Android users running old OS versions? Not anymore, say latest stats

android upgrade debate

"Whether those customers received "upgrades" without buying new phones, however, is debatable."

You pays yer money you takes yer choice - Some phone manufacturers will offer OTA updates but some consumers enjoy getting new handsets via a mobile contract and despite everything the upgrade interval is only slowly getting longer.

Others will be working out how to sideload cynogenmod which just gets easier and others still will just buy a new cheap but good handset which is not necessarily an option with the alternatives.

It might not be green but it's what consumers do (with encouragement) despite exhortations not to.

JB? I Dream of JB!

About three months ago my Nexus S gave up the ghost. Called my cel provider (Telus in Canada) to see about upgrading to a new phone. I got the Nexus on a three year contract and actually felt it was a reasonable deal. I'm perennially short on cash, so I can live with the contract. Or could.

After WAY too much time and energy I finally pinned them down: in order to upgrade to a current (ish) smartphone I would need to pay $150 and accept a MINIMUM increase in my monthly spend of $20. For two years.

Which would mean that the new phone would cost me about $650.

Except that the "cheapest" plan I could get on a new contract was not the same as what I have now. I would need to pay extra to keep my 2 gig monthly data cap, and my full voicemail service (not the "free" one that limits you to three messages in your inbox.)

They finally admitted that in order to upgrade the phone to a current one would cost me $150 PLUS I would now be paying $98 a month, instead of the $50 a month I pay now.

Meaning, to get a new phone and keep the service that I have would cost me an added $1300!!!!!

Which is how I came to by a cheap as dirt $100 pay as you go Samsung Discovery. Never heard of it? Neither had I.

Which arrived three months ago with Ice Cream Sandwich, and with no hope whatsoever of an upgrade, and because it's pretty much unknown, underpowered, and mediocre, little likelihood of a Cyanogenmod implementation.

The camera sucks rocks too.

I have to say that Android is pretty much a hopeless mess, with every phone, from every manufacturer, and many carriers, being it's own little customized item, which leaves 85% of the Android population powerless to do anything but wait for some large corporation to bother to upgrade their systems.

Why this matters: smartphones now handle just about anything that desktop computers did five years ago - e-mail, communications, banking, shopping, bill payments, remote access by VPN.

One hell of a lot of sensitive and private data is flying around, and the end users not only don't have any idea how secure their systems are, they have literally no way of improving the security of their smartphones.

None of us would accept it if Apple, or Microsoft, or (insert Linux distro here) said "Here's your OS, and don't ever expect us to fix any security problems, or make any improvements, or make it possible to replace it with a new version."

So why do we accept that from the companies that provide the OS for our phones?

Surely one massive lawsuit is pending at some point.

forcing developers to support too many different versions

Guessing you don't write android code then.

This is totally a non issue. The android SDK is very stable with rarely and breaking changes between versions. Gingerbread to ICS was the only blip...

Upgrade! Upgrade NOW! Give us all your MONEY!

The cell companies want all your money. Therefore they lock the phone down as much as they can and rarely provide OS upgrades. Apple is only an exception because they retain control of the handset rather than allowing the cell company to customise it. I had an HTC Desire for nearly 3 years, the last year of which I switched to a rolling 1 month contract from Tesco.. During that time the OS was never upgraded. The battery started to finally fail last month and whilst I could have bought a new battery I had a hankering for a slightly more modern phone. I was paying £10 a month to Tesco for 250mins, 5000txts and 500Mb Data. I am now paying £12.50 per month for exactly the same plan but I have a new Moto-G running KitKat on a 24 month contract. No it's not the latest phone but nor am I paying £35 a month for the latest thingy extension. I don't expect it to be upgraded to any later version of Android in the next 2 years due to the Motorola buy out by Lenovo.

I would also like to sing Tesco's praises. Their support team are superb (I have yet to speak to a script monkey) . They know what they are doing and they follow through on their promises. Compared to the shower I used to have to deal with at Voda they are a breath of fresh air. Well done Tesco!

Android fragmented ecosystem?

"One of the most consistent gripes about Android is that its ecosystem is fragmented"

One of the most consistent doses of FUD about Android is that its ecosystem is fragmented, it's either not selling or if it is selling, it's fragmented ...

Minor variations

I have 2 Android devices running different 4.n OS from different makers.

