This is what keeps me from android. I'm sure there are other android phones out there that receive updates but until I do a fair amount of research I won't know for sure. My days of carefully researching device purchases are behind me. I just want to walk into a store, buy a new phone and know for the next 2-3 years I'll get all the latest updates.
- The whole fragmentation and apps being made for iPhone first and sometimes never even making it to Android
- There is no Android store to take my device for a quick free fix or free replacement (Apple has replaced many of my idevices at no cost and done so quickly)
- A new Android device is released weekly; many cheap inexpensive ones. It just doesn't feel sexy/special to me as there is one iPhone millions lust for and the press and consumers go ape nuts over.
- The carriers and device manufacturers have a stranglehold on Android. Many Android users are not able to update their 2010 or 2011 Android device to 2012/2013 software as you can choose to do so with the iPhone. Also the device manufacturers create they own UI and add bells whistles. Android does not have one UI/UX to rule them all like iPhone.
With that being said as a long time iPhone owner .. I am annoyed by....
- Apple's tight control on it's ecosystem .. it indeed stifles innovation. I wish they would allow developers to build onto the built in apps (plug ins) like the camera, maps, alarm clock, facetime and other built in apps.
- New Maps definitely a step down from Google Maps
Overall I just wish there was only one Android device in which the UI/UX is controlled by Google. That would solve my Android complaints, but Google's M.O. is to be on as many devices as possible and thus Android doesn't work for me.
I don't get how people praises so much the iOS app store. I own an iPad and it's always a chore to find any decent free app. Also lots of paid apps are crappy, and you don't have any refund method. My android phone is filled with free and high quality free apps.
> New Maps definitely a step down from Google Maps
I'm tired of this meme. It's grounded in truth as the best memes are, but otherwise mostly it's "much ado" by we technorati, doting on SF and NYC public transportation and using "Google" Maps like a paper map to see what's nearby (campus, neighborhood, etc), and thinking everyone's use case mirrors theirs. It's easy to join this chorus. It's harder to voice disagreement by pointing out the huge usability strides in Apple Maps vs the earlier app. You will be mocked. But...
In most of America, cell coverage is sporadic and slow. Try to pull up where you are on former maps app and you wait ages for tiles to come in. Zoom, wait ages again. Drive or hike in marginal coverage with Apple Maps and the difference is night and day -- Apple Maps seems almost like it is in offline mode. Stats and tests prove it uses a fraction of the data, and holds far more of your map in memory.
In most of America, getting from A to B needs a car. The "Google" Maps didn't do real time turn by turn, much less offer the spoken guidance, glancable visual guidance (and status bar guidance while in other apps) of Apple Maps.
In the rest of the world, the famous public transportation options of Google Maps weren't necessarily available. In Rome, for example, a public transportation search simply returns no public transportation found. Apple opened transit up to local providers, and now cities worldwide are already offering local-grown transit apps that hook in. In this country, professional guidance companies like Navigon have already hooked in with "urban guidance" that can blend car to get into city, walking to get from parking to public transportation, and transit to get around town, in a single route.
Blogs show screens of Apple's 3D view mapping satellite onto 3D models poorly. So it's not Google Earth. For everyman's workaday use, so what? Articles joke about addresses being in BFE instead of downtown. Google Maps does that too, more times than not, unless you're careful to give enough precision in the search terms, and even then it will prefer Queens or Brooklyn to Manhattan for similarly numbered streets in "New York, NY". You have to use "Manhattan" to get the street 2 blocks away.
There's a report issue button, and as users use Apple Maps, the glitches will improve. In the meantime, what's amazing is how much more usable the foundation and architecture of the app and server side data is compared to the old app. This is not a step down, it's a huge step forward that can be readily built upon, and the launch day quirks (that can be found in any mapping app when you know your own area within a data set that covers the planet) simply do not get in the way of the typical user's everyday use.
