It's not like manufacturers don't want the strong brand recognition of being well supported and giving their owners the latest stuff. That helps them sell future phones as well, by gaining market share.
The problem that Google apologists/Android fanboys forget... is that deploying an Android update is a HUGE cost to manufacturers for customization, testing, and deployment.
Google ships endless new versions without any respect to this, and leaves most of the work, and the cost, on manufacturers, who already had thin margins to begin with. Especially on entry level phones, hardware costs have been a race to the bottom.
These people are afraid to point out that Google has created an OS that's hard to update universally, requires a custom deployment for each and every hardware model, and is shipped without working hardware support for most of the hardware using it or even a modicum of stability even on their own reference platforms.
People are incorrectly complaining about google when they should really be complaining about the OEMs. You can blame google for that business model but generally they aren't deciding when Android phones get updates.
Except Google is not the OS vendor for these OEM's. Each OEM forks and creates their own version of Android that they build from source. If you want a phone with Google as the OS vendor that gets updates every month and new OS versions every year then you have to buy a Pixel. If history has taught us anything it's that OEM's cannot be trusted to update their devices.
It's the oems fault in this case. And they have no excuse. Google has modified the architecture of Android to make it possible for oems to update as quickly as possible, as well as all of the previous efforts to enable updating user-facing features without updating the OS. But it's all still a kludge compared to iOS.
The bottom line is I don't think this is solvable with technology. Google should have gotten much tougher with OEMs once Android got widely accepted.
Google is interested in building Android as a platform. Having 80% of your install base stuck 4 versions behind[1] is a crappy way of doing it. Even after they've moved more and more of the platform into the Play frameworks you're still leaving users without a bunch of improvements to the core platform, not to mention security fixes. iOS is miles ahead on this front exactly because it controls the hardware. That Google doesn't do the same now that it also controls the hardware seems short-sighted.
Building a 150$ great phone would allow them to set a feature/quality floor for the market. If they forced their suppliers so the hardware in these phones is properly supported upstream, targeting new versions of Android should be pretty easy. When Ubuntu launches a new version it doesn't need to go and retrofit it to the thousand different types of laptop out there. The state of Android though is that the GPU/Camera/whatever drivers are binary blobs locked in to a specific kernel version.
It kind of is Google's fault. Most people associate any version of Android with Google. Manufactures that don't update their phones causes harm to both the manufacture's image and Google image.
Personally, I place all the blame on Google for not making the upgrades possible from their side. It should be easy to upgrade the core operating system as easy as updating Windows, OSX, and Linux.
I don't like this argument, because Android is not developed openly and the kernel itself is a fork which lags behind the mainstream Linux development until Google implements the changes, which users see when they throw away their phone because Samsung/HTC/Xiaomi/Ulefone/Whatever doesn't want to update the phone or Verizon/ATT/Telenor/T-Mobile, etc., doesn't want to push the update because they branded the phone so that means its theirs but not their responsibility.
Google doesn't want to bear the cost of testing and releasing updates for all of the hardware. Most Android manufacturers barely manage to break even (or outright lose money) trying to sell and support Android hardware. (Samsung makes money, most others don't.)
Blaming the OEMs for your security issues is free.
If Google makes it easier for manufacturers to make phones that can be updated OTA by Google than phones that can not (custom Android builds) most of them would probably do so. Have a hardware layer, an Android system layer, an OEM layer, and have a clear interface between them so they can be updated independently. Then Google should push updates themselves, they can't leave that to phone manufacturers or carriers, like you said, there's no incentives for them to do so. Of course, this has been an issue for Android since day one, so I wont hold my breath.
Are there any work done on a system similar to the one on PC, where software can enumerate available hardware? We have advanced computers in our pockets, but they can't be updated to a new OS version as easy as a 15 year old PC. It's ridiculous.
One of the annoyances I've had with Android, from a new consumer's point of view, is that it's presented as this monolithic OS that's the same across every phone. But once you do the research, you find that it's really not. Except for the Nexus line, there really isn't a "Google Android" experience. When you buy an Android device, you're really buying HTC's, Samsung's, Amazon's or Motorola's Android. Every device has different capabilities. Some ship with different Google services out of the box, others ship with their own internal apps. Google's Android strategy is that every manufacturer can make their own Android shell, without placing any requirements on the vendors as to what version of Android they're using.
