Android One - All You Need To Know!
This video was made to help you gain clarity as to what Android One Programme is, what are its advantages and drawbacks.
In the past couple of years, we’ve seen an increase in the number of smartphone manufacturing brands. For us, more brands mean more smartphones options to buy from. And each smartphone brand has a unique set of characteristics that they employ in their smartphones.
These characteristics include hardware specifications, software specifications, and the customer experience. Due to custom skins over the android software by manufacturers, there are many problems.
To remove such big problems and to restore users’ trust in the Android operating system, Google had launched the android one program in 2014.
An android one device operates on an unmodified version of android, which these days is popularly known as the stock android.
Additionally, an android one device gets promised 2 major android version updates, and monthly security updates for at least two years.
That means that if you are currently running on Android version P (Pie) then you would definitely get updates for Android version Q and R.
The list of Android One devices by going to www.android.com/one
In the year 2014, the Android One program was announced in the Keynote of Google’s annual event called Google I/O.
But the partner manufacturers in 2014 were not very good or popular (karbonn, micromax, spice). Also, phones like the Redmi 1s had entered the smartphone market around that time, and those devices were amongst the most hyped smartphones for that time.
Again in the year 2015, Google was unable to find good manufacturers (Lava), so it missed to meet the eyes of the audiences that year also, because these devices were costlier for their price in relative to the specifications that they offered.
The Android One programme gained popularity in 2017, when Google partnered with Xiaomi to launch Android One version of its successful device named Redmi 5x to market, that later came to be known as Mi A1.
After that, many manufacturers became willing to run their devices on the Android One program.
First, Motorola moto x4 came out in the US. Then htc u11 came out in Germany, and so on.
Soon, Nokia took the initiative to add intensely to the android one lineup. The company successively launched android one devices like nokia 6.1, nokia 7 plus, nokia 8 sirocco, etc in the early 2018, and nokia 6.1 plus, nokia 5.1 plus etc in mid 2018.
Phones from other manufacturers like Mi A2, Motorola One Power and LG G7 One have also come up as Android One devices in late 2018.
One thing to note here is that even though stock android will be the running operating system in all these devices, Google does allow manufacturers some slack to make small changes to the original code for Android, mainly to add applications like help center, camera, etc.
I have personally used several Android One devices over the past couple of months, and my experience with updates and performance with these devices has been great. In fact I am currently using Nokia 7 plus as a daily driver, and it was one of the first devices to get Android Pie update, after the pixel devices. Also, It was one of the first devices to get the beta access to the digital wellbeing app made by google after the pixel devices.
Mi A2 has not yet got the Android Pie update. Note that Android Pie was launched at around 6 August 2018, and around the date of publishing this video, it will be over 3 months without the latest Android version update on this device.
Mi A2 does get monthly security updates, and that too on time. So actually, it feels strange that the device gets monthly security updates as soon as they come, but it is months behind the schedule for the major android version update that was launched months ago.