Saturday 9 June 2012

Why Google Should Embrace OEM Customisations

With Jellybean just around the corner Ice Cream Sandwich still only runs on 7% of Android devices, this a problem because it means that a lot of Android users are left running outdated software and having an outdated experience. OEMs are to blame, but you can't really blame them either, they want to differentiate their products from the others who are all running Android as well, and they want some branding so that people can recognise it's their product, which makes sense but it also causes problems. To brand Android the OEMs have to hack their own skins and customisations on to it, which they have to do for each individual device they sell each time a new version of Android is released and this takes a lot of time.

But

If Google embraced the customisations this could all be easier,  by developing a plugin and skins system OEMs can add their changes in this format. This would be better because it would allow Google to still have control of software versioning while OEMs just have to worry about their own plugins, theoretically if this was done correctly then Google could update all Android phones at the same time and the OEM plugins would still be compatible unless something major changes, in which case Google just has to warn them of the changes before release and they can just update their plugins.

Fragmentation = Solved (partially)

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