Reply to post: Monthly security updates will soon become a major PITA

Google flubs patch for Stagefright security bug in 950 million Androids

Zola
Mushroom

Monthly security updates will soon become a major PITA

It's all very well Google promising to push out monthly security updates, but the design of the current Android platform ensures that frequent updates will become a major PITA and something I'm sure users will grow weary of pretty quickly.

The problem is that the Android platform takes over 20 minutes - tested on a quad-core Nexus 5 (2013) - to apply even the smallest update. Every application on the device (and I haven't installed many myself, maybe only a dozen, but the number of apps on the device still runs to about 120) has to be (re-)"optimised" - thanks to ART - every time the system is updated. And optimisation is a very, very slow process (I actually wonder if it's only running on a single core, it's _that_ frickin' slow).

1MB update? Boom, 20+ fudging minutes to apply the update.

10MB update? Another 20+ fudging minutes to apply.

200MB update? You get the picture. The size of the update doesn't matter, it's always going to be dwarfed by the colossal time it takes for ART to get it's shit together.

It's a horribly flawed process that is going to become a major burden for users if small security updates are pushed out frequently. I can see myself skipping updates just to avoid the inconvenience of the slow update process (although at least they're unlikely to be as bad as Twitter, who seem able/willing to publish new builds of their app on an almost daily basis with no hint of a changelog - it does make you wonder how crap their developers are).

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