[Q] Why can't you install android on any phone? - Streak 5 Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting

Why is it that there isn't just one version of android that will install on all phones? I mean, you can install windows on any pc regardless of spec and it automatically finds drivers for internal parts and makes them work? why can't this be done for android? would be miles easy for developers if you could just take a rom from say a dell streak and put it on say a galaxy s and vice versa, seems ****ing retarded to me that this isn't the case with android? Love my streak and android as a whole, but would be so much easier if the updates were dependant on the companies that made the phone and were just dependent on when google updates the software!!

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Alexanderbooth said:
Why is it that there isn't just one version of android that will install on all phones? I mean, you can install windows on any pc regardless of spec and it automatically finds drivers for internal parts and makes them work? why can't this be done for android? would be miles easy for developers if you could just take a rom from say a dell streak and put it on say a galaxy s and vice versa, seems ****ing retarded to me that this isn't the case with android? Love my streak and android as a whole, but would be so much easier if the updates were dependant on the companies that made the phone and were just dependent on when google updates the software!!
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Haha, first of all, are you genuinely serious? I loved the os of the ps3 why cant I have that on my xbox 360, come on mate, really. If that was the case, then we would probably just need 1 type of phone with every release of android software, example iphone.
Android allows people to have a nice choice of phones from different manufacturers.
I personally, think android is 10 times better than any other simply because of the control the users have, we can purchase an android phone and customize the hell out of it to our liking, yet you have no choice to jailbreak an iphone to have half the options android users get out the box.
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Yes in a perfect world that would work, "one OS for any phone" but the truth of the matter is that it is a driver issue, and manufacturers want to make a profit. There are too many different manufacturers of components and not all of them are compatible with each other, get out dated or don't meet recommended minimal specs. Example is trying to put Windows 7 on a P2 machine. Maybe it will install, but you are not going to get much if any of the benefits of the new OS. Or if you put win 7 on a Mac. Sure it will work, but it is not going to be on a machine that it was designed to run on spec wise. Believe me, I wish it was that simple, but unfortunately it is not. We can dream though.

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It has a lot to do with the drivers, unless every phone was identical internally (or each generation identical internally) there are no drivers for that specific device.
PCs are much more standardized when it comes to hardware working with drivers. Most important components like video/audio/ I/O have standard fallback modes and their specific drivers. That's why you can install windows or linux or whatever on a system and at least expect it to boot and most of the stuff to work. They have generic drivers that will do the minimum required for it to function, but not much more.
From a user perspective drivers are much more diffucult with regards to *nix then with windows, this is especially true with regards to android (as it uses the linux kernel)
Windows has standardized (as in they have published the specs and adhere to it) driver frameworks and spend a good deal of testing time making sure 3rd party drivers will remain reasonably compatable. Usually it goes smoothly enough when releasing a new standard, when it goes bad you get what happened with vista where the drivers were the main cause of instability. Most of the time you can use drivers written for win 95 on win7 x86 and there's still a fair chance it might STILL work depending on how well the driver was written (this is a gross oversimplification, there's an entire class of win 9x drivers that wont work, but the other class will).
With linux driver compability is much less clear cut, many important drivers are available as source, and it's very possible (but requires a fair deal of planning ahead) to build a pc and only use source code drivers.
If something is only available as binary drivers you're at the mercy of the manufacturer to keep it updated and working.
This is why android is so difficult to roll out timely updates. The kernels in 2.2 are very different from 2.3/3.x and rewriting the drivers for it is what accounts for ~90% of the work (assuming your device is powerful enough to update in the first place)
The full driver sourcecode isnt often made available for android devices, so you either have to spend time writing your own or attempting to adapt the binary drivers to make it work. This is what is happening with streakdroid 2.x
The other critical point is that the bootloader must be willing to load 3rd party code.
There's a fair amount of devices that have had android ported to them because they were:
1) Able to load 3rd party code (either by hacking the bootloader or it allowing it on it's own)
2) They either had comparable drivers or were willing/able to write their own
3) There were enough devs to take the time to accomplish this in the first place
4) Android is open source so it's possible to write your own drivers in the first place (techinally all you might need is the driver sdk, but no mobile os has only a driver sdk available, it's either all or nothing)
Being open source has absolutely nothing to do with being able to install it on any device.
Winmo 6.5 is closed source (sorta, it's somewhat like shared-source) but it's just as easy to port over. But there's little to no interest to porting it to new devices.
Win8/arm might be like how windows is on the pc IF they keep drivers the way they are. If ms decides to incorporate them the way linux does it wont be any different then what android is experiencing now (though it's kinda unlikely, windows has always loaded drivers as seperate modules, and they're likely actively paying attention to that with win8)

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I will just add that in my very humble opinion the OP wasnt by NO MEANS asking a dumb question (and it would rule to have standardized drivers for phones)
(and btw, great writeup manii. this might as well fit in some android related blog.)