I'm a mapping hobbyist. Google Maps have gotten almost as good as hand made paper maps from the past, but still have a long way to go to get to the level of a Richard Saul Wurman. Apple Maps already have map usability techniques that offer clearer info with less clutter, and in the months of using the beta test app I rarely had complaints in the greater NYC area other than transit, which has now been even better solved by the whole new class of beautiful and usable third party transit apps. Yet technorati have scared regular users from upgrading for fear of "losing" their Google Maps. That's a huge disservice to the normals who count on us for guidance. (And of course they can add Google Maps back to their home screen. It only works online anyway, why aren't we telling people how to have both?)
Apple upgraded Maps to offer guidance to regular people in flyover country. Of course Apple should be held to task for insufficient debugging of place points, but even aside from the other fantastic features of iOS 6 (eg shared photostreams), friends and family just wanting to drive to work on the best route to avoid traffic should be encouraged upgrade today.
Apple maps doesn't have 3D or turn by turn for me. That's because Apple decided go the planned obsolecence route and withhold those features from iPhone 4 owners. So now I have all the downsides of the new maps wih none of he benefits.
With Apple, there's usually a usability reason for these decisions. When you get to update, but certain features aren't enabled, I'm not sure that's planned obsolecense. Not releasing ICS for phones launched last year is, but in this iPhone 4 vs 4S situation, looking at what iOS 6 features you do get vs which you don't, there's a common thread that points to something else.
On your device you get iOS 6, but 3D turn by turn NAV is designed to run in parallel (multitasking) with other apps like Mail or Messages. Consider the performance gain of the iPhone 4S vs the iPhone 4 (nearly 2x, see below), and consider how users would react if the background turn by turn nav was causing their foreground apps to freeze.
A hallmark of the iPhone experience is fluidity. It's one of the painfully obvious differences to owners of both OSs (I own a Google Nexus as well). Framerate and responsiveness make the UI feel more tactile and real, connected to your touch and intentions. My speculation is that the processing power needed for the turn by turn could degrade the experience while in other apps, so it was nixed.
This is what drove me away from Android and just made me get an iPhone.
Much like you, I'm done with researching what device to get for weeks, finally settling on one (with the necessary compromises) and then get shafted anyway.
Plenty happy with my iPhone so far, I may reconsider Android once the no-upgrade, crappy custom skin, comes with crapware problems it's riddled with are resolved.
It's been resolved. Get the phone sold by Google themselves. (GSM Galaxy Nexus) from the Google Play Store. You wouldn't get a Motorola phone with iOS on it (in the event Motorola happened to get their hands on iOS source)?
Are you sure? This was my reasoning when I bought a Nexus S in early 2011 just after it was released. It came with Gingerbread. Later, at the end of the year, they released the ICS update, and then subsequently was blocked. One of my friends got it, but I never got it (until I downloaded the ROM from somewhere and manually updated). The official line was that this was due to poor battery backup, but I felt the battery backup time improved after the update. Eventually I ended up selling it for 100$ and buying a iPhone 4s.
Clearly, all hardware manufacturers have an incentive to not give updates in order to compel people to buy their latest devices. It's just that Apple plays a slightly different game by giving updates, which make your device slower and slower with every upgrade until about 18-24 months later, you just fork out cash to buy their latest device.
Unless the carrier blocks the update from going through. It took two months without a word from Verizon before my Galaxy Nexus finally got the Jellybean update, behind all the other Nexus phones.
At some point I imagine Verizon will simply stop supporting the phone, and the developer site will point to the last, 'carrier-blessed' OTA Android release.
If I can't trust a Nexus device on this platform, what can I trust?
Only way to assure future updates is to buy an unlocked device directly from Google.
I bought an AT&T Nexus S from Best Buy for $49 with a 2 year contract. It did not receive updates from Google even though it had a Google logo on the back and I had to update manually by downloading from the device image download link mentioned above. I have a Galaxy Nexus now that I bought thru Google, it updated to the latest point release as soon as I turned it on. As long as device gets purchased with a contract at a subsidized price, don't expect updates to get to you over the air.
