On Wed, Sep 28, 2016 at 11:53 AM, Georgi Guninski <guninski@guninski.com> wrote:

dude, are you a google dude?

updating android device from yellow color vendor is PITA, admit it.
likely updating it from a white whore too.

when a great android malware comes, maybe it will make a botnet with
bandwidth estimated at least 314Tbps.

remember the times when m$ were bugfucked, but there were wasn't _much_
public malware? -- m$ cried like fucked chicken "there ain't no virii"

The "long tail" of old versions of Android in the wild is indeed a HUGE problem. Kind of ironic given the amount of effort Google puts into finding and fixing bugs in Android. What good is a bug fix if the fix never gets applied on devices in the wild? This is one reason I typically stick to Nexus devices, even though they tend to be pretty mediocre overall. Google should tell vendors that they can't call their phone an "Android phone" unless they get updates out in a timely manner. Or maybe we already do that.

Brillo is the IoT version of Android. I *think* it has some kind of requirement around sending out updates, or it just updates the Android core separately. At any rate, my impression was that it aims to try to avoid a repeat of the low-end smartphone situation.

Note that IOS is no counterexample unless you really want all comsumer hardware produced by a just a few companies that control the entire stack. The equivalent of IOS devices from a timely updates standpoint would be Nexus devices.