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by protomyth 5012 days ago
"Older phones not getting Jelly Bean is a silly complaint at this point, can't we get past this?"

I would imagine we can get it past it when every phone capable of running the newest Android version is allowed to upgrade to the newest Android version. Until then, it is an issue for developers who want to use the latest APIs.

1 comments

I can't necessarily disagree, when it comes to developers. Just curious, what are these latest and greatest APIs that's preventing developers from producing quality apps because they don't exist on older phones? Is it because of security and/or functional updates to the OS or is it truly app APIs that some apps just can't exist without?
One example from the graphics APIs / changes:

"Earlier this year, Android 3.0 launched with a new 2D rendering pipeline designed to support hardware acceleration on tablets. With this new pipeline, all drawing operations performed by the UI toolkit are carried out using the GPU.

You’ll be happy to hear that Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich, brings an improved version of the hardware-accelerated 2D rendering pipeline to phones, starting with Galaxy Nexus."

http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/11/android-40-gr...

You can walk your way from http://developer.android.com/about/versions/jelly-bean.html backwards to see what is missing on older phones.