> Only way to assure future updates is to buy an unlocked device directly from Google.
At least in the USA that's often a sucker move. You pay full price for the phone, but still end up paying a higher monthly fee to cover the subsidized handset you didn't take.
A couple carriers do offer BYO handset pricing. But if you want to stick with a big carrier like Verizon then the phones Google sells directly are effectively coming at an extremely hefty premium.
Really? Does it have Siri? Does it have FaceTime? Does it have turn-by-turn navigation (the one added feature of the Apple Maps catastrophe)? Is notification Center the only substantial feature added since iOS4? Can the iOS6 running on the 3GS really be considered the same as the iOS6 running on e.g. the iPhone 4S? Or is it iOS4 with a few extra APIs for developers?
I mean, Google releases updates to the Google Apps on Android for quite a substantial amount of time, so it's quite possible that unupdated Android devices are actually getting almost the same level of support as the 3GS. The only difference is that app developers have to bundle the [new APIs](http://developer.android.com/tools/extras/support-library.ht...) with their Android apps while Apple pushes the new API onto devices.
Nexus devices are your best bet, but I think even Google intends to only update them for about 18 months, or one update short of 2 years. For example Nexus S was released in the fall of 2010, and I doubt it will get the Android 4.2 update from this fall, not because they can't do it, but because they won't want to do it.
Microsoft has also only promised 18 months of upgrades for their WP8 devices. But I think 18 months is too little. It should be at least 2 years or 2 major upgrades. For example, any new device that comes with an Android 4.x version should receive at least the Android 5.0 and Android 6.0 upgrades (and of course anything in between them). Any new Android 5.x device should get every update up to Android 7.0 (including the Android 7.0 update).
I would be quite satisfied with such an upgrade process. That's what I'd call quality customer support. Am I being unreasonable to ask for this? Is Apple really the only company that can do this? In that case, I'm not surprised they are so much more successful than the others who forget about their customers almost the moment after they sold them the new phone.
I'd be willing to bet that the s gets 4.2, rumors are that its a fairly minor update. Google usually has a good reason for dropping support: for instance the nexus one did not have enough flash for 4.0. Apple is similar, the iPad didn't get iOS 6 because it didn't have enough RAM.
That's exactly the reason they stopped releasing updates for my ADP1 back in the day.
There simply wasn't enough internal flash to hold the OS anymore without repartitioning it (something which carries a lot of risks). And the hardware just wasn't up to snuff.
Go with any Google phone, they're developer friendly, support jailbreaking without doing anything crazy, has good upgrade path, and supported by 3rd party mods like cyanogenmod. All the other phones are basically crap -- you'll get one upgrade option if you're lucky, and it probably won't get 3rd party mod support. My Nexus S can get up to jellybean even though it started from gingerbread. I suspect the future Google phones would have a similar level support.
I also owned the nexus one, but sad that it wouldn't go past gingerbread.
I don't get this argument. These Motorola phones are all using a unix like operating system. So why don't you say "That is what keeps me from unix like operating systems", which includes the iPhone?
Stop thinking of Android as a Smartphone. Your confusion will vanish immediately: The Galaxy sucks? Don't buy Galaxy anymore. Motorola does not support devices well? Then stay away from Motorola! (At least until the changed course for the mothership).
Apple is known for great long term support, so is Google.
Buying a device from on of them usually guarantees good support.
Asus has a good track record as well. Samsung is not that great, but they still give software support for the Touchwiz OS on their Galaxy line for 12-18 months. This usually includes 2 major Android versions.
I'm not in the US, but I hear Verizon, Spring and AT&T provide horrible software support. Never buy a smartphone that has one of their Logos on it.
Your experience with a smartphone depends on a combination of hardware, software and service. Android is none of the three things, it's just the technology that most vendors use as the base for their software. It has nothing to do with service.
Motorola Razr Maxx. Killer battery life - i get 2 days of heavy usage, would get a week or more of light usage. Updated to ICS from Moto. Specs are soso but dual core plus 16gb flash is plenty for me - no way would i trade specs for battery life given that most top line Android phones struggle to last a single day. Oh, and build quality is very nice (it is a Motorola).
