[brodie78382]

> and they only upgrade when the device no longer meets their needs.

I think you hit the nail on the head here. My HTC M7 GPE is only just beginning to show its age in terms of performance. My SO's Samsung S4, however, has been literally unusable for months now: battery performance issues, only able to run ~3 apps at once (low RAM), unable to update any apps because there's no free space despite having around 50 less apps than me and also despite having an SD card, overall performance is laggy & slow, certain apps won't even run now, the list goes on.

These phones came out within months of each other in 2013, and in spite several hardware advantages the Samsung is no longer meeting its users needs compared to my M7. Of course, my SO has no idea why this is, like you said she barely knew what kind of phone she has (lol), but the end result is that she's having to upgrade the phone (early, I might add), and the differences can largely be boiled down to software and updates.

[andy9775]

I think the issue is that Android is becoming like windows is/was. By this I mean that there is lots of built in bloat. For instance Rogers (my carrier) automatically installs an NHL app, a ringtone app and other seemingly useless addons. Further, Android API's tend to change quickly and the standards aren't as strong as they are around the iOS ecosystem[0].

If google stops allowing manufacturers and carriers to customize the device and handles upgrades we'll see the same stats as iOS has with regards to market reach of the latest os version. Further, if they clean up the API's and develop better standards its less likely that apps will crash phones or cause significant lag or issues when running on old devices with a new os

0. I say this as an android dev who only wrote a little iOS with swift.