Google can not solve the problem of Android update

Android 10 is official and to this day, it is only available on a very small number of phones: Pixels and some others. I'll have a review later today, but here's a quick overview: it's good, it better protects your privacy, but it does not matter if you can not get a phone that handles it.

It's hard to maintain a sense of indignation at Android's horrifying track record of providing users with year-to-year upgrades. We're in the tenth release, after all, and the evolution of upgrades is the same as it was a decade ago: Google Proprietary devices are updated quickly, everything else takes months, if not all.

This is not entirely just to say that nothing has changed, though. Google has asked manufacturers and operators to release critical security patches faster. And from Android 10, a new initiative called "Project Mainline" will update some of the piping of Android directly through the Play Store.

It's very important, but it's not what people want. They want the big updates. Yet, the Android ecosystem seems designed Prevent major OS updates from being prepared and delivered to users. It's because it is. And since this situation has not changed for a decade, it is impossible to draw an irrefutable conclusion:

Google can not fix it. Nobody can.

The status of Android updates is still so serious

Take the recent report from Counterpoint Research, which states that Nokia is by far the best maker when it comes to publishing major operating system updates (after Google and Essential, which have far fewer devices to take in charge). It includes this revealing graph, which shows the percentage of adoption of the company's portfolio by Android 9 during the year of its release.

Counterpoint search

What strikes you in this table is how far away is Nokia! But it is actually a failure board. Here, let me highlight the most important quadrants:

Six months after its release, only one manufacturer has managed to update half of its portfolio, and only two have managed more than one quarter. Full year after the release, only Three managed to cross the 50% mark! And the two largest and most important manufacturers – Samsung and Huawei – are around 30% and 40% respectively.

The lion's share of phones sold during this period were running the latest version but very little existing the phones have been upgraded to 9. There is a more traditional metric to measure the installation base of Android that we can also look at, and the numbers are also dark. This would be Android's own distribution board:

Android

In May, Android 9 Pie had barely managed to crack 10%. It's better than in the past, but still terrible.

Google can not fix it

All this results from the functioning of the Android ecosystem.

There is an open source group, Android, which is nominally separate from Google and involves all major players. They are all free to take the heart of Android and do what they want (within reasonable limits). Some of them apply minor customizations that are easy to move from one version to the other, others make things much more difficult. Sometimes (often), it is less and less interesting for a manufacturer to deploy all these efforts, especially on older phones. In addition, the operators generally want to check that all these updates do not mess up their network, which further slows down the process.

This is the simple version of why Android updates take forever. The slightly more complicated version is that when I wrote that Android was "nominally" separated from Google, which I really meant by "Google controls Android". It requires a lot more resources to develop it and chooses the features that will be included in each version. It also controls – or at least can exert serious pressure on – the entire Android ecosystem, as it leverages the Play Store and allows you to create the most popular Android apps (Chrome, Gmail, etc.).

In other words, Google has two levers to try to transfer Android updates faster in this fragmented ecosystem. There is a technical lever and a political lever.

Let's start with the technical lever on which Google relies heavily. I've already mentioned the Mainline project and the monthly security patches, but the most important element is the Treble project. Treble began in 2017 as a multi-year effort to change the design of Android. It is essentially to make it more modular, so as to make it easier for the manufacturers.

From a technical point of view, Treble counts as a pressure. Google dictates how manufacturers use Android on their own phones, potentially limiting the customizations they can make to get updates faster.

It's been two years, though, and you'd like to think that Treble would have more dramatic effects. And it is true that more and more companies are creating these updates better. I would also like to note that more of them participate in Android betas. But Android is moving slowly – and Treble is not a quick fix. It's possible that Google could simply change Android so that he has the exclusive control of publishing updates, but that seems really unlikely.

What I mean by "political" leverage is the mix of solicitation, cajolery, encouragement, shame and begging that is Google's attempts to maintain the Android ecosystem. That helped, but as for the technical lever, Google has very little to do here.

I could imagine a world where Google Required fields phones with the Google Play Store and Google Apps to update their phones as soon as possible. Google has already used this club for a variety of other purposes, and it did not go well. The company was put in hot water with the European Union and forced it to create a browser ballot and unbundling applications.

It's like that, until it's gone

The "nuclear" option for Google is to block one or the other of these levers to the fullest. I do not see that happening. It's not (just) that Google is too shy, it could actually cause more fragmentation. More Google and Android are subject to strict and strict rules, plus it is likely that some companies are content to say "forget this" and tinkering with Android, as Amazon does with its Fire tablets. It would be a disaster for Google.

He does not have to have to be that way. Microsoft, for example, has created a multi-vendor ecosystem, but still has a firmer hand on updates for Windows Phone. Again, that may be why failure failed – manufacturers were much more likely to make Android phones because they could do more to differentiate (or monetize) their own phones.

Even Google itself has managed to solve this problem, albeit in situations with much less important issues. Port OS, Chrome OS and the platform that operates Google's smart speakers receive all updates directly from Google. Some parts of Android, such as Android Auto, can not be changed by manufacturers and updated through the Play Store. Android itself, however, has been misconfigured from the start.

Some Googlers are probably not very upset about this, as it gives Pixel phones a big advantage over all other phones. But I would not go so far as to say that Google as a whole is happy about how Android updates work. I do not think that society thinks they can push one or the other of these levers much further.

Again, Google has very temporarily bypassed some operators to implement RCS messaging only. There may be creative ways to combine strategies and code to solve this problem – but I can not think of any of them, and I doubt that any Google genius can do that. If they could, I think they would have already done so and we would all update our phones with Android 10 today.

Well, there is always fuchsia to hope for, maybe he will have updates.

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