[kalleboo]

And if they did that, instead you would have just bought a phone that was stuck on Android 6

> made OS updates a requirement of the Android licence contract

Now you're being contradictory. You want to force manufacturers to always update to the new Android versions. But you ALSO want to make Android 7 require specific hardware features. How could these requirements work together?

[pjmlp]

The same way they have worked forever on the PC world.

OS updates always work with fallbacks, and minimum hardware specifications get revised every few years.

Google can ask Microsoft how to do it.

[kalleboo]

That is something Google could do to actually solve things - make the OS binary compatible (rather than requiring device manufacturers to recompile) with driver blob plug-ins. It would require a change to the Linux driver ABI model but without know anything about Android I kind of assume they've already done that.

[pjmlp]

That is the point of Project Treble, where drivers run as user space processes and use Android IPC to talk with the kernel.

But, big but, the OEMs are free to decide when and how those updates are made available to users.