[kyrra]

Except it's not that simple in the Android world. Someone explained it really well a couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13057605

The basics are that every phone out there uses a forked Linux kernel patched to hell to get it working. Since none of the drives are upstreamed it's unmaintainable.

The linux kernel does not have a stable driver interface so shipping updates to phones is a LOT of work.

[mortehu]

This doesn't explain why they can't upgrade user-space applications and libraries. It's very rare for a user-space application upgrade to require a kernel update on any major operating system.