[kllrnohj]

Your post was word for word identical to posts made 2 years about KitKat when it was released. Only instead being compared against Gingerbread. And several years before THAT when Gingerbread was released people were saying it about Donut & Eclair.

So yes you'll have to wait ~2 years for the majority to be on M or higher. Oh well. Does that suck? Yeah. Is it a major, show stopping, "omg google why haven't you devoted 100% resources to fixing this?" issue? No, that's absurd.

And why do you think Apple has negotiators for this? Apple doesn't license iOS to anyone. They've never attempted to solve this problem. Ever. For anything.

[threeseed]

I have no idea what your point is.

Why shouldn't Google be devoting resources to solving this issue ? Being unable to upgrade is a massive security risk and prevents developers from rolling out new and interesting features in their apps.

It is largely a solved problem. You have a core OS/SDK which is upgradeable and some sort of plugin style architecture around it for themes/new features. Sure some OEMs may ignore it and fork the OS but then Google has the leverage of Play Services / Android brand they can use as a stick.

And whether iOS is licensable or not is irrelevant. For their particular phone it is upgradeable without carrier intervention. Why is every Android phone different ?

[mappu]

Upgrading the core OS is hard mostly because new android versions rely on certain new kernel features; and the new kernels break backward compatibility with proprietary drivers.

There was a story posted a few weeks back about how a certain (Samsung or LG?) phone had added new members to the middle of a kernel struct, for the benefit of their camera driver. It hamstrung a lot of the community reverse engineering work to port a new kernel to the device.