It's not just the customization. The hardware running on these devices is very diverse, much more diverse than the PC. It is also changing extremely quickly -- probably a majority of Android platform versions have non-trivial changes in the hardware interfaces, as the platform is dealing with significant new features in the hardware of newer devices.
Consider, in the space of a couple years: - CPUs have gone from not having floating point, to supporting floating point, to multi-core. And these CPUs come from at least 4 major manufacturers. - The screens have gone from 320x480 to qHD on phones and other larger screens like tablets. - Graphics acceleration has gone from designed around the Qualcomm chipset where there is a dedicated 2d blitter owned by the surface flinger for window compositing and OpenGL ES 1.0 acceleration available to one app, to chipsets with only OpenGL ES 2.0 acceleration that can barely be shared across a couple clients (surface flinger and 1 app), to OpenGL ES 2.0 acceleration where the platform is relying on full multi-context support to accelerate all apps. There are also a tremendous number of different DSP setups across the different chipset, and the platform must rely on making using of the DSPs to have good performance and battery life for things like music and video playback. Manufacturer customizations can certainly make things harder, but it's not the only problem. On Mon, May 2, 2011 at 9:34 AM, Syed Mohammed, Khasim <sm.kha...@gmail.com>wrote: > It depends on the amount of customization that is added or integrated. > If the Android framework is seriously not followed then migration will > be bit difficult. It also depends on the amount of testing to be done > and availability of time and people for the same. They also have to > meet CTS that might be trickier if the customization breaks any of > these tests. > > Regards, > Khasim > http://arowboat.org > > On Mon, May 2, 2011 at 5:27 PM, Dudero <sinfanh...@googlemail.com> wrote: > > Hello, > > > > I would like to know, why every handset manufacturer has so much > > problems in updating their Android-version. Some manufacurer annouce > > already before the official handset release, that they will not > > support any update and some other who will support some updates need > > for this more quarters... > > > > Are the differences from esp. Eclair->Froyo->Gingerbread so big? I > > always thought this must be an easy task, also because of the most > > changes are in Java and not really depending on the speciffic > > hardware?! > > > > Greetz > > Dudero > > > > -- > > unsubscribe: android-porting+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com > > website: http://groups.google.com/group/android-porting > > > > -- > unsubscribe: android-porting+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com > website: http://groups.google.com/group/android-porting > -- Dianne Hackborn Android framework engineer hack...@android.com Note: please don't send private questions to me, as I don't have time to provide private support, and so won't reply to such e-mails. All such questions should be posted on public forums, where I and others can see and answer them. -- unsubscribe: android-porting+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com website: http://groups.google.com/group/android-porting
