Releasing new devices with an outdated version Android has become commonplace. Causes? Food Cycles and Benjamin Franklin.
In summer, expensive smartphones with an outdated version Android will go on sale. New devices worth hundreds of dollars, the best devices on the market. And on the shelf next to them there will be the same new items with 'old' software. And among them there will be not only smartphones that have appeared for a long time, but also actual novelties, which everyone has heard about and are already ready to buy them. For some, this will be confusing. But the reason for this is quite simple.
It's all about the so-called minimum allowable costs. They mean the efficient use of all resources, it can be money, as well as time or any other benefit for the company. We know this idea from the statement of Ben Franklin: “Remember, time is money.” It's no secret that devices based on Android do not work with the latest software version. The main reason for this is the complex nature of the task of keeping device software up to date, which in turn is due to software licensing. Plus, those who were involved in the creation of the device or its software do not want to change anything at all. Many of these reasons apply to brand new devices with outdated OS versions.
Building an OS is not easy, you can't just make changes to the platform halfway through.
Google only creates Android for the products it sells. The company allows manufacturers such as Samsung or LG to create their own operating system based on Android at any time, this is their software licensing policy. This is why Android became the dominant OS so quickly and also why your phone is probably running on an outdated version Android from the date of purchase.
Building and testing an OS is not a cheap pleasure. Sometimes this is relatively easy: for example, in the case of Android – a Blackberry device, the 'patches' were released on the same day as Google's security updates. The new code was developed taking into account the merger with the existing code and the company using the code needed only to check the changes in the updated components and their differences from those presented by Google. Real changes in key aspects Android are quite another matter, and even a seemingly small transition from 7.0 to 7.1 can be a very difficult process. And also expensive.
Software cycles and hardware cycles
Samsung will most likely show the Galaxy S8 at the end of March. The device will work on the base Android 7.0 or 7.1. The likelihood that 7.1.1 will be on board is very small, this version was not yet ready at the time of the completion of the software for the new smartphone. And there is no problem with that. The smartphone will run on Android Nougat and have the same app support as the Google Pixel. The phones released at the beginning of the year usually all have a similar feature and will lag quite slightly in terms of updates in the future.
Technical releases are good, but 7.1 is still up to date.
This trend becomes a problem for those devices that are released later in the year. The annual platform update Android takes place every fall. By this time, beta testing of the new version has already passed and we already have an idea of the upcoming release a few months before it. But companies cannot create their software based on beta code, and therefore any device that is in the late stages of production just before the platform update will be 'lagged behind' by one step. This can significantly impact application security and compatibility.
In both cases, the time it takes to stop production and update device software before launching will affect sales revenue. Money is the only priority for smartphone makers. Nobody at Samsung or LG wants old software on your device. But since they want to update it themselves, they have to wait. And time is money.
Original material by Jerry Hildenbrand
The race for the new version Android on the smartphone, in my opinion, has already lost its relevance, most applications work adequately on 4.4, not to mention the most popular at the moment 6.0. Therefore, manufacturers have no other choice, and they are trying to come up with new scenarios and 'chips' that are available only in new smartphones with Android 7.0 and higher. Thus, the companies seem to hint to users that their devices are already slightly outdated and it would be time to fork out for new ones. But craftsmen are against shortening the product cycle of their smartphones: ports of new versions Android appear for old devices, and even if their functionality is cut down, some functions can be tried before the official update is released, if at all. So don't be afraid to buy devices with 'outdated' versions and don't fall for marketing gimmicks. Unless, of course, the latest version Android is your top priority. Of course, new is good, as long as the optimization is at the level that some manufacturers lack.