As a "geek", it will probably drive you crazy to not have ICS. As a regular phone user, Gingerbread will do everything you need it to, and you probably wouldn't even notice it isn't the latest and greatest.
As a regular phone user I would have a vast array of options. My biggest need is email and the browser. I like to think with every new update the overall experience will improve.
I wonder if there's a market for an email only device?
I bought the Atrix, one of these phones. Worst device I ever bought. To think the iPhone 4 was the exact same price but such a bigger value makes it hard for me to want to go Android again.
Samsung devices have a pretty good stock ROMs out of the box. Never had the need to flash my Galaxy S2. And they have flashing-free and reversible rooting methods.
He said it was a resourcing issue, they didn't have the resources to patch every phone and considered every option. Except, it seems... paying for more resources?
I'm just glad to be on a Galaxy Nexus with OTA updates direct from Google. Even then the version I was on was configured not to receive OTA updates as it was a Nexus Samsung ROM not a Nexus Google ROM. It took reflashing the Google image using community tools, something that is mostly not possible for most of the population.
I suppose the only solution is greater awareness of the issue, to increase demand for better support
Another solution for lack of resources would be reducing complexity. They need to release fewer models a year and promote only those throughout the year. Of course they need a lot more resources for upgrades if they release a different model every month.
Rumors say that starting with Android 4.2, and especially with Android 5.0, Google will start upgrading all "Nexus certified" devices (and everyone can make such a device, if they want, under strict rules). I really hope that's true, and I hope the market starts moving towards those devices rather than regular Android ones so it incentivizes manufacturers to build them. I also hope Google intends to upgrade them for 2 years since the phone's launch.
Reducing complexity could also be done if Google released only one major upgrade per year, instead of two. That way it's much less work for manufacturers, too, and most users don't have to be 2 versions behind all the time (like most are on Gingerbread right now). Hopefully Google intends to only release Android 5.0 next year, and that's it. It should also make it easier for developers, who don't have to worry about 5 different API versions at once.
Remember you (or me) are not their clients. The telcos we buy phones from are and they want more models they can push. Also, there are certification issues on different markets. For instance, it's illegal to use an iPhone 5 in Brazil because it wasn't approved by the regulatory agency.
One way Motorola can get around this would be to make the phones more modular, with models differing in peripheral components (keypads, LCDs, cameras), keeping the computing engine consistent and manage building images with component-specific flags.
One way Google could step in to help would be to make less updates to Android core and release more frequent updates of their userland apps (GMail, Maps, Plus etc). I get JB has better rendering performance on current hardware, but I can live without a performance enhancement for a phone I already have if, in return, I get something like Google Now.
And finally, telcos can somehow mitigate the problem by making the phone purchase experience better. If the experience of upgrading a phone were enjoyable, people would do it more often, keep themselves locked in their contracts and just be happy about it.
I don't understand the problem. Why can we upgrade our computers' OSes so easily, while it's impossible to do it for phones? Don't they have drivers for all their parts so you can just plug them in the OS's API and have the newer versions just work?
Apparently the driver situation is much different on phones.
All the different SoCs need extra drivers, the graphic chips, the display, everything. It's very different on a PC (where you may have upgrade problems as well, if you have hardware that has no drivers for your new OS) and it's especially easy for a Mac.
Plus, I think Google made a terrible mistake in the beginning by not asking manufacturers to support the drivers for their phones for 2 years or more. It would've been even better if they convinced them to make all drivers open source, although that might've been a lot harder to do.
And that part of Android is largely closed source, so
phone vendors are on the mercy of chipset makers,
who might not have updating drivers for previous generation hardware as their most important mission.
PC components are usually long lived and we expect them to last a couple major system upgrades. This expectation is relatively new with embedded electronics, where the norm has been not to update software at all (think about updating your washing machine firmware). Therefore, the idea of revising a device driver for a component that's already shipping is somewhat alien for a hardware maker - all their resources are devoted to the next generation and few, if any, software improvements trickle back to the previous-gen components.
