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by MiddleEndian
2580 days ago
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Wintel is something that could be taken down a notch, but it seems everything outside of the x86 family is even worse. If I buy a Dell laptop or a Lenovo laptop, it will come with a bunch of useless junk installed that nobody in their right mind would ever want, like Lenovo's useless gigantic Wi-Fi icon in Windows (last observed by me in a T520). But not only can I uninstall all of that junk software, I am still running real Windows. And that means I can update it normally. Compare that to an Android device. You get a phone from a company like Samsung and you cannot uninstall the Facebook app no matter what you do. You get a phone from HTC and maybe they decide to push an update from 7.something to 8.0 and 8.0 introduces a new issue. That is fixed in 8.1 but you can never actually upgrade to 8.1 because it's not the real version of Android it's the HTC version of Android and they have ordained that your device shall never go past 8.0 and they pushed some firmware "security" update that prevents you from installing any other OS on your device. Additionally, some software seems to be dictated by your mobile carrier, which would be like allowing Comcast to control what you run on your PC. So whatever fragmentation there is on Wintel (or LinAmd), it is not nearly as hostile to the user as the Android ecosystem. |
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To be clear, I don't think this is a failing of open source. The problem is that Google allowed phone manufacturers to release practically anything they wanted based on the Android code base under the name "Android" and to ship with the common market (Google Play).
Frankly I don't think they should have allowed any modifications, making Android closer to how Firefox is distributed. (Anyone can edit the source code of Firefox, and even release a fully built binary based on that edited code, but you can't call it Firefox.) Maybe fewer manufacturers would have bought in at the outset, or maybe some would have tried to fork Android, but it's easy to forget what a desperate situation they were in. Outside of Apple and maybe Blackberry, the mobile OS market was in shambles because nobody was ready with high quality smartphone software. Android was a huge win and probably saved multiple companies from bankruptcy, and I think they would have eventually bought in to a more strictly defined OS out of necessity.