[richdougherty]

Agreed, it really is a shared problem. It seems like a kind of "collective action problem" [1], where coordination between different parties is required - but they all have different interests and they're not all interested in splitting the costs.

Google is in a difficult position. In order for Android to catch up to the iPhone they needed to encourage a wide consortium of vendors to adopt and sell Android hardware. Part of the way they encourage vendors to sell Android phones is by being very permissive about how vendors install, update and use Android. This helps Android by growing market share.

Unfortunately, it leads to a lot of variation and fragmentation in devices, which in the long term can hurt the Android ecosystem. I guess there's a balance that Google is trying to strike between being too permissive and too restrictive in how they work with vendors.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action#Collective_a...

[pjmlp]

It worked for Microsoft to impose hardware designs on PCs, the big difference was that OEMs did not had the source code of MS-DOS and later Windows available to them, to do whatever they felt like it.

[thanksgiving]

OEMs can't do whatever they like with Android outside of China PR. They need Google play services.

[pjmlp]

Yet Google decides, sadly for us, not to use that as enforcement for the updates.

[mtgx]

Indeed. Google has the power, and that excuse that Android is open source and therefore Google can't impose anything on OEMs is getting a little old and tired.

If Google would have promoted Android the way it did with Chrome OS (and the open source Chromium OS), it wouldn't be in this situation, and we'd be getting updates often. But I guess hindsight is 20/20. I still wish they did more about the support of Android devices throughout the ecosystem, not just for the highest-end devices.