Jellybean dominates Play, still seated atop rising KitKat The KitKat edition of Android now accounts for 13.6 per cent of all devices hitting Google’s Play store, the colossal advertising firm has disclosed. KitKat is the fourth most popular edition of Android, eight months after it was released by Mountain View. The data comes courtesy of Google’s Dashboard. Jellybean, released …
If we work along the (fairly well substantiated) theory that the vast majority of consumers either buy an iPhone or a Samsung phone but that almost none of them go out and deliberately buy an Android, the consequences of Samsung phones no longer being Android phones should be fairly self-evident in terms of Android sales.
Consider an imaginary parallel - Apple decide that their Macbook Air line will no longer run OSX but will now run (for the sake of argument) Ubuntu. The effect on sales of Airs would be negligible (this is almost wholly a consumer product, after all) but the effect on new installs of OSX would be dramatic in the extreme.
> the consequences of Samsung phones no longer being Android phones should be fairly self-evident in terms of Android sales.
We have an actual example of a company relying on the brand name and switching the OS wholesale, there is no need to draw imaginary conclusions from speculation.
Previously, "the vast majority of consumers either [bought] an iPhone or a [Nokia] phone". Nokia changed the OS and went from number one to almost out of the top ten.
In the unlikely case that Samsung changed suddenly from mainly Android to mainly Tizen without an Android compatibility layer (ie could not run Android apps) then the most likely outcome is that it would have little to no effect on Android sales, buyers would just change to another of the many brands.
"The South-Korean electronics giant will this summer release its first Tizen phone, the Samsung Z, in Russia"
One phone, in one market, suggests it will have very little effect.
I would guess that anyone who bought a Samsung blindly, based purely on the brand, would return it to the shop very quickly if they found they couldn't access all their favourite apps.
I would also guess that the only brand whose customers will blindly buy whatever phone has their brand of choice on it, is Apple.
Exactly. While there is a worrying number of people who'll ask me questions like "do you prefer Apple or Samsung?" and thus don't really know Android and might accidentally buy a Tizen phone, I suspect they would be less than happy to discover their Android apps don't work on their new gadget and that the Gmail client is just a link to a website.
Still Samsung will probably wait for Tizen to get better before switching OS in that way, although that will mean they risk becoming tomorrow's Nokia as some other company becomes the belle-du-jour.
I absolutely hate Android 4.4 Kitkat. But I don't have much choice in the matter if I go for an Android device.
This version has lost the ability to run applications from the SD card.
It has lost the ability to send an image through wifi to display on my digital TV.
As far as I'm concerned all it's gained is to share an name with a biscuit based confectionery.
Technically it has lost the ability to run applications (well, write application data) from *everywhere* on the SD card but retained the ability to write to one place. Google say that's because FAT-formatted SD cards can't enforce permissions on folders so malicious apps can make malicious edits to other apps' data areas, but that doesn't stop you messing up your apps by mounting it into another-OS-running machine and making edits. I guess it's harder to do it accidentally now though.
Not sure what you mean by "send an image through wifi to display on my digital TV" - I don't think any such technology is part of Android, although some manufacturers like Samsung have their own support for things like Miracast and there are of course third party apps that do things like DNLA/Chromecast.
On my HTC Android Jellybean, gallery has the options to "select player". and "play"
The player in question is my wifi enabled TV.
And Presto, my badly shot photos appear in full TV screen size.
The option just isn't there on Kitkat.
Which is a pity when I need to show elderly relatives some family photos.
> On my HTC Android Jellybean, gallery has the options to "select player". and "play"
Hmm, from stuff on the internet it looks like a DLNAthing and will therefore be HTC's software not Google's doing it. Unfortunately DLNA is notoriously flakey.
I would try an alternative DLNA app to see if that can talk to your TV - if it can, well, that's your problem ;-) BubbleUPNP is a good option.
This. I have an HP TouchPad dual booted to Cyanogen Gingerbread which will never be updated. Ever.
