I wish Android 14 inspired as many app updates as iOS 17 did

Maybe if android 14 was guaranteed to have 70% adoption in one week developers would actually care. There’s no point developing features for 5% of users

Google never should have opened it up for hardware manufacturers. They should have just made the OS and licensed it out like windows. Then hardware manufacturers wouldn’t be able to release crappy forks that never get updated.
- I disagree. If google hadn't opened up, manufacturers wouldn't have bothered. We also have great UIs like oneui with useful quality of life features not found in stock android. Not to mention a longer update cycle than even Google the developer of android.
- This assumes that Android would have anywhere near the reach it does now because of it's openness.
  Google actually is enabling hardware manufacturers to control the end to end experience by allowing them this level of control over their own ecosystem.
  The difference is ... they're not Apple. No Android manufacturer operates at the scale Apple does. Licensed Android won't change that any more than it will change all of the Windows 7 and 10 licenses that still live on in the real world.
  It would also put the onus on Google to produce all the device drivers and compatibility layers needed to support the breadth of hardware currently available. This would slow the entire market down.
- They didn't really have a choice. They were building on open-source software and Linux and Arm are somewhat bad at abstracting the hardware. So this means that the manufacturers must homebrew their own distro for their hardware, instead of just publishing drivers like windows hardware does.
  They've been working on fixing this, but fundamentally they built their castle on sand. And if they hadn't, they probably never would've gotten anywhere at all and we'd all be on Blackberry or WebOS or WinPhone or whatever.
- I disagree. For me that is the beauty of android.

Remember that all apps need to target the almost-latest target API at least. That means Android 13 for all new apps and app updates since Aug 31.

https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/11926878

The update philosophies on Android and iOS are vastly different, as is mentioned in the article.

iOS bundles a vast amount of things in their updates, such as core app updates, platform capability updates and developer API updates.

Android uses the OS update to bring new platform capabilities, mostly, and not even entirely through the mechanism, with lots of things now starting to be delivered unbundled from OS version. Core apps are delivered entirely separately from the OS version. Developer API updates often are backwards compatible using the AppCompat library, meaning that older OS versions sometimes get to benefit from the updates as well.

These differences have led to some significant differences in OS version support - a common OS version support policy for iOS app developers is to support the two most recent OS versions, while android support often is afforded to versions as far back as 5.0.

This in turn leads to an interesting effect, where the useful life of an Android device can actually be longer than that of an iOS device, despite the latter having access to OS updates for a longer time. This being because of the fact that the iOS device essentially becomes unusable once it's no longer supported - you literally can't install apps from the app store anymore, because they have long since dropped support for your OS. Android in the meantime keeps on going, because of the different philosophy of backwards compatibility among Android developers.

All of that being said, I do wish that Android developers were a bit better on things like UI consistency and supporting the latest OS features. I don't know if I'd trade it for what iOS has, though.

This in turn leads to an interesting effect, where the useful life of an Android device can actually be longer than that of an iOS device, despite the latter having access to OS updates for a longer time.
This is so true.
I have a first-Gen iPad Air that runs fine, but is fast becoming useless, despite having received an OS update months ago.
While an old Galaxy S4 I have around runs many apps that still function fine (especially since I can find old compatible versions on apk mirror).
Pretty frustrating, because the iPad Air performance is plenty for the things I want to use it for.

Personally I'm giving all of the apps that haven't implemented a themed icon a 1 star when Android 14 launches.

You've literally had a year and a half. It takes 60 seconds to do. Stop being incompetent.

[This comment has been deleted by an automated system]
- It literally does take 60 seconds to do. It also is incompetence if you're not up to date on the latest Android design guidelines.
in some cases the company behind the app vetoes conformity. not much a developer can do when management wants their branding to stand out
- Then the company deserves it.
A very small percentage of android users are at Android 14. Grow up
- Android 13 has themed icons.
  Maybe developers should grow up and learn to be competent?
A think that a lot of devs take "themed icons" as a gimmick feature on top and rather focus on app stability and other features, or they just don't care because they don't see it as a deal-breaker in any means.
- Yep.
  As a user, I agree with them.

All the things they listed that Apple added is already possible though

I think there also is something different in play. Most Apps come from the U.S. where most people in the tech sector use iPhones. So what OS are they most likley to support better?

Most people in the tech sector use iPhones
As someone in the "tech sector", this is not my experience.
Yea, we'll use them for work phones because Corp manages them anyway (so no advantage to using Android). But pretty much everyone uses Android for personal devices.
Management and above are iPhone.

I think there also is something different in play. Most Apps come from the U.S. where most people in the tech sector use iPhones. So what OS are they most likley to support better?