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markdexter said:
Haha, first of all, are you genuinely serious? I loved the os of the ps3 why cant I have that on my xbox 360, come on mate, really. If that was the case, then we would probably just need 1 type of phone with every release of android software, example iphone.
Android allows people to have a nice choice of phones from different manufacturers.
I personally, think android is 10 times better than any other simply because of the control the users have, we can purchase an android phone and customize the hell out of it to our liking, yet you have no choice to jailbreak an iphone to have half the options android users get out the box.
Sent from my Dell Streak using xda premium
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O M G!!! android fanboys!! your worst than apple fanboys, when did I even mention the iphone or what makes android so good? or installing other peoples software on to other hardware, I'm only talking about android and its phones you turn everything into android is better than ios blah blah blah blah blah!! Shut the **** up and go to another thread!!
The other people in the thread, yeah I kinda knew it was down to driver issues, but I didn't think it was that complex. Android imo is the best os I've ever experience in my life, even better than windows 7. But for me, I actually think the only 1 draw back the os has, is the fragmentation of the updates. Is this possiblity of one android os to work on all android phones, so you can just download the update.pkg from google and just install it on any android phone, or is this something that was never intended and because of how its developed its to late to go back and change this? or is it something google has in the pipeline?

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Alexanderbooth said:
O M G!!! android fanboys!! your worst than apple fanboys, when did I even mention the iphone or what makes android so good? or installing other peoples software on to other hardware, I'm only talking about android and its phones you turn everything into android is better than ios blah blah blah blah blah!! Shut the **** up and go to another thread!!
The other people in the thread, yeah I kinda knew it was down to driver issues, but I didn't think it was that complex. Android imo is the best os I've ever experience in my life, even better than windows 7. But for me, I actually think the only 1 draw back the os has, is the fragmentation of the updates. Is this possiblity of one android os to work on all android phones, so you can just download the update.pkg from google and just install it on any android phone, or is this something that was never intended and because of how its developed its to late to go back and change this? or is it something google has in the pipeline?
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Well I am glad Alexander cleard that up. I totally see now tht he was referring to one android update for all "android" phones. Which in theory, would be nice and possibe be the solution to so mny segmented releases.

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Android fanboy?? Grow up, first of all I wont as you say **** off to another thread, you didnt get my point, but thats ok I can tell by your answer and generally by your original question that your not that bright, thats ok buddy.
I own an iphone 4, to run apples os I have to own an apple product (the phone) which for me is too small, I would like a bigger screen, so im stuck.
With android different manafacturers are in competition for what the people want and offer a huge variety of phones. Yes its a bit of a pain in the arse to install custom roms on them but once you know how its pretty easy.
At the end of the day to have one os that would go on any phone would be nice but then really whats the point in having a whole bunch of different phones. I like the way android is, I own as I said a earlier an iphone 4 and a dell streak, I find myself using the dell more, simply because I can make it my own.
Also ....me fanboy, you said you like android better than windows...the most popular os al over yhe world.
Sent from my Dell Streak using xda premium

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Rico ANDROID said:
Well I am glad Alexander cleard that up. I totally see now tht he was referring to one android update for all "android" phones. Which in theory, would be nice and possibe be the solution to so mny segmented releases.
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Yeah I know, coming from having the dell streak, and only having one upgrade while I've had the phone, I just can't understand why phone manufacturers go to all this trouble creating there own version of android when they could easily outsource this part of the phone to Google. I'm sure it would also make it easier for app developers to make there app work on all android phones. Seems so strange to me growing up with windows and being able to just buy a new pc and just get your windows cd out and bosh on windows, and it works. Does anyone know if this will ever happen or do the phone manufacturers want to have there own version of android, so they can fill it with there own apps?
To me even if they did still want there own versions of android, they should still give you the option of returning to stock android and just going to google for the update.

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markdexter said:
Android fanboy?? Grow up, first of all I wont as you say **** off to another thread, you didnt get my point, but thats ok I can tell by your answer and generally by your original question that your not that bright, thats ok buddy.
I own an iphone 4, to run apples os I have to own an apple product (the phone) which for me is too small, I would like a bigger screen, so im stuck.
With android different manafacturers are in competition for what the people want and offer a huge variety of phones. Yes its a bit of a pain in the arse to install custom roms on them but once you know how its pretty easy.
At the end of the day to have one os that would go on any phone would be nice but then really whats the point in having a whole bunch of different phones. I like the way android is, I own as I said a earlier an iphone 4 and a dell streak, I find myself using the dell more, simply because I can make it my own.
Also ....me fanboy, you said you like android better than windows...the most popular os al over yhe world.
Sent from my Dell Streak using xda premium
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Your saying I'm not bright, but your comment to my original question had no relevance to what I was asking at all, you didn't even slightly attempt to answer what I had asked.