Operating systems – Page 2

Microsoft today held an education-focused event in New York City, at which it announced a stripped-down version of Windows, new end-user and teacher/administrator apps, and new hardware for the education market. This is by far the biggest and most comprehensive education push we’ve seen from any of the three big OS vendors, and is clearly intended to reassert Microsoft’s pre-eminent position in the education domain. What was evident from the first part of the event was how committed Microsoft is to making this work, and it began with an impassioned and personal talk from CEO Satya Nadella about his own family background and how education made a difference. Just as Microsoft’s AI mantra has been about democratizing the technology, so he now talks about democratizing educational opportunity. That’s a worthy goal, and Microsoft’s new announcements are a great way to try to bring that about, but Microsoft was also admirably realistic about the role technology plays in education: it assists and empowers but can’t replace committed teachers and parents or educational institutions. I have separate posts about Windows 10 S (here) and Surface Laptop (here). But I like the way Microsoft is introducing education into many of its existing products, including Office, Minecraft, Intune, and so on. Treating education as a first party audience alongside consumers and enterprises makes perfect sense, and is the route others have already taken. What Microsoft announced today feels like it will move its story forward in education considerably. Both Google and Apple have developed more comprehensive stories in education over the past couple of years too, but Microsoft’s arguably goes further, though developer events from the other two in the next six weeks could redress that balance a little.

via VentureBeat

Google Announces Pixel Isn’t Guaranteed Software Updates After Two Years (Apr 28, 2017)

Android is notorious for its poor track record in supporting older devices, but one of the supposed advantages of the old Nexus program and the new Pixel devices was supposed to be solving that issue by removing the carrier and OEM middlemen from the process of OS updates. However, Google has officially stated that the Pixel devices aren’t guaranteed to get further OS updates beyond two years from their launch, while they will receive security patches for another year after that. Given that these are Google’s current and only devices, the idea that someone would buy one today with no guarantee of OS updates after 18 months is a bit much, especially given that average upgrade cycles are lengthening towards three years. Bear in mind, for example, that all iPhones back to the iPhone 5 (now four and a half years old) run iOS 10. For Google to offer such limited upgrade support even on its own devices is baffling and a sign that it’s not yet taking its first party hardware seriously enough. My guess is that these are bare minimum timeframes and that it may end up prolonging support beyond these official dates, but the message it’s sending here isn’t great.

via Android Authority

Android is Hard

★ Microsoft Misses on Revenue as Hardware Weakness Partly Offsets Cloud Strength (Apr 27, 2017)

Microsoft was one of numerous big tech companies that reported Q1 2017 financial results (its fiscal Q3 results) this afternoon, and the only one of the big three to miss on revenue. That revenue miss was largely due to a shortfall in hardware revenue as Surface had its first big year on year decline in a year and a half due to a lack of new mass market hardware, and phone revenue dropped to essentially zero. However, these two businesses together make up just 4% of Microsoft’s revenue, which continues to be dominated by software and to an increasing extent services, while growth is dominated by the move to the cloud. Microsoft’s cloud revenue run-rate is now at an annualized $15.2 billion, compared to Amazon’s $14.5 billion in actual annual revenue, though Microsoft’s definition of cloud here is far more expansive than Amazon’s. The productivity business had a particularly strong growth quarter at over 20%, while the Intelligent Cloud segment also improved a little to just over 10%. But margins continue to fall overall as the newer cloud services generate less profit than Microsoft’s old massively profitable software business did, and that picture isn’t likely to change. Microsoft is growing again after both lapping the introduction of Windows 10 and the revenue deferral associated with the new business model, and also getting past the biggest drops in the phone business, but it’s mostly doing so by doubling down on enterprise products and services while its consumer and hardware businesses mostly continue to struggle to find growth.

via Microsoft

Samsung’s TV and watch OS is reportedly full of security holes – The Verge (Apr 4, 2017)

We’re talking here about Tizen, Samsung’s alternative operating system which it uses for smartwatches, TVs, and to a lesser extent phones, and some security researchers are claiming there are widespread security vulnerabilities in that software. Some of the characterizations in this article seem like a bit of a stretch – it would be very odd indeed if Samsung had done as little to provide security in Tizen as the researcher quoted suggests. But these allegations are becoming part of a pattern recently in relation to Samsung, between the Wikileaks smart TV story, the more recent (and more serious) story on smart TV hacking through broadcast signals, and now this. It’s particularly problematic for Samsung because it has worked so hard over the last few years to develop Knox, its enterprise security solution, which is best in class in the Android world. It simply can’t afford to get a reputation for poor security when it’s trying to become the de facto standard for Android devices in the enterprise, and needs to address these vulnerabilities – and the broader claims – quickly and definitively.

