The only problem with Asus phones in general, which is also apparent in their ROG phones, is the lack of updates. Their hardware is top-notch, literally; I've never seen faster phones. But, they don't update them consistently enough, unlike Google and Samsung which have pledged multiple years of software support through Android releases.
It’s sad that no phone maker is playing the open and standard platform game. A brand like Asus would have everything to win with this : they already are recognized as a « geek » brand, they could ship updates with no effort and they could get free marketing from the word to mouth of the « geek of the family ».
Instead of that, like any other Android manufacturer in the market, they ship great hardware with shitty or soon-to-be shitty software that will make your premium phone worse than the next Chinese phone.
Critical phone components (or rather, their drivers and/or firmware) are not open however. I would like a platform with x86-level standardization but competitive power efficiency a lot. I don’t see it happening though. It’s not down to the phone makers, but to the component suppliers—like Qualcomm.
Sailfish is interesting, but depending on what you do on your phone, you may find it an inappropriate choice of daily-driver. Just like a PinePhone is interesting with trying different Linux distros, ultimately you will very likely realize that you need battery life, reliability and to stop farting around with your phone actually working and get on with your everyday life.
Android manufacturers, unlike Apple, don't really earn much via the software - so there is really no reason for costly updates which keeps the customers from buying the next phone..
It's unfortunate that lack of updates don't prevent customers from buying the current phone.
It feels like we need consumer protection laws that require companies to prominently advertise the software "warranty". So Google and Apple can put "5 years" on the box and Asus needs to put "0 days". The problem is that it isn't something that most people think about. But when you point it out to them it definitely changes how they evaluate phones when you show them that this one will be dangerously insecure after 1y but this other one is good for 3y.
Sony has an open devices program where some models end up a year or so after their release. Jolla uses this program to make Sailfish releases tuned for select models.
I think it's hard to have easy open-source support by default as ARM hardware needs a model specific device tree and some of the required software might not be fully open.
Asus might not own either all software or rights to release a fully open model themselves, even if they'd like the idea.
I don't think it needs to be fully open source.
Its fine if its even kernel + blobs too.
Since I have choose to use CalyxOS/any privacy focused ROM, I have been locked to pixels, because all the others have some crap in the system that devs don't want to deal with.
The niche brands fall into this, like Fairphone (have one and love it, also for the modularity guarantee of 5 years of OS updates!) or Swiftphone, which very much encourage use of alternative OS.
I own the Zenfone 8 and it has consistently received updates large and small. It came with fairly clean Android and I get the feeling it's not far behind a Google phone when it comes to updates. That includes major updates (got upgraded to Android 12 too). It's a really great phone. The only thing I would improve is the fingerprint sensor, but apparently that's been addressed in the next iteration.
That's a community effort, and from previous experiences some pretty random things can be broken, but if the contributors don't care, they won't even look into it. It's fine, but it's not an alternative to actual updates.
In the same way, mods for games aren't an alternative to the developer just fixing issues.
It is a community effort and it is not uncommon for hardware to be traded between members for establishing some driver or interface with. eBay is part of that.
3 years of Android version updates and at least 5 years of security updates.
But I have to say, Apple's OS version updates are not always quite what they seem. My 2 year old iPad gets OS updates in name only. None of the major new iPad OS features are supported.
That's fine if the hardware just isn't capable of supporting those features. But it sort of muddies the water compared to an Android device that doesn't get a nominal OS bump but still gets security updates and all the new features distributed through Google's Play services.
All security issues are handled on iOS for many years. Yes, feature updates are gated by model because Apple wants to sell new stuff and the new features are a big driver of that.
GrapheneOS on Pixel is probably the best bet right now.
>All security issues are handled on iOS for many years.
Yes, absolutely. I didn't mean to imply anything else.
Google says Pixel 6 will get "at least 5 years" of security updates. We're going to have to wait and see if that's better or worse than what Apple does.
Are you serious? iOS upgrades give you the entire OS experience and upgraded app support with a few flashy features missing.
Compare that to Android where the best case is invisible security updates and guess which causes upgrade anxiety?
I'm an Android developer for a living but I use iPhones because the Android ecosystem is currently optimized for generating e-waste.
SoC manufacturers generally don't make enough money to want to do more than the bare minimum, so unless you're Google making billions off a hundred other angles you don't do OS updates for more than a few years and maybe pay lip service with security upgrades.
>iOS upgrades give you the entire OS experience and upgraded app support with a few flashy features missing.
As you know, Google updates apps and cloud features on a continuous basis while Apple holds back most new features until they release a new OS version. If you look through the list of iPad OS 16 features for instance, you'll see that almost all of them are in fact new apps, app features and sharing/cloud features that Android users would be getting anyway [1].
