fedward, tumbling

understatementblog:

Why Don’t Android Phones Get Updated?

It appears to be a widely held viewpoint³ that there’s no incentive for smartphone manufacturers to update the OS: because manufacturers don’t make any money after the hardware sale, they want you to buy another phone as soon as possible. If that’s really the case, the phone manufacturers are spectacularly dumb: ignoring the 2 year contract cycle & abandoning your users isn’t going to engender much loyalty when they do buy a new phone. Further, it’s been fairly well established that Apple also really only makes money from hardware sales, and yet their long term update support is excellent (see chart).

In other words, Apple’s way of getting you to buy a new phone is to make you really happy with your current one, whereas apparently Android phone makers think they can get you to buy a new phone by making you really unhappy with your current one. Then again, all of this may be ascribing motives and intent where none exist - it’s entirely possible that the root cause of the problem is just flat-out bad management (and/or the aforementioned spectacular dumbness).

This is damning of the entire Android ecosystem. Whether by intent or accident the people in charge of it have made the platform into something whose biggest value is in not being the iPhone (the previous advantage of not being AT&T [at least in the case of the Droid] having been erased by the launch of the Verizon, and now Sprint, iPhone 4 and 4S). Android’s carriers and manufacturers have taken out one perceived drawback which is, in fact, a great advantage on the iPhone platform. Apple’s nature makes the platform stable for users and developers, and aside from periodic griping about App Store policies (a lack of transparency on rules, the 30% cut) the marketplace is larger and healthier than the Android marketplace will ever be, and this distinction will only increase over time. What’s better for users is better for developers, and vice versa, as app store demand increases app supply, and vice versa.

Go read the whole thing. It has an awesome chart.