• tsonfeir@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • limerod@reddthat.comM
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • Pxtl@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • MudMan@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • Pxtl@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          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?