Of the very few actual OS features, the most substantial one by far is Stage Manager, which is only supported on M1 iPads as esteth has said. This isn't just "a few flashy features".
I'm a bit unlucky with my iPad purchases because this is the second time I'm missing out on the most important new OS features on a new-ish iPad. Granted, nothing of the sort ever happened to me on iPhone. I'm rather happy with Apple's iOS update policy.
Stage Manager will straight up not work on non-M1 iPads.
You cannot keep 4 major apps in memory without seeing an eviction.
Also your comparison doesn't make sense, you're comparing iOS built-in apps to Android 3rd party apps by Google... AOSP's built-in photos and emails apps have barely been updated in the last decade.
All in all if you think iPadOS is letting you down, Android upgrades are a circus that Google refuses to rein in.
>you're comparing iOS built-in apps to Android 3rd party apps by Google
I'm not comparing them, I'm putting them aside for this comparison, because Apple links a lot of regular apps to the release cycle of the OS while Google doesn't do that. That's a separate issue that isn't relevant for the point I was making.
I'm only talking about features that would have to be part of the OS on iOS as well as on Android. There are very few new features of that sort in iPad OS 16. I'm not getting most of them.
I understand that this may be down to hardware capabilities. But Apple does have some wiggle room when it comes to deciding how to implement any new features and how much work to put into making them less resource intensive.
You realize the Gmail app is not the equivalent of the iOS Mail app right? That would be the AOSP email app which only gets updates when Android OS gets updates...
My point is that I didn't get the most important new iPad OS features on my new-ish iPad. Apple simply didn't implement those features in a way that makes them work on relatively recent devices.
>You realize the Gmail app is not the equivalent of the iOS Mail app right?
Yes, but the differences are not relevant to the debate. I'm talking about OS features only, and I'm disregarding regular apps that just happen to get distributed along with the OS for business reasons.
> My point is that I didn't get the most important new iPad OS features on my new-ish iPad. Apple simply didn't implement those features in a way that makes them work on relatively recent devices
Like I said already:
- there was no magical way to make this feature work on your "newish iPad".
- You can even test it yourself: open Safari, open a few productivity apps, and watch the cold starts come flying.
- Stage Manager is not the most important feature, being on the newest development target is since if you're not most updated apps will not support your device in 12 months
> I'm talking about OS features only, and I'm disregarding regular apps that just happen to get distributed along with the OS for business reasons.
So you're arbitrarily deciding which OS features count, cool... you're free to do that... but that's the definition of a strawman.
Apple's approach to an OS places more value on built in apps, so you see a ton of app based features, that use OS level APIs that don't exist until a new OS upgrade.
You're trying to say Apple could just ship them as app updates, but no, they can't. The APIs they're built on don't exist until a new OS version comes out.
>there was no magical way to make this feature work on your "newish iPad"
I don't know how difficult it would have been to support a broader range of devices. There are always trade-offs involved, engineering trade-offs as well as economic ones. Neither of us is familiar with the technical details or with the options they discussed.
Fact is, this major new feature (and others) is not supported on very recent hardware they sold to me. That's disappointing irrespective of the reasons. And it raises the question how meaningful those X years of OS updates really are.
>So you're arbitrarily deciding which OS features count
I'm counting all OS features but not apps that are only linked to OS releases as a sales strategy. Of course they want to show off new OS APIs in their apps when the OS gets an update. That doesn't require syncronising release cycles the way they do. Many if not most new app features do not depend on new OS APIs at all.
Second, _massively increasing multitasking capabilities_ is being given to the models that have _a massively upgraded SoC_ there's nothing artificial about that limitation.
Older iPads cannot not hold 4 arbitrary apps in memory, try it yourself if you want. For anything but the most basic set of apps you'll find something evicted by the time you loop back...
Third, "the" major point of an OS upgrade if any is being on the latest development target. Ask Android devs still targeting versions of Android from 2015 about that...
The Pixel 6 Pro has been update to become a pile of hot trash in my case. The updates have been so bad I'm returning it this weekend, while I received a perfectly functional hone...
I'm sure some will appreciate the (security) updates, because the year or so of OS updates I've experienced have been a constant trend towards the worse.
There's not a single screenshot of the operating system I could see, and I need to unlock the phone and all so assuming this is a custom ROM.
Usually you lose access to things like GPay or certain NFC functionalities, and end up with a not-entirely stable experience anyway. I'd rather a phone that just worked. The half a dozen I had previously at least didn't struggle with the basics!
Google Pay won't work, but everything else has been quite solid for me. Additionally, it is more secure than the stock OS and significantly more protective of your privacy.
