Android fragmentation
Early august last year I bought a T-Mobile G2 Touch ( in reality a re-badged HTC Hero ) thinking that the time was right to move over to Android. I had spent the previous couple of years tracking OpenMoko but after that imploded I was left wondering what to get. The iPhone held a draw but being a geek at heart I decided to go for the younger developer friendly Android. I run Ubuntu on my laptop and I love the fact that as individual packages are updated my laptop downloads them and incrementally gets better. A Linux based smartphone I want some of that.
The second consideration was that T-Mobile are terrible at firmware updates, no worse than that, wilfully neglectful. The simply don’t seem to care, once you have bought a phone that’s it, painful crashing bug? doesn’t matter. Battery draining software flaw? its not that bad. Missing out on much improved and completely new features? Who really wants that. My old phone was an N95, I bought it when it came out and it was a brilliant little phone, it just suffered from a few bugs. Nokia had spent the time and fixed them but T-mobile just wouldn’t sign them so that I could install them on my phone. With Android I reasoned the update process would be more like a PC and come directly from Google, I get to cut the pain of T-Mobile out all together.
So back story out of the way how has it been? Terrible. Since getting hold of my phone there has been one update (a small bux fix patch) that took bad press and a 175 page thread on T-Mobiles support forum before they finally released it, last of all the UK carriers. I am still running Android 1.5 while the world of android has moved on to 2.1 and Google no longer releases new apps for anything under 1.6. My less than a year old phone is now a dinosaur it seems.
Where before I was excited at announcements of improvements to Android now I look at them with despair. I understand that at some point supporting old hardware becomes overly restrictive, but this phone is still being sold new. The fragmentation of Android is hurting my will to use it. It is still early days for Android, and it has come a long way already, but Google needs to take control, to impose an upgrade schedule on handset manufacturers that carry the Android brand.
My smartphone, sold as a computer in my pocket, needs to become exactly what it claims to be. I want incremental over the air updates for small bugs exactly like you get on your Pc or Mac with new versions for improved functionality. Most of all, I don’t want to wait six months after a new version has been released to have any hope of installing it.