via The Verge

Samsung

Declining Privacy & Security

Apple just made a historic and risky change to all iPhones — and you probably didn’t even notice – Business Insider (Mar 28, 2017)

Apple this week pushed iOS 10.3 to iPhones and iPads, and although there were various other headline features, the big under-the-hood change was the upgrade from Apple’s historical HFS+ file system to the new Apple File System trailed a while back at WWDC. That this upgrade went off seemingly without a hitch is remarkable given just how disruptive it might have been to devices and the apps that run on them, and given that Apple has had one or two buggy iOS releases in the last couple of years, including one that bricked a lot of phones. I suspect Apple deliberately rolled this update out off the usual big annual schedule because people tend to adopt these point releases more slowly, so that if something did go wrong it could pull it before it did too much damage. But Apple is also benefiting these days from the extensive developer and public beta programs, which get its releases into many more hands (and onto a wider range of devices used for a wider range of tasks), which likely helps iron out some bugs before they ever get to wide release. But it’s arguably been underappreciated this week just how big a change this was and how flawlessly Apple seems to have executed on it. That’s a good counterpoint to some recent suggestions that Apple’s quality control around its software has suffered lately.

via Business Insider

Apple
iPhone

Apple is Doomed

Google Provides an Update on Android Security (Mar 23, 2017)

This is a year-in-review post from the Android security team, and it’s supposed to be reassuring on the state of Android security. However, there are several fairly worrisome data points in here worth pulling out. Google says 0.71 percent of all Android devices had a “potentially harmful app” installed at the end of 2016, so almost 1% of the roughly 1.5 billion Android devices in use, which amounts to almost 11 million actual devices, and that number has risen rather than fallen in the past year. Secondly, even though Google has been working with carriers and OEMs to push security updates to devices outside the very slow OS upgrade cycle, about half of devices in use at the end of 2016 had not received a platform security update in the previous year. Given how frequently Android exploits are discovered, that’s pretty worrying. On the plus side, Google has reduced installations of malware from the store by around 50% across several categories, which is obviously good news, but the fact that it acknowledges some of the apps installed from the official store still contain malware is a sign that it isn’t doing its verification job well enough.

via Google

Android's Poor Security

Google releases Android O to developers, promising better battery life and notifications – The Verge (Mar 21, 2017)

There’s an increasing dichotomy between the way the world’s two big mobile operating systems are run. On the one hand, you have Apple, which updates not just iOS but many of the apps that live in it once a year, announcing new versions in the summer at its developer conference and releasing them in the fall to consumers, with smaller updates through the year, and consumer adoption reaching a majority of the base within weeks. On the other, you have Google, which now announces new versions of the OS in a blog post, provides more detail at its developer event, and makes it available to OEMs in the fall, with consumer adoption typically taking a year to reach significant numbers and never reaching a majority of the base for any single version. However, individual apps are now mostly updated separately, making even full releases like the Android O version announced today relatively minor updates, focused on back-end developer features and a handful of consumer-facing features. That’s to some extent an inevitability when Google has so little ability to get new versions out to consumers quickly, but some have argued (with some merit) that Google’s approach actually pushes app-level features out more quickly and more regularly than Apple’s. The focus of this update for consumers is on notifications and battery life, with the former bringing Android’s power management more in line with iOS, while the latter could extend Android’s lead in an area where Apple has been making some mistakes recently. But by far the more interesting and important updates will be happening in individual app updates which will reach users much more quickly.

via The Verge

Operating systems

Android is Hard

CIA Leak Reveals Gaps in Patchwork of Android Software – WSJ (Mar 11, 2017)

