[General Topics] thefrozenoasis:
What do you think when someone asks you about the worst part about Android? Chances are, Android fragmentation is one of the first things that flies through your head. But I've been thinking about it and I haven't noticed anything to suggest that I am not alone.

It is well known that Android owns the smartphone market globally. It has done this by being open source. This has become it's greatest strength and it greatest weakness. For the first point, it is currently on over a billion devices all over the world. As for the second, I think you can guess: fragmentation. God knows how many different companies have taken Android and twisted it to their laggy and unsupported preference. I would really like to point towards the manufacturers that basically releases a new phone every month to three months. These include Samsung, Blu, and countless others. Here looks like a good place to say that I HATE THOSE LITTLE COMPANIES WITH THEIR

CRAP

TABLETS ON AMAZON. Anyway, Samsung probably is the worst right? With their big fancy skin and slow updates....well look at Blu! They have at least two dozen phones, tablets, and everything in between, most of which don't get a single update (to the next large update like 5.0, 5.1, etc. This doesn't include small patches, though I'm sure that they don't give many of those). Now I know that this is starting to turn into a rant, but that's OK. I'm almost ready to point out my...point. :l

If any of your friends, co-workers, acquaintances have iPhones, you might have heard the "why does my iPhone 4 on iOS 6 not support this app" complaint (or something similar). I've found that most apps work with Android Jelly Bean, ICS, or even Gingerbread, all of which are as old or older than iOS 6. Android apps support older versions of Android better than iOS does, which has very few fragmentation problems. Quick note: Some people haven't updated their iDevices to the newest version, so please don't give me crap for it. So that is my first supporting argument, which is a little harder to go against than my final point.

Quick recap: there to many different skinned versions of Android. This might seem to contradict my rage about "THOSE LITTLE COMPANIES WITH THEIR

CRAP

TABLETS ON AMAZON", but no one cares since most people probably agree with me on that. We should all calm down about the slow updates on our devices. Don't get angry at me and say that I must have a Nexus or a Motorola and I've never known the struggle; I have the LG Optimus G AT&T version and it hasn't gotten the official Kitkat release. Actually, I haven't even gotten an official update since 4.1.2. Thanks to custom ROMs, I'm on Lollipop right now. But that isn't the point. Maybe we shouldn't think of Android as "be together, not he same", but more like "be not the same, not together." That didn't quite work the way I hoped...

So I'm starting to think of Android a only a base and that we should think of skinned versions of Android more like Linux and it's distros. Ubuntu is based off Linux, but it isn't Linux (not actually sure if there is a pure Linux...would it be text based?). It rather another creation of it. The candied named Android versions are just new standards and aren't really necessary. I'm pretty sure that Samsung could take the current version and just add the security and new features in as they need it. Well, maybe some dev could correct me on that? Anyway, I'd like to end this summing up this thread (b/c it isn't very organized to my eyes) by saying that it's OK that you don't have the newest update and that Samsung really should add in the new features if not update the whole OS.

:silly: