[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.