[zanny]

As another Arch user using an S4... that currently has stock, because CM is just broken from a lack of maintainer on jfltespr... your desktop never breaks and is always up to date, while your phone eventually breaks and never gets updates.

That is predominantly because OS and hardware as separate products is essential to user empowerment over their own hardware. There is a tremendous conflict of interest for a company who makes its money selling new hardware to provide good software support to old hardware, so they just do not. And it brings Android as a whole down for it.

If these companies were also not so Linux hostile and stupid, they would upstream their device support into mainline Linux so we could see a healthy ecosystem of Android forks rather than just one attempt in CM that destroys the souls of volunteers who have to maintain all the insane out of tree binary blob kernels these OEMs ship phones with.