As you are presumably aware Google’s Android operating system is the dominant smartphone and tablet operating system. iPhones and iPads get all of the press (they use Apple’s iOS operating system) but Android has about 90% of the market. If you don’t know what an operating system is, a quick summary is that it’s the computer program that makes your smartphone something other than an inert hunk of chips and circuit boards. It’s not the computer program that you as a user interact with but it’s the program that makes the connection between the programs you do interact with and the hardware itself. This post at Ars Technica highlights an important point:
Just as Google is coming under fire for publicizing a Windows bug two days before Microsoft released a fix, the company is now in the crosshairs because of its approach towards updating its own software.
Not for the first time, a bug has been found in the WebView component of Android 4.3 and below. This is the embeddable browser control powered by a version of the WebKit rendering engine used in Android apps.
Android 4.4 and 5.0, which use Blink rather than WebKit for their WebView, are unaffected. But by Google’s own numbers, some 60 percent of Android users are using 4.3 or below. As such, this is a widespread, high-impact bug. The normal procedure would be to report the bug to Google, and for Google to develop a fix and publish it as part of Android Open Source Project release.
The problem is that Google has no plans to fix the old versions. The first unaffected version was released waayyy back in September 2013.
I think this reveals an important conceptual issue. You shouldn’t become dependent on a smartphone or tablet you aren’t planning on replacing every year or so. They aren’t durables. They’re ephemera. They’re consumables.
For most of us that places a limit on how much we should be willing to pay for a smartphone or tablet and, again, for most of us that’s a heckuva lot less than $500.
The criticisms of a lack of upgrading paths for Android is seemingly more astute.
As much as I hate to say it, Apple has a leg up here. The iPhone doesn’t have this problem.
We have a couple of Kinde Fires (Android apparently), but I stick with my iphone and probably always will. The older I get the less I want to learn a new OS.
Yesterday we ordered a Chromebook for the kids (they sometimes use them at school and it’s plenty for what they need for writing). They are still relatively new and my understanding is that the OS automatically updates.