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disolitude on 02 April 2012
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rocketpig said:
disolitude said:

2. carriers are able to brand android devices as they like, pack them with apps, themes and branding that they want and market them as they want. Storage room, number of apps and microsoft charging carriers has nothing to do with this. OEMs selling android phones to carriers have to bend to their wishes where microsoft stands behind windows phones with standardized set of rules which applies to carriers and OEMs.

I can see why carriers don't like the idea but for consumers, it's a big win and it's Android's biggest flaw. Too much power is put into the hands of the manufacturer. Could you imagine what the PC world would be like if Dell started skinning Windows 7 and dictating which models could upgrade to Windows 8? That's basically the Android ecosystem and Google needs to fix it if they plan to continue selling $100+ phones. They've already lost my business over it and it won't take long for the general public to start following suit after they get burned when their $200 six month old phone doesn't get an OS upgrade. That shit may fly for the mouth-breathers who pay $12 for some shitty Android 2.2 phone but customers who spend money expect better service than that.


I fully agree and have experienced this first hand with a Motorolla Milestone. Bought it with 2.1 in mid 2010 when 2.2 was already out and 2.3 was on the horizon. My carrier rolled out 2.2 in mid 2011 and by then I was long done with Android as my main device and I got and iPhone and Windows Phone instead. I tried flashing it to 2.3 with cyanogen mod and nothing worked as well as it should anymore. You need the official ROM to have that piece of mind that everything is working like it should, especially with Android. People that like to tinker with stuff may enjoy constantly hacking their phone, but those days for me are long gone.

Obviously OEMs can be blamed for this as well as carriers since neither like to do updates due to R&D involved in skinning Android and quality control testing as well as device fragmentation that makes it almost impossible to batch update without custom work for every device. However I think Google is to be blamed as well for lack of following through with OEMs and carriers as well as not leading by example with the Nexus line. It took 5 months for "some" Nexus S devices to get proper working ICS, while others like Verizon CDMA Nexus devices will never get it. That is just rediculous to me. They have 1 legacy phone that is the official "Google" branded device and they don't support it in a timely fashon.

In comparison, Apple tends to support their devices for 3 generations with updates and Microsoft appears to be doing the same with Windows phone 8 coming to legacy devices. With Android once the carriers, OEMs and Google are done, the phones tend to be properly supported for 6 months.