This is common Google strategy. They are trying to build the future and pre-ICS devices are not the future. So they get shafted. Google may make unhappy customers this way, but they can move a lot faster than companies like Microsoft, who support everything back two decades or so sometimes.

But to be fair, everyone gets a cheap phone every two years, so what's 1% today will be 100% in two years. Remember, the G1 is three-ish years old, and it's mostly gone now. The Nexus One was released on January 5, 2010, and so only the earliest of early adopters (with a standard contract) are just now gaining the ability to upgrade.

Two years is a long time, but if IE 6 went away after two years, we wouldn't even remember that it was once a thing :)

I agree in general but IE6 was out for five years before IE7 came out, so it may not be the best example.

Of course, that was because they disbanded the browser team after crushing Netscape.

Hey, watch it there. All WP7 devices support all the updates thus far and for atleast the next year or so.

Apple seems to be able to innovate iOS while providing robust and timely updates for older devices.

I would not call iOS 4 on the iPhone 3G "robust": it was more of a disaster than anything. There are obviously strengths to all sides here, and I don't mean to champion that Google's is best or the only way. But I think it's clear what they're doing, and I'd bet they've weighed all possible options and found this to be the most economically sensible one.

I honestly thought Apple's behaviour with the 3G was shameful. I wouldn't have minded if they hadn't released the update for the 3G, but instead what they effectively did was brick a load of people's phones and then offer poor options for downgrading. It's really not what I expect from a premium brand.

this is a bad analogy, apple does not backport features to old versions of their OS, they put their new OS on old handsets. google puts their new OS onto old devices as much as they can too, the problem is that the carriers and other handset manufacturers don't. i'm sure google would love if everything would start running ICS, but it's not their responsibility.

"as much as they can ...not their responsibility."

You make it sound like Google's suddenly found themselves in these unfortunate circumstances through no fault of their own.

On the contrary, this is the reality of Android. You don't get to own the pluses of being "open" and not own the minuses.

> You don't get to own the pluses of being "open" and not own the minuses.

Actually you can, you wouldn't blame Linus because your linux based router comes with a broken or old version of linux.

I'm sure Linus himself would tell you that he would own that as a minus of linux and that it's far outweighed by the positives.

Let's not guess what he would say. But blaming Linus for that is like the Iranian government blaming a dev because someone used his upload app to upload porn pictures or people blaming gun makers instead of killers. You can do it but it isn't the smartest thing to do to say the least IMO.

Oh yeah? Let me know when I can get Siri on an iPhone 4 without resorting to some sketchy hacks.

This false equivalence is tiresome.

The inability to run a handful of hardware dependent features on iOS is not even in the same ballpark as the complete lack of timely updates for over 95% of Android users.

Hardware dependant? Siri was shown running on pre-4s devices (3g if I recall correctly) before apple bought them.

Not to Apple's standards apparently.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-57371624-264/why-apples-a5...

Siri has since been ported to older devices via jailbreaking. As I understand it, there are no performance issues.

However, I do agree that Google needs to sort the 'update problem'.

"As I understand it, there are no performance issues."

It's one thing to "work" in the hacking sense, and another to "work properly" in the Apple sense.

http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2656999&cid=38...

There's a difference between running and running as well as on the 4S. The demo of noise reduction is impressive. http://www.audience.com/demos/transmit-noise-en.php [audience.com] It's easy to see why with that noise reduction, Siri would be much more accurate than without it, in real scenarios.

Apple obviously wants Siri to be judged on it's best performance. They have a reputation for quality to maintain.

That's certainly true for some definition of "robust" and "timely". I'm assuming yours doesn't include security and bug fixes.

The way Android is fragmented changes all of that. If iOS were fragmented the same way Android was, Apple would be doing the same thing.

Yeah, while I'm generally excited about this, I won't be able to use it anytime soon, unfortunately.

Same here, I bought into the Nexus One hype, great phone but without ICS we are left high and dry with an expensive paperweight with regards to something like Chrome on ICS.

Unfortunately, because of shortsightedness from both Google and HTC (HTC mostly), phones back then only had like 450 MB internal storage, and from that only 250 MB were for the OS itself.

This means an ICS install would be severely limited by the hardware (I think a full ICS install is significantly bigger). Modders might be able to put ICS on it by cutting apps and features, or doing other kinds of hacks to extend the internal storage, but for Google that just wasn't worth it.

I would really blame HTC for this. Pretty much all of their phones throughout 2010 were like that. It was my main frustration with HTC at the time, another one being the weak Adreno 200 GPU.

Is it HTC or Google's responsibility to provide future-proof reference designs and specs?

HTC

"Future Proofing" a phone is difficult, because a manufacture needs to overspec the phone whilst still keeping it at a reasonable price.

HTC is notorious for underspecing storage on their phones. Other manufactures do not have the same problem.

Considering only 1% of android phones are capable of running ICS, I gotta blame it on the OS designer, not a reference hardware manufacturer.

In this case it is Google's responsibility.

There are ICS builds you can install on an N1 if you are willing to repartition your NAND (the stock partition layout can't fit ICS). Look here:

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1411429

Root and install a 4.0 rom!

I ran 4.0 via Cyanogenmod 9 on my Nexus S 4G for weeks, and unfortunately the bugs and constant app crashes got so bad that, as much as it pained me to do so, I went back to 2.3 yesterday. I love Android 4.0, but there doesn't seem to be a good, stable implementation of it yet.

Example issues:

  * Random reboots
  * Choppy playback in the Music app 
    (Amazon MP3 worked fine)
  * Random app crashes, particularly 
    games (possibly due to lack of official 
    4.0 support)
  * Poor GPS performance, occasionally taking 
    15-20 minutes to acquire a position (typically 
    solved more quickly by rebooting, but it takes
    several minutes to know there's a problem in the 
    first place)

It's difficult to blame the app crashes on the OS if the app doesn't claim to officially support 4.0, but that's still reason enough to wait.

I'm eagerly awaiting the day that CM9 is released, or MIUI releases their official 4.0 version, but until then I think it's better to stick with what works.

Edit: Formatting.

I've had ICS on my Nexus S for a few months now and I've not seen issues like that. I'm just using the standard Google image (AFAIK, my brother did the upgrade for me - Android 4.0.3, kernel 3.0.8-gb55e9ac). I do see a lot of battery drain when I'm using the GPS, and I don't play games, but no crashes.

I've been using this ROM on my NS4G for about a month:

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1364221

In my experience, the stability and performance of various peripherals like GPS and the WiMax radio are about as good as the stock 2.3 ROM. I haven't even noticed a change in battery drain...

I'm running the same ROM on a NS4G also for about a month. It feels like a new phone and has been awesome in every way.

Have any good ROM suggestions? I'm looking for one somebody with first hand use of it can sell me on.

Definitely CynanogenMod. Probably (I haven't checked them all) the most complete and best testet Rom out there. Available for nearly every major Android hardware.

If you have a Droid X and can live without the camera, EncounterICS is unbelievably good.

It is very phone specific for ICS right now. When Cyanogen 9 comes out there will be more 'standardization.' For now, I'd look up the dev forum for your phone on xda-developers and see if there are any good options.

There is only an alpha 1 version of 4.0 (CM9, in fact) out for my phone, and it still has severe bugs.