We have a few others in the family.

All just about the same, but all with enough small variations in menus etc.that have been introduced either by the maker or supplier, to make managing them irritating. Under the hood they may be pretty much the same. But it doesn't make it less annoying when I try to do something with one and the menu item I need isn't where I expected it to be. Or when an app loads onto one, but appears not to on another.

98.2% of Android devices run old OS versions

The latest Android release is KitKat (4.4.X) and only 1.8% of devices run that, leaving 98.2% running "old OS versions". Hence a major WTF for the article title including the phrase "Not anymore".

Countering that, Google have managed to push updates to older OS'es without a version change, either by splitting previously core code into a Play store app (e.g. Google Keyboard) or by silently updating Google Play Services.

It's probably the only ways to work around the huge disincentive barriers there are for carriers to upgrade Android on their models (1. It costs them time and money to put their unwanted bloatware on top and have it go through certification and 2. They want to sell you new Android device every year, so if they upgrade old ones, people may keep the old device for another year or two, the horror of it).

My attitude to all of this is simple - only buy Nexus devices or devices that you can install a custom ROM (e.g. CyanogenMod) on - that way, you'll be quickly onto the latest release without having to wait many months or not see an upgrade at all (I'm looking at you Huawei, with your Ascend P1).

It's partly a numbers game

When version 2.x of Android was out, 'only' 200 million smartphones a year were selling. Now it's a just hit 1 billion a year. So the new is bound to outnumber the old. Plus there was that rather weird gap with Android 3, which was the emergency tablet version, that barely made it onto any phones. So there was quite a big gap between 2 and 4, and therefore a jump in hardware requirements.

I don't follow Android as closely as I did, but hasn't 4.4 been out for about 6 months now, and only has 1-2% of the market? So there's still a slower uptake of the newer OS versions. But it probably doesn't matter as much, as improvement is slowing down.

However, fragmentation was only one criticism. The more important problem is security updates. Are Google still issuing secruity updates for 4.0? And whatever version you're on, even if Google are still fixing bugs and security holes - what good is that, if you're manufacturer and telco can't be arsed to pass them on to you?

kit kat

i thought the whole point of 4.4 was unification of past models , 4.4 is supposed to run on devices with only 512 Mg of ram, this will bring a lot of older sets up to date if, that's a big if, the carrier releases it.

I have a cheap Chinese tablet running JB, would love to upgrade to 4.4, but Rockchip chips while popular, have little support.

I also take the point of view that is just a friggen OS if my device meets the minimum specs ,why is it such a pain to upgrade, if the video,wifi,audio were supported in the previous version OS, why not now?

Old Devices

Whilst its true that manufactures are only shipping 4.4 largely on newer devices, there is probably a 4.4 or a 4.3 rom for pretty much every droid out there assuming if your willing to root it, just had a quick look at xda devs and even the G1 got a 4.1.1 Rom.

Ok sometimes manufactures dont open source drivers and later roms suffer from bad drivers, but assuming its a popular device a way around the issue normally surfaces given time.

I know others might disagree, but to me androids fragmentation (choices), bounds of different roms that has driven innovation, take for example cyanogenmod, for a long time (some would argue they still do) were at the forefront of all the custom rom players, they introduced new features, which eventually got swallowed up and became part of android on later builds something that will never happen on other close garden platforms.

The fruit bats can say what they want about their iwhatevers, your comparing appfails.... and oranges.

New OS's screw up the phone

I have a Samsung Galaxy Note 2. I got it as soon as they came out and it was 100% reliable. I think it was running 4.1. After a few months the OS got updated to 4.2 and the phone became completely unreliable. Random restarts, persistent crashes you name it and it had it. I ended up doing three factory resets, deleting all the apps and starting again. In the end I rooted it and put Titanium on it and stopped some of the crap that Samsung/Vodafone bundle on their phones. The phone now is stable and I get a crash about every four or five months as opposed to one or two an hour when I was using it before. As this is the third android phone I have had and every one has had very adverse effects to be "upgraded" to the newer OS's I will not unroot it and install 4.3. The first Android phone I had became almost a brick after it was updated it was that useless. In the future I will root every Android I get so that it will never update as these updates are not voluntary, you cannot avoid them. The phones work great out of the box so that is how I will keep mine. If others have had the same issues then that is maybe why they are not running the latest OS?