[DMcCunney]

Apple vs Android

I see a lot of this discussion. but you need to understand root causes.

The key point with Apple is that they control the hardware as well as the software. iOS and MacOS run on Apple kit, and are useless if you don't have Apple devices. (Running other software on Apple devices might be possible, but not simple.)

Apple's Holy Grail is usability. They take pains to make Apple devices Just Work, and do so in the manner the user expects them to. If you aren't sure what will happen if you click an icon or make a menu choice, Apple will be unhappy.

This leads to the walled garden, and the need to jailbreak an Apple device to install third party stuff not vetted and approved by Apple. That sort of stuff is a support nightmare, and I believe Apple's attitude is "Do that at your own risk. If it breaks, it's your problem, and we won't try to fix it." Speaking as someone who has had to try to support all manner of nonsense in multi-vendor environments, I don't blame them a bit. (An employer of many years didn't have corporate standards for IT. It bit them hard.)

Android is not so lucky. It began as an open source effort to create an OS specific ally intended for smartphones. Google bought the company making it and continued development. But it's still open source. Any hardware vendor who wants to use Android can download the source and build an Android image customized for their hardware. No permission from Google is required, or can be.

It's modular, so the vendor can pick and choose. (My first Android device was a low end tablet from an Asian vendor. Android supports Bluetooth, but that tablet didn't have Bluetooth hardware, so Bluetooth support was not compiled into the image.)

So there are an enormous number of Android devices, whose only similarity is that all run Android. If you buy a low end device to try to save money, you are likely to find yourself with a lot of bloatware on the device, because the bloatware developers pay the vendor to install it. If you're lucky, the bloatware can be uninstalled like any other user application using Android's built-in installation routines, But chances are good the bloatware isn't installed as a user application, but is instead installed as a System app. Those cannot be uninstalled by the user, unless the user roots the device. That has become progressively harder to do. The best you can normally do is Freeze it so it can't be used or updated.

And one of the big differences between Android device vendors is support and Android updates. Will the vendor supply Android updates? (I have seen some that don't.) If they do, how long do they do so? (And one question might be whether your device can run recent updates. Older hardware may not.)

So my usual question on updates is why you might need them.

The first reason is likely "fixing security bugs" The second is access to potential new features. The third is simply a desire to stay current.

I have three currently used devices - a cell phone, and two tablets.

The cell phone is an Alcatel Fierce XL. It runs Android 5.21 Lollipop. It will not get Android updates. I don't *care*.

The first tablet is a Google Nexus 7, which was a pass along from a friend. When originally released, it ran Android 4.4 Kit-Kat. The second tranche ran Android 5.21 Lollipop. It killed performance. Its future involves unlocking the bootloader and flashing more recent firmware to it. (There is what looks like a decent release of Android 7 Nougat, rooted out of the box, available online.)

The second tablet is a new acquisition It's a Samsung Galaxy Tab A7 Lite, running Android 11. That gets updates, and I got a new one while bringing up and configuring it.

How much I care about updates depends on device and use cases.

The cell phone, as mentioned, runs Lollipop and won't see an update. I don't care. In use, it's a cell phone, and a PDA with WiFi and a decent camera. It goes online via WiFi to check for app updates, from behind my secured network at home. I don't browse from it, and apps used for PDA functions like Calendar, Contacts, and To Do tend to be things that access locally stored data. I'm not worried about security fixes, because I don't normally go online with it, save to update apps. And Lollipop runs the stuff I normally use, so I don't need an OS update simply to run stuff. (There have been a couple of apps whose recent versions need a higher Android version. The versions I have do what I need, and I stay put.)

The Samsung Galaxy Tab A7's main purpose in life is media consumption. It will be my primary eBook viewer, but can also display pictures, show videos, and play music. Again, data is locally stored, on a 64GB MicroSD card. While I can go online with it and do stuff like browse the web, I normally won't. If I'm at home, web browsing is via Firefox with several levels of security on the host system. If I'm out and about, I am normally busy doing other things. Email and the like can simply wait till I'm back home.

So when folks complain about not getting Android updates, my question tends to be "Why do you care?" If the answer is security fixes, I start preaching the virtues of Safe Hex, and not doing stuff that needs the security fixes. (Yes. you do need security, but you need to understand why, and what kind of security you require. Too many folks don't know and don't want to. They just want to do stuff and not worry about it. I sympathize, but we aren't anywhere near that point unless you are in something like Apple's walled garden. Safety requires knowledge. Deal with it.)
_______
Dennis