On Android versioning oddness
Android releases are done alphabetically, which is dumb. Why is it dumb? Industry standard is numbers because numbers make sense.
I’m not sure Android’s way is dumb per se, but it sure is yet another example of engineer thinking (this is logical to me, therefore let’s do it) versus thinking for the typical consumer (where numbers do indeed rule, and version 5.4.3 is clearly more recent than 2.5.1).
He’s only partly correct. Android updates are given numerical values too. Froyo is 2.2, Gingerbread is 2.3, etc.
And thinking about this post is the first time I’ve ever noticed they had alphabetical names, the number is the first and only thing on the device itself, it’s a non-bitch from Books there.
Of course they have codenames, everyone has codenames. Hell, our last 2 releases were “Corvette” and “Viper”. but the customer doesn’t see those in the product.
Sadly because our marketing our idiots what they DO see is “Winter 2011”, which makes no sense at all and is actively harmful south of the equator but that’s not the point.
It’s the opposite of dumb. It’s also the opposite of engineer thinking. Engineers think in numbers; people don’t. People think in terms of names. If you ever ask a friend which version of Windows or Mac OS they run, they’ll tell you something like “Leopard” or “Vista” (if they know it at all; more likely, they don’t know, and don’t care). They sure as hell won’t use the version number to identify the version, unless they’re geeks.
In fact, I wish Apple would use alphabetical names for OS X, because I can never remember which order the cats go in.
@LKM: When I ask most non-techies—like my dad—what version of OS X they’re running, they don’t know. But if they know how to find out, they’ll inevitably find a version number, and if they see an update and know what they’re running, they can know that x+1 > x. With alphabetical naming, you’re making the assumption about how the ordering goes, and I really don’t think that’s intuitive enough.
In software, I’d say OS nicknames are an odd anomaly (which somewhat gets Android off the hook). Numbers are commonly used in year form (Office 20XX, iLife 20XX) or straight versions (Blah 3.0) and that makes more sense than:
Which version of Photoshop are you running?
Fandango!
Hmm. How does Adobe order its updates again?
That all said, perhaps *I* am being too assumptive about numbers being intuitive, although, as I mentioned, they seem to have some resonance with non-techies I deal with.
Still, interesting comments from everyone so far (and a good reason why, in some cases, I hugely enjoy having comments on the blog).
I don’t think I’m making the assumption that regular people know that Android names are ordered alphabetically. I’m merely making the assumption that a name is easier to remember than a number.
I do, however, make the assumption that most people simply don’t care which cat goes after which cat, or whether Honeycomb came before or after Gingerbread. I’m merely pointing out that for those of us who do, having them in alphabetical order helps a ton.
So:
– Names are easier to remember than numbers for regular people
– Alphabetical names make it easier to remember the order in which the versions go for the few people who care
Conclusion:
– Version numbers are best for engineers and geeks, which is why we use them so prominently
– Names are better for regular people, which is why non-tech products (like cars, watches, or chocolate bars) don’t tend to expose version numbers, even if they have them
– Alphabetical names add some of the features of version numbers to names, so that we geeks have it a bit easier