Remember google's excuse for omitting kitkat for the galaxy nexus?

[shabby]

http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/31/...exus-will-not-be-upgraded-android-4-4-kit-kat

Google also notes that the Galaxy Nexus uses a chip made by Texas Instruments — a company that's no longer actively developing smartphone chips. So it could be that trying to get everything in 4.4 working on that chipset would have been fairly burdensome.

Now guess which soc google used on the prototype project ara phone? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSo3KeGUNO4&t=349
Seems they chose the ti4460 because its an extremely well documented chip, ti is extremely helpful in supporting the product, and there's wide range of development hardware like the panda board for developer use. Seems like the galaxy nexus would be perfectly suitable for kitkat with all that support.

 

[postmortemIA]

And MS without problem ports thousands of drivers from one version of Windows to another... yet Google can't support their own device.

Bad excuse. The Android fragmentation is nobody else fault but Google's. Google has all cards in their hands.

 

[zerocool84]

Wasn't the reason because Ti stopped supporting their chips since they got out of the game?

 

[Yuriman]

Wasn't the reason because Ti stopped supporting their chips since they got out of the game?

That's what I remember, which makes it very strange that they'd be putting a Ti chip in an upcoming platform.

 

[Ravynmagi]

I don't really think it's too strange. They are using it in a prototype device that they'll never sell to the public. So they didn't need to have optimized perfectly working drivers necessarily.

 

[Red Storm]

I don't really think it's too strange. They are using it in a prototype device that they'll never sell to the public. So they didn't need to have optimized perfectly working drivers necessarily.

Yep.

 

[kpkp]

I don't really think it's too strange. They are using it in a prototype device that they'll never sell to the public. So they didn't need to have optimized perfectly working drivers necessarily.

And they forked 4.3 for ARA anyway.

 

[crashtestdummy]

It's sort of a tough bind. If you push the limits of how fast you can add features, you get fragmentation like Google. If you work hard to make sure everything works well on every device, you get a slow update cadence like Microsoft. The only way to avoid both pitfalls is to severely limit the number of devices you have to develop for, like Apple.

We think of these companies as having infinite capabilities and resources, but even they have their limits.

 

[NikolaeVarius]

And MS without problem ports thousands of drivers from one version of Windows to another... yet Google can't support their own device.

Bad excuse. The Android fragmentation is nobody else fault but Google's. Google has all cards in their hands.

No they don't. What the hell you smoking.

The fact that Drivers were so completly borked in Vista was a huge reason why it failed miserably.