..carrier ui layers are the only thing holding them back is silly
There's also market fragmentation, but I'd say carrier dumbassery is almost a worse problem.
This "differentiation" or "branding" or "experience" or whatever buzzword-compliant term chosen to describe it almost always makes the device less useful and less functional.
Not just by being ugly, slapdash-looking "let's slap our identity all over this" abominations, but by harming performance. The canonical example was MOTOBlur on the Droid 2. The hardware was decent, it was an incremental upgrade over the original Droid, but it's made almost unusable by the preloaded Moto garbage. Compare a Droid 2 stock vs a Droid 2 running the AOSP version of the same Android release and try to say they're even remotely comparable. Worse battery life, sluggish performance..
Jellybean all on its own is a beautiful system. A fantasy of mine is that, for the next major release, Google enforces the kind of UI requirements being imposed by Microsoft - how much carrier dickery do you think will appear on Windows phones?
The OEMs and carriers want to differentiate in SW too, not just in hardware. They don't want to be dumb pipes or just the "boxes" that android ships in. They happen to suck at SW and screw up the android experience. Without the opportunity to mess with it, Android wouldn't be as attractive to them.
"Jellybean all on it's own" is a non sequitor because Jellybean didn't spring into being all on it's own and fully formed. It incorporated (and ICS before it) a lot of features from non-Google skins.
There's also market fragmentation, but I'd say carrier dumbassery is almost a worse problem.
This "differentiation" or "branding" or "experience" or whatever buzzword-compliant term chosen to describe it almost always makes the device less useful and less functional.
Not just by being ugly, slapdash-looking "let's slap our identity all over this" abominations, but by harming performance. The canonical example was MOTOBlur on the Droid 2. The hardware was decent, it was an incremental upgrade over the original Droid, but it's made almost unusable by the preloaded Moto garbage. Compare a Droid 2 stock vs a Droid 2 running the AOSP version of the same Android release and try to say they're even remotely comparable. Worse battery life, sluggish performance..
Jellybean all on its own is a beautiful system. A fantasy of mine is that, for the next major release, Google enforces the kind of UI requirements being imposed by Microsoft - how much carrier dickery do you think will appear on Windows phones?