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superchunk on 13 June 2012
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TeddostheFireKing said:


this is a bit off topic, but it does have to do with what Apple showed at WWDC.

When they brought up their pie chart of iOS5 adoption and compared it to Android, I was amazed by how many Android users were still on 2.1 and 2.2. Why are they? You mentioned something about it not being mandatory to update the phones, can you explain it a little more please :)


If you go out and buy a low-end product you get low-end support and features.

Example: yesterday I bought a HTC Droid Incredible 2 for my mother-n-law. It was a free phone with upgrade, single core, but otherwise really nice phone and a major upgrade from her Blackberry 8330 Curve I gave her two years ago. HTC currently has it listed as TBA to get 4.0 ICS while every other phone they've made in the last year and half will get ICS by the end of July. Its currently on the last phone OS, Android 2.3.5 Gingerbread. It very well may never get ICS and for the next two years will ring up in Android's pie chart as a 2.3.5 device.

Same goes with tablets. There are a lot of $99 to $199 tablets that were on 2.x and will stay that way as the no-name OEM has no interest in providing updates.

Android simply has too many devices with a near infinite different set of screens, cpu, gpu, keyboards, sizes, etc to allow it to have 100% updates. The bigger companies like HTC, Moto, and Samsung do try to update their higher end phones and Google (with the introduction of Android 4.0 ICS) has implemented a mandatory upgrade timeline. But, it will take a few years to have those lower end phones die off and be replaced.

What I find amazing is that people hang on to phones longer than two years and fail to take advantage of the upgrade to new free or cheap phones that are far better than what they have. You're already paying for the service and likely to not leave, why not upgrade? If people did that regularly then there would probably be no 2.1 or 2.2 phones. Though there would still be 2.2 tablets from even just last xmas shopping season of cheapos.

We are now seeing the same thing in iOS btw. Now that Apple has put out more than 4 phones, many features and entire OS upgrades are not on the older phones. Sure those are four year old products, but there is a big difference in putting out one phone a year and one every month.