My bank decided to abandon their own payment solution in favour of GPay, and the neo-bank or two I do use also uses GPay, while I don't actually have physical cards for these. In short, not using GPay is not an option.
> it is more secure than the stock OS
Maybe, but I don't trust community maintainers (nor auditing) enough. At least Google has a business entity that backs their services, community ROMs have nothing of the sort.
I dabbled in ROMs and the likes previously, but I just want a phone that works like a phone should right now. I've got too many other things to tinker with already.
Re Google Pay, if it's a must-have for you, then so be it.
However, re community maintainers, clearly you have read nothing about GrapheneOS, as security is by far their top priority, at the expense of nearly everything else.
No I do not have the time nor interest to read about every ROM group.
I just want a relible, usable phone, and do not experience safety concerns that would warrant preferring a less convenient experience. I don't think most people do, for that matter.
It might be just me - but my phone battery degrades so significantly after 3 years that the phone isn't worth using anymore, so I'm not that bothered about not receiving updates past that window.
My 5 year old phone is still at 84% battery capacity. I set a charge limit to 80% unless I'm planning to be away from a charger for some time and set it to go to low battery mode at 40%, which discourages me from draining it too low. I wasn't even this careful for the first couple of years that I owned it, and I use the fast charge mode.
You can change the battery in most phones (there are plenty instructions on youtube how to open the case or do it with some service center), that's much cheaper than buying new phone.
On chinese marketplaces there are batteries for almost any phone, might be in your local marketplaces as well, depending on location.
This is a very solvable problem, at least for me. I only charge when I'm running low on battery and my phone tells me to and I never interrupt the charge cycle once it is plugged in.
I've been running a Galaxy S7 since 2016 like that and only now do the first battery issues slowly start to appear.
I own the older Zenfone 6 from 2019, i.e. 3 years old.
I has received frequently updates until now, including the change of the major version of Android, from the one with which the phone had been initially delivered.
It seems like that phone will get 2 major updates (Android version upgrades?) and 2 years of security updates. Nothing more than any other brand will give you.
Before Xiaomi became mainstream they were quite supportive of the dev community. For example they sent a bunch of Poco phones to XDA developers before release.
I feel like Asus would do so much better if they opened up the ecosystem a bit.
Running linageOS 18.1 (Android 11) on a Zenfone Max Pro M1 (fresh install over 16.1 - which received regular updates every 2 weeks i think)
I beleive each model depends on the number of contributors working on image for that model, my phone is quite old yet it is now possible to upgrade (fresh install) to 19.1, which I will eventually get around to. I bought this phone specifically to use lineage. I use the camera, it works fine, and dont have any issues personally with the quality, although i am not really too bothered as long as its not shit, which it isn't IMO
Some phones require extra firmware to get good quality out of the camera that are protected with keys that get wiped when unlocking the bootloader, which is probably what was meant.
samsung apparently also used to have a kill switch on their S22s with the Exynos cpus in EU (the only models that are unlockable...Snapdragons are not). i have a hard time believing this tho if they permitted unlocking at all. most likely it was some signed firmware snafu as you say.
Android 12 has me swearing off updating my phone honestly. It's backwards in every single way. I don't use my phone for anything critical so I am more than willing to trade security for usability.
Do you check your email on that phone? If so, and I pop your phone, I'll have your email credentials, and with that I can probably reset the password of any other account you have.
While some people legitimately blame bloatware on Samsung Galaxy, Samsung's customized Android (OneUI) is good for this perspective. Google sometimes decides weird annoying changes for AOSP but Samsung sometimes just refuses the change and keep their OS sane. I previously liked pure AOSP, but finally I found that it's not the best Android distribution.
I'm in agreement with you. I no longer like Google's UX decisions in AOSP. It's got to the point where I dread finding out what they removed or buried under multiple taps. I have Android 12 on a galaxy tablet, and OneUI with Good Lock makes it sane.
What's stopping people from just running the, say, Google build of Android on this phone? If there is custom device drivers or whatever, can't they just be copied from the custom ASUS android over to the standard android build, while avoiding all the crapware and lack of updates?
It’s a huge pain in the ass. Usually trips up the android safteynet drm and doesn’t give kernel updates because no one has access to the proprietary driver blobs which no longer work with new kernels.
You can often get android api updates like this but not any real security updates.
Nothing. People do that all the time - there is a huge community for aftermarket custom ROMs at places like xda-developers. However, I would guess that is like less than 1% of users since custom ROMs a) are not popular b) require some courage and technical knowledge c) often void the official warranty.
D) Are highly unlikely to support relocking for new keys in secure boot, or are limited to a very small number of models.
