I have cyanogenmod. Updates every day and according to recent news, they are expanding for non-technical users.

Hell, even a friend of mine who doesn't have any it-background installed it without a problem :)

Is it safe to update to the nightly releases? Can you do it automatically?

I just upgraded to the latest release candidate (from a 1+ year old version) and it re-locked my phone and disabled the Google Play store. I finally figured out after much googling that I had to reflash google apps but was pretty stressed for a while there.

I'm wondering if perhaps I auto-update to nightlies if I wouldn't run into that problem again, but then I'm also worried about a bad release.

This is probably because you came from 10.1 and upgraded to 10.2.

Then it locks your phone again, but its easy to re-enable. Updates between 10.2 versions don't lock your phone.

You can just download new updates in your configuration, system submenu of your phone.

Just download and then click install. I never had a problem with it actually (although they are nightlies), sometimes battery improvements are noticable and system improvements, that's really cool. So, i never experienced a bad release, and i'm always capable of downgrading my phone to the previous release (i download a new upgrade, install the new release and after some days i delete the old installation files).

A lot of days, i just do an update every day at midnight when i'm going to sleep.

One day, my phone went from 1 day battery time to 2 days (after the update from 10.1 to 10.2, somewhere the fifth nightly update i did).

One advice, if you install 10.3 in the future, install GAPPS in your system/app directory first. So you can install it immediatly.

I didn't have a problem with rerooting though.

Thanks for that.

It's complexities like this that I am too old to have time for that would make me more than happy to pay $x/year for a premium Cyanogenmod "subscription" service as floated recently that takes care of all this for you.

I hope I see the battery life improvements, that's one of my main complaints about Android.

You're welcome.

Actually, i only realized how much battery life makes it easier for you :P

But i still have 2 extra batteries in my car, for when i have no time. One of the best benefits of Android smartphones :-)

So the problem of battery life didn't really affect me much, just switch the battery and it's done... :)

I've been running nightlies for maybe 8 months to a year now. I update every few days to a week. I've had two issues in that time:

1. When the alarm clock app was rewritten/significantly changed it began crashing in startup. Cleared the app data for it and it worked fine. 2. More recently, when they merged in the 4.3 branch from AOSP, it required an update to gapps as well. I didn't actually read the change/upgrade logs and ended up just reinstalling my phone clean.

Really not all that many problems when you consider it, and not all that serious. The worst case scenario (reinstall phone, restore from backups) only came up once.

I have a Samsung Captivate, an iPhone 4 and a Nexus S (developer phone) all purchased in Q4 2010. Nexus S updated until 4.1, iPhone is still current with iOS 7 and the Captivate got ONE update (manually via USB) from 2.1 to 2.2... the Software Update NEVER updated.

I had this same experience. In 2010, I decided to buy the Captivate over the iPhone 4 after reading a bunch of reviews online. IIRC, I bought it right when it was released, which almost exactly coincided with the release of Froyo. After four or so months of putting up with a laggy interface, cheap (feeling) build quality, and no software updates in sight, I sold it and finally bought that iPhone 4, which I used for the next 3 years.

Recently, I decided to give Android another try and went with the Galaxy S4 when that came out. I was pleased with how far the OS had come since Eclair, but it still felt less responsive than even my 3-year-old iPhone. As for the build quality, that's my biggest regret in buying a Samsung product again. It's hard to beat the feel of an Apple device, but at least the Nexus 4 and HTC One are trying.

Omitting Flash sizes - there is Nexus 4, Galaxy S4, HTC One and soon Moto X which Google will update like they do any other device they sell. Pretty good variety than iPhone models I'd say.

That is three (and one coming). About the same as the number of iPhone models you can buy in a store.

How many of those phones can you update in three years, like I just did for my iPhone 4? (An armless man can count them on his fingers? :-) )

Key difference is you don't get the mostly similar 3 iPhones - you get 4 vastly different phones with meaningfully different feature sets - and they are even made by different companies. Way more variety and choice.

I bet all of the Google Play sold devices would see at least 2 major updates. (My Gnex got 4.1/4.2/4.3 - and unlike my iPad 3 ios 7 update, it actually got better at every update.) That's good enough for me considering that Android updates are really not the same as iOS updates - most apps including the Keyboard get updated independent of the OS.