Another factor is driver quality. A lot of the device driver code I saw is full with embarrassing hacks needed to cope with hardware problems and looks a lot like development ended as soon as it worked, without much regard to future maintanability, or even commenting the hacks. Looks a lot like design engineers preferring green wires to correct PCB mistakes while repair engineers favoring the use of yellow ones.
Yet Apple manages that part of the deal reasonably well. I'd say what's missing is an industry device standard a la IBM PC, such that drivers can be decoupled from the overall device development. It seems like low to midrange smartphones have experienced a race to the bottom before they were even in the position to lower the spending on software integration. I just hope that consumers are aware of this and choose devices that are based on standards set by the OS developer, such as Nexus and Windows Phone. Google has some homework to do in terms of the Nexus brand awareness if you ask me.
> what's missing is an industry device standard a la IBM PC
I fear that. Before the IBM PC clones the personal computer market was fragmented, but evolution was very fast. In the mid-80's, we had computers and capabilities x86 PCs would only gain in the mid-90's (for instance, plug-and-play expansion slots were present in the Apple II). Amigas had preemptive multitasking and Ataris pushed the price of 32 bit computing to impressive lows. Acorn introduced a RISC-based PC whose processor now powers just about everything that needs to process information around you.
Today, most personal computers are descendants of the IBM PC and employ an extended version of its horrid instruction set (the x86 was Intel's plan-B at the time - i432 was plan-A) running a matrioska of computers with something similar to an IBM 5150 at the core. The three major OSs in use on PCs are derived from 60's technologies, two from Unix, one from VMS. We deserve more.
While I share your feeling about x86, I don't feel PCs have stagnated since their standardization, at least not up until a few years ago. You are certainly correct that IBM PC at first was a horrid standard and until the Win95 generation other products have been ahead at least in certain aspects. However, I can't imagine the subsequent technology race between Intel, AMD, later 3Dfx, NVIDIA and ATI without that standardization. You just can't build chipfabs for billions of dollars if the market is splintered. Today we effectively got hundreds of GFLOPS accessible at our fingertips on commodity hardware, over a TFLOP if you count peak performance. Granted, bus architecture is still a bit stuck in the 80ies, which has now become a bottleneck with our SSDs - hence why Apple chose the proprietary route to get more out of their Macbook Airs.
> I can't imagine the subsequent technology race between Intel, AMD, later 3Dfx, NVIDIA and ATI without that standardization
Before the x86 dominance, you'd have Motorola in this group, making 68K chips (or, maybe, 88K). Processors today would probably be as fast as they are, maybe faster because they wouldn't need to be compatible with binaries written 30 years ago.
I didn't mean that the progress we've seen is because of x86, but because of the PC standardization.
Imagine if we had a couple of competing systems like IBM PC, Atari, Commodore and Mac, each with 20-40% market share, each with their own chipsets. Do you think we would have 30 GFLOP single threaded / 700 GFLOP multithreaded performance built in commodity systems now? I don't think so.
In mobile space it's kinda similar: Only because ARM was able to get such a dominant position in chip design we have the current speedup rate.
The thing is however, that the main chipset is not the whole story, it seems to me that the way those dozens of subsystems work together nowadays just isn't designed well - as you said it just barely works. Having a standard would help in that every subsystem manufacturer could just provide drivers for his part and the OS would then know what to do with it, it's not necessary anymore for the assembler to do all that work.
It is a solved problem, as you point out. So it's just business.
Symmetry does break when we consider that you don't purchase your PC after consulting and getting permission from your internet provider. Imagine that ..
Now the funny thing - insert haha here -- is that the trend seems to be for getting herded onto small, mobile, and ultimately task focused devices and ubiquitous computing.
This topic really has significant social bearing far outside its current utilitarian scope.
