I wrote this up yesterday and didn't publish it because my Facebook friends couldn't care less.
CyanogenMod releases faster, has more stable [stable] releases, uses better, more mature, widely embraced software (mtd over bml, ext4, etc), has more (and more consistent) features. Carriers are asking the manufacturers to lock the bootloaders to keep you from flashing CyanogenMod on it and your mom having a stable phone that receives fast updates.
They prefer methods of control that cause users to want to upgrade because half their phone capacity is already being spent running Blur, Sense or some daemons that have running to support their proprietary front ends. And none of it, of course, is truly necessary. Extremely complex theming options are available, again via an open source feature developed by T-Mobile and shared with the OSS community.
And before anyone says it, my mother hated her Droid in it's later Froyo days. It was faster and better battery than Eclair but was also more prone to freezing and being low on memory. I installed CM7 stable, she gets push updates that are seamlessly handled via Rom Manager. The only thing I had to tell her was to make sure the "Backup checkbox is filled in". If need be, restoration instructions are very simple for me to give over the phone, but in ALL my days of flashing nightlies on several (of my) phones, I've never had to.
Same story with the brother's Droid Incredible with the horrendous and offensive previous versions of Sense. The sad thing is, Verizon killed the Gingerbread update. It was leaked and largely fully functional, but no phone will ever see it.
Not all Androids are created equally. [Just to be on the same page, I'm not using this as an excuse. It's a huge perception problem. End users don't know that the Thunderbolt, Nexus S, and Droid X all have different interfaces and complexities going on in the background.] I'm also not sure if I "want" Google to do anything about it, besides be more emphatic that the "Google" branding on the phone makes it better. (That branding is reserved for the clean, near-AOSP roms)]
>I installed CM7 stable, she gets push updates that are seamlessly handled via Rom Manager.
Does this work for major updates? As far as I know when you want to move between major versions (the next one is 7->7.1) you have to basically wipe the phone and start from scratch. Because most Android apps use local storage that isn't synced to the cloud, to actually keep your data you'll have to use hacky things like Titanium Backup that may or may not corrupt data, particularly so for system settings.
The biggest shortcoming I see in CM is this, the lack of a good Over The Air upgrade method that keeps your data. Ideally I'd like to see Google offer APIs to apps so that their data is continuously synced to my google account and then upgrading or getting a new phone would just be a matter of logging in and letting it sync for a while, making it closer to a ChromeOS experience.
I've gone from super alpha CM7 to CM7.1 and current nightlies without wiping, save for once, and that was due to Google Apps changing.
CM6 -> CM7 you have to wipe, but most OTA updaters will tell you that the OTAs from Eclair->Froyo or Froyo->Gingerbread effectively require a data wipe anyway. My mother had issue after issue after the Eclair->Froyo OTA and they went away when she did a factory reset (wipes /data).
>Ideally I'd like to see Google offer APIs to apps so that their data is continuously synced to my google account
They exist, though there is some fine print about device compatibility that is a bit wonky and NO one seems to use them for anything. I agree. I think this is the missing feature in a large way. I hate having to remember to turn off the loud beep in QR Scanner when I wipe my Droid (it's speaker is sooo incredibly loud). Things like that would be trivial to store in text config and/or sync with Google.
>CM6 -> CM7 you have to wipe, but most OTA updaters will tell you that the OTAs from Eclair->Froyo or Froyo->Gingerbread effectively require a data wipe anyway. My mother had issue after issue after the Eclair->Froyo OTA and they went away when she did a factory reset (wipes /data).
I just checked and 7.1 doesn't require a wipe, I was under the impression that it did. Is it that only when the upstream major android version changes that you need to wipe? A quick googling leads me to believe at least Google's official OTAs for the Nexus line don't require wiping.
This is the problem with Android. You flee the clutches of one unscrupulous and controlling company (Apple) into the clutches of your choice of many other unscrupulous and controlling but also incompetent companies. Android's advantages are strictly hypothetical when the last mile of the user experience is controlled by exploitative bunglers like Verizon.
It seems strange to say "This is the problem with Android" and follow up by describing how it's manufacturers and carriers' faults.
Sure, I'd love if Google rolled out their own VoIP based wireless service, but that's a pipe dream and that's not really the point. Google-branded Android phones avoid these problems. They're not hypothetical, there are many devices that are more than capable of running pure AOSP or CM7.
I guess it's just a matter of terminology, but again, I don't know what people want to have done about it. The model for buying phones in the United States is broken and there's no way to control that ecosystem from where Google sits. Period. The cat's out of the bag, and I vastly prefer being able to build and flash CM7 than the more restrictive alternative across the isle.
This is all true but, for the average user, entirely academic. What counts is their personal experience of the phone. What is a matter of terminology to us is a costly matter of frustration and regret for them.
I'd like to see Google start promoting its own phones a lot more, although it's a tightwire act for them now since they risk alienating the other handset makers if they go too far.
CyanogenMod releases faster, has more stable [stable] releases, uses better, more mature, widely embraced software (mtd over bml, ext4, etc), has more (and more consistent) features. Carriers are asking the manufacturers to lock the bootloaders to keep you from flashing CyanogenMod on it and your mom having a stable phone that receives fast updates.
They prefer methods of control that cause users to want to upgrade because half their phone capacity is already being spent running Blur, Sense or some daemons that have running to support their proprietary front ends. And none of it, of course, is truly necessary. Extremely complex theming options are available, again via an open source feature developed by T-Mobile and shared with the OSS community.
And before anyone says it, my mother hated her Droid in it's later Froyo days. It was faster and better battery than Eclair but was also more prone to freezing and being low on memory. I installed CM7 stable, she gets push updates that are seamlessly handled via Rom Manager. The only thing I had to tell her was to make sure the "Backup checkbox is filled in". If need be, restoration instructions are very simple for me to give over the phone, but in ALL my days of flashing nightlies on several (of my) phones, I've never had to.
Same story with the brother's Droid Incredible with the horrendous and offensive previous versions of Sense. The sad thing is, Verizon killed the Gingerbread update. It was leaked and largely fully functional, but no phone will ever see it.
Not all Androids are created equally. [Just to be on the same page, I'm not using this as an excuse. It's a huge perception problem. End users don't know that the Thunderbolt, Nexus S, and Droid X all have different interfaces and complexities going on in the background.] I'm also not sure if I "want" Google to do anything about it, besides be more emphatic that the "Google" branding on the phone makes it better. (That branding is reserved for the clean, near-AOSP roms)]