenses are “a castle on sand” and they should “have done it like Windows”?
If you start running before anybody notice you may be able to make it. Go. Just. Go.
But no, seriously, that’s why I prefer Android. I have versions of it customized to handheld consoles, single board computers and a bunch of other stuff. I don’t want to be out there buying licenses for my platforms from Google.
Samsung is the biggest phone manufacturer in the world, Sony is a massive corporation.
If people want to sell phones the least they can do is have the software staff to back it up by doing maintenance. If I wanted an iPhone I’d buy an iPhone.
Look I love open-source but the whole lack of a separate binary driver layer is dumb and is why Windows can support a machine for over a decade while Android has terrible device-specific support windows and you don’t just get your new OS version from Android Update, you have to get it from your vendor.
Imagine if you owned a Dell and couldn’t run Windows Update, but had to use Dell Update instead?