It's a great thing that there's all this choice for the devices. It's a great thing that Android allows this kind of freedom. But it's led to a lot of issues for Google and for developers.
The problem that Google has is that they've effectively lost control of Android. They can't force manufacturers to use the latest version of Android. So they're left with situations like this, where the vast majority of Android devices are running an old version of the OS, and will never be updated to the newest version, because the manufacturers just don't want to[1]. So the result is that they have to support around 4 different codelines at the same time(ICS, HC, Gingerbread, and Froyo).
It's a problem for developers because your display code might not look right on a new device with a weird screen resolution. Or you might need API calls that are only in 4.0, which would lock you out of 90% of the devices right now.
No, the alternative is for Google to exert control over the device manufacturers and state that if they're going to be using the Android OS, they need to support and update their devices to the latest version for at least 2 years after the phones are released.
[1] There is a good economic argument that patching phones that are 18 months old with 24 month contracts about to be up just doesn't make sense, but honestly, it comes down to that the manufacturers just aren't willing to do it.
Yet another reason to be thrilled, as an Android user, that my ability to upgrade is held hostage to my phone vendor's willingness to package it. Google has so much weight to throw around, and seems to recognise the problem with fragmentation; why do they only ever take such half-hearted steps to combat it?
>It is the device makers and the carriers that are responsible for the situation you're talking about with updates.
Google could have just as easily bargained for the same kind of terms that Apple gets on iOS devices with carriers. No pack-in garbage, no mucking about with the OS. If not with the G1, certainly with the later releases.
Their desire to have Android be "open" is also its greatest weakness.
Google was forced to do it, because contrary to iOS, Android updates only take place when one buys a new phone, for all pratical purposes, even if Google pretends we have lots of nice OEMs doing updates.
That's what this article neglected to target: The dozens of proprietary versions of Android that are dribbled out by each carrier for each phone.
I'd like to know how this failure happened. Did Google fail to create a proper hardware abstraction layer and driver model that would allow people to update the OS immediately upon release, as long as the driver model didn't change? Even with the crapware installed by telcos, why can't people update the OS? There's plenty of shit installed on PCs by vendors, but it doesn't all just break if you install a new version of Windows.
There have been many changes to Android that ostensibly would allow Google and the manufacturers to support older hardware longer. All for naught, because nothing talks louder than the profit motive. They want to sell people upgrades by leaving the old phones unable to upgrade.
Also, quite frankly I have trouble believing that a multi-trillion dollar company cannot negotiate with a chip supplier to have support or be able to write drivers themselves, lacking a HAL as Android does.
I consider google with android to be a similar position to the linux kernel on my servers. I don't expect any of the kernel team to produce a patch for my 2.6.18 kernel I am running on a RHEL 5 system, I expect Red Hat to do that.
Why doesn't Samsung / LG / HTC manage Long Term support for Android versions, back port the patches and roll them out? Alternatively why don't they all pool together and manage an LTS version for customers.
It seems crazy that the company that has a relationship with the customer doesn't have to support the customer, and everyone instead blames google who wrote the code. The android vendors could back port, create alternative patches or simply make the device able to be updated to a more recent version.
And people ignore that Google could easily put some clauses on their contracts to force OEMs to upgrade, just like they have clauses obliging them to use Google Play Services if they want to use the store.
It is all a mater of what Google is willing to put on their Android contracts. No excuse.
This is missing the point I think. Google does not want to push updates because that requires them to do the massive job of verification and validation necessary to push new features to so many hardware variants.
The problem that Google apologists/Android fanboys forget... is that deploying an Android update is a HUGE cost to manufacturers for customization, testing, and deployment.
Google ships endless new versions without any respect to this, and leaves most of the work, and the cost, on manufacturers, who already had thin margins to begin with. Especially on entry level phones, hardware costs have been a race to the bottom.
These people are afraid to point out that Google has created an OS that's hard to update universally, requires a custom deployment for each and every hardware model, and is shipped without working hardware support for most of the hardware using it or even a modicum of stability even on their own reference platforms.
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