Do you care if your phone gets the latest Android OS?

by  on  in Techee Klatsch

Earlier this summer, Google announced the newest version of the Android operating system, dubbed Jelly Bean. The moment this new Android became official I started seeing posts pop up on tech blogs attempting to answer the queston: When will my phone get Jelly Bean?

Before that you could find hundreds of posts attempting to answer a similar question: when will my phone get Ice Cream Sandwich? (the previous version of Android) I know that tech blogs write these posts and obsess over the question of when which phone will update because it generates a lot of hits. However, I wonder how many people really care if their phone gets updates to the latest Android? And if they do, why?

There are some obvious reasons to want a newer version of the software, such as the ability to run newer apps. Developers will only make things backwards-compatible to a certain extent. So it’s good to be on the right side of the line.

The reason I hear most often is that the newest version has features the user wants. But if your phone had all the features you wanted when you bought it, why this rush to get more features? Are they really so necessary? Or is it just the newness you like?

Do the majority of users even care, or only the ones who are likely to care about having the newest thing (people who read tech blogs)?

  • Sean Wallace

    I tend to update my phone every two years, for a number of reasons, but, yes, I do like to know when my phone will get updated, if only because there are usually battery / resource / app improvements.

  • As long as I can unlock the bootloader and install a custom ROM, I’m happy. My latest phone is an HTC One X, even though I don’t really like HTC Sense all that much (although the Sense camera app is pretty great).

    But I bought a used model from a guy who had already unlocked the bootloader and installed CyanogenMod. 

    I’m keeping an eye on progress of a project to bring CyanogenMod 10 (Android 4.1) to the phone, but it’s not very stable yet.

    So for now I’m using a custom ROM called “Senseless” which is based on HTC Sense, but which replaces many of the annoying cartoony graphics I’m not fond of with graphics taken from the Android Open Source Project.

    I admit… I may not be the average smartphone user though. :)

  • I’ve been eyeing a (hugely discounted) Motorola tablet since yesterday, and rolling my eyes at the reviews online–besides their technical criticisms that have been tackled already in the one I’ve found on sale, the last remaining criticism is about its OS version–it’s not the latest! Since this is going to be my first Android anything, and I’ve stripped my time-sucking tech use to only what I need, not what I want, any OS that I can navigate and has its security issues taken care of suits me just fine.