The attacks sold to governments fighting such evils as journalists and pro-democracy youth haven't yet been shown to include persistency across reboots, AFAIK, but relatively small percentages of politically active people using insecure boot could encourage them to build those features to more passively monitor a sub-sample as it is relatively easy and makes their work less detectable.
Apps have started locking you out if they detect you have an unofficial build. Even dumb apps like McDonalds. Good luck using mandatory banking apps there as well.
I recall during my android root days that banks would block your phone from running apps if you were rooted - I needed to install a separate app and define which apps I could "sandbox" of sorts, to convince them they were running on a non-rooted device
Are there any workaround apps sort of like this now, or has Google finally plugged all the loopholes for this?
That generally works fine, especially for the same Android version. However, as Android evolves, so do the driver requirements. Yesterday’s driver may simply not work with today’s Android. Only the driver supplier (typically the likes of Qualcomm) could realistically create an updated driver. Otherwise, extensive reverse engineering would be required.
Drivers and support for the features that require said drivers, as its often the case that only first party software has the secret sauce - very often the case for camera apps.
That's not how software works. Software is always buggy. Question is only how severely functionality is impacted and when those bugs will be found. Most bugs are never noticed since they only concern corner cases that you normally won't hit in the field or would even have a hard time driving the system into even if you tried on purpose.
The main issue is with security-related bugs. Especially with mobile phone software, which has an enormous attack surface and has really wide distribution, this is a constant issue. No mobile phone OS ever will be bug free and will always contain security flaws. Over time, more and more of them are discovered, and it's a race between the vendor fixing them and malicious actors exploiting them. That's why the OS (and all the apps) need to be constantly updated. The longer you skip updates, the more you fall behind and the more doors are open that better be closed once they are known.
> needs to be paired with an argument that they ship buggy or incomplete software.
That argument is an easy one to make and everybody familiar with software engineering should be intimately familiar with it. This is not about some button not working, it's about somebody pwning your phone.
Because the hardware can handle updates to the OS, and as the ecosystem evolves, apps start misbehaving or not even functioning on older versions of the OS. And then you've got vulnerabilities.
Not sure what you're looking for, but Ctrl-F "Battery" brings you to the battery sections with a "learn mode" button showing some battery life numbers.
It's thicker, which is bad, but at least that allows for a side mounted fingerprint sensor. A rear mounted one is inaccessible on a phone holder, car or bicycle.
It weights a lot more.
No micro SD slot.
Anything else, I don't care, so I can't find a reason to pay at least 3 times the price. If it were a couple of cm shorter, maybe but probably not.
Software updates are not always a good thing. For instance I have not updated my Samsung in years, because I know the pending update will take away call recording functionality.
their pledge is "Pixel 6 and later Pixel phones will get [updates] for at least 5 years from when the device first became available on the Google Store in the US." where [update] is security and may include features, (and I guess even feature removals) etc.
I have a Pixel 3, which received less than 2.5 years of secure use between time of purchase and time of last security update. I'm looking for a new phone that isn't made by Google, preferably one that has an open platform, because I don't trust Google as far as I could throw their advertising department.
My employer is strict on security for employee's phones to be able to install our apps. Right now they wont allow any android except Pixels, Samsung recently got taken off the list due to lack of updates.
It's not just about snooping. It's also other things like being part of a botnet that's scanning for vulnerabilities or actively hacking or DDOSing or being used in a proxy network
When users are used to updates screwing them over generally, it's not a surprise that we start to find people who don't want to update and disregard the security entirely.
iOS doesn't seem to have this problem, reaching "89% of all devices introduced in the last four years use iOS 15"[0].
iOS generally is less at-risk for these botnet issues since any botnet needs to be actively embedded within a popular app-store-installed app, especially if it wants to run expensive background tasks hitting HTTP endpoints. To add, since apps can't JIT, the apps can't RCE a jailbreak that would allow full system compromise, besides if the exploit chain is possible via a WebKit exploit (which is exceedingly rare[1]).
>I certainly don’t worry about any negatives from an iOS update
Really? I always have issues after iOS upgrades, mostly related to iCloud. But I still update ASAP because as soon as a new iOS version is released, the old version causes even more iCloud problems. Apple and the whole iOS ecosystem just doesn't tolerate old versions (which is mostly a good thing but also has some downsides)
I've never actually noticed any difference after almost all of the updates since I purchased it. I'm assuming they either have all been security, "stability" or features that Samsung already had provided in their fork.
Huawei had the most advanced hardware and best UI in the cheapest, most compact devices that I've seen. I'd gladly let the Chinese spy on me to keep using them.