The CIA leak taught us nothing new about the slow rate of Android adoption, but it did perhaps serve as a reminder of its consequences for security. Android adoption is notoriously slow, and it’s something I’ve written about quite bit (see here for my most recent deep dive into the numbers). It takes roughly two years on average for a new version of Android to reach 50% adoption among the base, and no version ever gets above about 40% adoption before a new version begins eating into its share. Compare that to iOS, which typically gets to about 70% adoption within a few months of release, and whose two most recent versions usually account for over 90% of the total base. In the past, this was very problematic, because it meant security vulnerabilities weren’t patched and users were left open to hacks and malware. However, more recently Google and its partners have separated some of the security patches from major OS updates and fast tracked these through a separate update process with the carriers. It’s not a universal solution, but it has helped mitigate some of the security impacts that result from slow OS updates. However, Android in general continues to be far more vulnerable to malware than iOS both because of the slow update issue and because of its overall architecture.

via WSJ

Android's Poor Security

Google will discontinue Google Now Launcher in the coming weeks – Android Police (Feb 4, 2017)

Another chapter in the bizarre saga of Google’s various voice and assistant technologies. Now was Google’s proactive non-voice assistant play for years, while Google Voice Search handled the voice aspects. With the launch of the Google Assistant, it was logical to assume that it would displace this combination, and yet its still not clear whether that will actually happen. Google is discontinuing the Google Now Launcher as part of the GMS bundle OEMs use to pre-package various Google apps and services, but isn’t replacing it with an Assistant-based launcher, and gives OEMs the option of not replacing it with anything within their own launchers. So, Now dies as part of GMS (and in the Google Play Store) but there’s no official communication still about when Assistant might be made available broadly to OEMs. Google’s decision to make the Assistant exclusive to the Pixel at launch was a massive strategic shift, and has arguably cost them significantly in the voice platform race against Amazon, and it continues to provide very little clarity on its future as part of Android for OEMs.

via Android Police

Android is Hard

Minecraft Pocket Edition will no longer receive updates for Windows mobile devices | Windows Central (Jan 19, 2017)

It’s becoming ever clearer that Microsoft is going to go through yet another revamp of its smartphone OS strategy, on top of Windows Mobile and Windows Phone (you could argue Windows 10 Mobile as it currently stands is already a third, but it was very much an update to Windows Phone in reality). Other developers have been abandoning their Windows Phone apps for some time now, but for Microsoft itself to do it is the clearest sign yet that there’s no meaningful future for Windows on consumer mobile devices as it currently stands. The article holds out hope for the full Windows on ARM strategy Microsoft is working on, but it still seems very likely that this will end up being a marginal and enterprise-centric play rather than something that gets Microsoft back into the consumer smartphone market.

via Minecraft Pocket Edition will no longer receive updates for Windows mobile devices | Windows Central

Microsoft's Consumer Challenges

BlackBerry QNX Launches its Most Advanced and Secure Embedded Software Platform for Autonomous Drive and Connected Cars – BlackBerry (Jan 4, 2017)

BlackBerry’s QNX is one of the leading in-car operating systems, acquired by BlackBerry from Harman some years ago. In the context of the demise of BlackBerry’s hardware business, this is one of several software businesses that forms the core of what the company will be going forward. It seems to be moving fast in providing support for some of the new things carmakers are doing, including autonomous driving, and QNX is definitely one of several big tech names to watch in the car tech space.

via BlackBerry QNX Launches its Most Advanced and Secure Embedded Software Platform for Autonomous Drive and Connected Cars

Tech Disrupts Transportation

FCA and Google Collaborate on a Uconnect System Concept Powered by Android – Fiat Chrysler (Jan 2, 2017)

This is an interesting side benefit of Google’s partnership with Fiat Chrysler around autonomous vehicles – FCA is now using Android N to power a new version of its Uconnect connected car technology in cars. FCA is on the official list of Apple CarPlay partners too, so even though there’s deep integration with certain Android apps here, this doesn’t mean iPhones will be second-class citizens in the car. But it does mean Google is now in cars in two distinct ways while Apple still seems to be honing its strategy behind closed doors.

via FCA and Google Collaborate on a Uconnect System Concept Powered by Android – Fiat Chrysler

Warm Takes on Microsoft’s Surface Pro 4 – Medium (Dec 27, 2016)

Part of the recent version of the Apple is Doomed narrative has Microsoft in the ascendant, ready to eat its lunch. As with the rest of the narrative, that’s overblown, and this piece does a nice job of highlighting the challenges for Microsoft in winning over Mac users. It’s also a good entry in another couple of narratives – Hardware is Hard, and Microsoft and Hardware, pouring some cold water on the plaudits for Microsoft’s recent hardware efforts.

via Warm Takes on Microsoft’s Surface Pro 4 – Medium