RE: Android Orphans: Visualizing a Sad History of Support

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Source: theunderstatement.com/

A very good summary about Android environment. Very well summed-up and visualized the two rival ecosystem.

Root of problems - Hardware Manufacturers

Android suppose to be an open source project.By the default nature of an open-source, it is bound to lure all the hackers around the world to get their hands dirty on the project. Yet hardware manufacturers tries very hard to be in control of both the hardware and the software (firmware).
".. there’s no incentive for smartphone manufacturers to update the OS: because manufacturers don’t make any money after the hardware sale... The hacker community (e.g. CyanogenMod, et cetera) has frequently managed to get these phones to run the newer operating systems, so it isn’t a hardware issue."
Despite realizing that they can't make money after hardware sale, and they are resource tight to keep up with the pace of the OS development, they still want to be in control. They even demanded takedown of the roms [1], which the hackers used to baked their custom rom (firmware).

This IMO is the biggest mistake of all the vendors. They should be grateful there are these fan-boys out there that help improve the products and user experience. If not for these fan-boys, many would have left Android for other OS, such as iOS.

And to some extend, Google itself also demanded takedown of CyanogenMod [2], despite their tremendous effort in help keeping the Android devices up-to-date, and perform better, with the lag-fixes, memory management fixes, and performance tweak.


Openness of Open-source.

Nuff said, if I'm part of the mass non-it-savvy consumers, I would been stick to iPhone long time ago. But, because I enjoy hacking my own products. That's why I sticked to AOSP.



References:
  1. http://www.phonenews.com/htc-now-demanding-takedown-of-unmodified-rom-archives-11464/
  2. http://phandroid.com/2009/09/25/google-responds-to-cyanogen-uproar/

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