Eyes Above The Waves

Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Repatriate Kiwi. Hacker.

Friday 22 April 2016

Android's Update System Is Ridiculous

My ancient Nexus S phone got wet and died on the Whanganui River. I was planning to get a new phone anyway so I can run a supported OS, so I went out and bought a Nexus 5X. It's the latest, greatest, pure Google experience, so it should be awesome, right?

Well then... after going through the FTU and starting to use the phone, the first thing that happens is that it asks me if I want to upgrade to Android 6.0.1. Sure, that's why I bought this phone, no problem. The update downloads, installs, the phone restarts, some applications get "optimized", and eventually we're back in business. This takes about five minutes. So far, so OK.

What happens next is mind-boggling. After restart, the phone offers me another OS update, "January 2016". Download, install, restart, applications optimized, five minutes later we're back. Then it happens again for, you guessed it, "February 2016". Then "March 2016". Then "April 2016". So I've wasted about half an hour babysitting my phone while it crawls through this process.

This is stupid. Surely the geniuses at Google can see it would be a vastly better first-run experience to deliver all the updates together so you only have to go through a single update-restart cycle. What are they thinking?

Comments

Anonymous
Quite true. I always think android's system difficult to use. and also the update too. i'm not used to my new-edition system yet. i really want to recover my old one back.
Anonymous
They are thinking people should update their Android phones once a month.
Robert
That's fine. People should update their Android phones once a month. But that doesn't mean you have to have an awful first-run experience.