Also, new phones really only started coming with KitKat in May. That's mostly the fault of the wireless carriers, who require an extra 4 months+ to sign off on such things. Verizon just started making KitKat available to Galaxy S4 users for example, in the last 30 days. Has nothing to do with Google or Samsung.
The way 'fragmentation' is stressed in an article shows the bias of the writer.
The truth is that the story is much more nuanced: many, if not most apps will run on an older Android version, and if an app doesn't, half the time it's because the developer used a higher API version than was needed. The number of apps that actually need the latest features are much lower.
What the figures DO say, is the sorry state of affairs when it comes to upgrades. How hard can it be to separate HAL from OS, so that OS upgrades are 'easy' on mobile devices?
"What the figures DO say, is the sorry state of affairs when it comes to upgrades. "
I'm not sure if it would really be a good thing if Google/Samsung/HTC/etc were to pressure the carriers to push out updates faster. They could just do what Apple does and not give any pre-release info, so people don't know the OS was out for a while before their carrier chooses to provide it.
They don't say that about Android either though, do they? The most critical bit I could find is: the numbers demonstrate just how fragmented the Android market really is. Hardly saying it's failed.
And Win7 didn't stop old versions of visual studio working so how was it impossible to make software for XP after it?
While satisfying news for Google and Android fans at a higher level, the numbers demonstrate just how fragmented the Android market really is.
And how much of this is a problem? The Android API has been pretty stable for the last couple of years and I've yet to come across an app that won't run on any of my three devices, the oldest of which is nearly three years old and it's still on Android 4.0. It's true that this wasn't the case initially with the API expanding rapidly and often requiring stuff in hardware that older kit didn't have.
As others have pointed out in the Windows world there is XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1 plus the server versions. The vast majority of software runs fine on all those versions. However, you are generally up shit creek without a paddle if you want to straddle the 32-bit / 64-bit worlds easily on Windows. And don't mention ARM. If you want an example of fragmentation look no further than that.
In the IOS world a lot of developers march neatly in lockstep with new releases and quickly require the newest version of IOS. I'll admit I don't have first-hand experience of this but a mate of mine with quite a bit of Apple kit complains about it regularly. One of the reasons why it's done is because it's a nice way to force paid for upgrades. And if it works for people - that Apple punters are happier to part with their money than others - then good luck to them.
Yep Apple makes money selling hardware and iOS/Mac OS X are loss leaders and a necessary evil used to force obsolescence of the hardware (especially with yearly releases of "new" OS versions which are often nothing but glorified service packs). For example iOS 6 didn't support the iPAD 1 barely two years after its release. Its also why the latest Linux distros and even Windows 8.1 (yuck but still) will run on some of the early Intel Macs but newer versions of Mac OS no longer will. Bad when your competitors support your product longer than you do.
If an article I just saw is to be believed "Recently, SamMobile shared a leaked internal document detailing the expected Android 4.4 rollout timelines of several Galaxy devices. The document also noted that the Android 4.4 update for the Galaxy S3 I9300 was “cancelled due to unresolved problems.”
"The document also noted that the Android 4.4 update for the Galaxy S3 I9300 was “cancelled due to unresolved problems.”"
Problems that speculation suggests is more about the Samsung bloatware (in particular Touchwiz) than about any inherent problem with Kitkat and the S3. Which shows two more problems that Samsung face with Touchwiz:
1) Will they do the same thing, and mess Tizen up with bloatware, crap customisations, and rubbish apps that you can't remove?
2) Will the be just as enthusiastic to abandon handsets when it suits them, when those handsets can still be bought new?
3) Will they be just as enthusiastic with the network distribution of updates for Tizen, which slows updates down, or even means they never happen because the network operators cannot be bothered?
The orphaning of the S3 is only the latest in a line of similar moves by Samsung. They clearly still don't understand that customer goodwill is fragile, and customer loyalty easily changed.
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