Now lets meet the happy tuple: (Utilitarian, Totalitarian)
Its more of a business decision me thinks. A lot will not buy the latest phone Model if they could update the software on their 2 year old phone that would give them all the features
So, Samsung will be able to sell fewer Galaxy 3 if a user could update the Galaxy 2. (Even if the new OS version is slow on an older hardware).
> He said it was a resourcing issue, they didn't have the resources to patch every phone and considered every option. Except, it seems... paying for more resources?
Yeah, and this is the part that's so strange. Attach a dollar figure to how much it would have cost to broaden the list of updated phones. Then consider that Google/Motorola is basically drowning in money and that the dollar figure is just a rounding error.
Google buying Motorola was always kind of mysterious. Now it's more mysterious. Google, why would you do something like that if you weren't going to, at a minimum, make sure that they support your stuff as well as possible?
Anyone who was cheated by Motorola should sue them for the price of the phone in small claims court. Motorola might be able to weasel out and win the case depending on the actual language of what they promised. But if enough customers sue them it will create a PR nightmare and major legal expense to the extent that they will be forced to reverse their decision.
Motorola has repeatedly broken their promises. This is not the first time a new phone is not upgraded.
I won't touch a Motorola phone, yes, even with Google. I may opt for a Android phone next, but other manufacturers have presented more upgrade options.
Incompetence runs deeply in some organizations
This is a big sore thumb for Android, something that Google should really enforce against the big vendors.
They are not stuck at all. If they had bought an apple, microsoft or blackberry phone they would have been stuck.
But because they are on an open source android device they have cyanogenmod which is even better than stock and either has or has coming ICS for their model.
This is pretty revolutionary for mobile devices where you no longer are slaved to the manufacturer. Credit to google?
Actually the people who installed the last motorola patches actually had the ability to flash their phone removed with that patch, so they can't even install cyanogenmod.
This may be a funny comment to find on HN, but even as a reasonbly technical person I really don't want to spend the time to find mods, research what my hypothetical Android phone is capable of running etc.
Especially because I depend on it to occasionally take a call and whatnot--I don't want to worry about whether some program or software update is going to screw it up. I worry enough about this stuff at work.
Nexus sort of solves this problem, but I hope that Google will do an even better job as Apple has now that they own Motorola.
This provides that you're a) a nerd, b) comfortable voiding your warranty by rooting the phone and c) that your phone is even popular enough for there to be things like Cyanogenmod to install on it.
Sure, I did that with my HTC Incredible, but I shouldn't have had too and most people won't.
You don't need to be a nerd; you only need access to someone you trust who would do it for you. And plenty of folks wait until their warranty runs out before modifying the OS.
CyanogenMod doesn't exist for the Motorola Photon.
It's great to say that open source means you have the power, but most people can't reverse-engineer a driver.
In fact, it seems like none of the newer, popular Android devices are supported by CyanogenMod. Looking through the Android phones from the top three American carriers, I see:
Motorola: RAZR M, RAZR MAXX, RAZR, Photon Q 4G LTE, ADMIRAL, Atrix HD
Samsung: Galaxy S III, Galaxy Stellar, Stratosphere, Droid Charge, Galaxy Nexus, Conquer 4G, Replenish, Transform Ultra, Galaxy Victory, Galaxy S II (Sprint), Galaxy Note, Galaxy Exhilarate, Galaxy S II Skyrocket, Captivate Glide, Rugby Smart
HTC: Incredible 4G LTE, Rhyme, Rezound, Hero, One X, Vivid
Pantech: Marauder, Breakout, Flex, Burst, Pocket
Casio: G'zOne Commando
Kyocera: Rise, Milano
ZTE: Fury
Sony: Xperia ion
That's a list of every Android phone offered by the big four American carriers. There isn't a single device for Sprint or Verizon (accounting for over half the market) that CyanogenMod supports. With AT&T, you're limited to the Galaxy S II Skyrocket (and, really, you'd want the S III). There's also not a device released in 2012 that CyanogenMod supports. CyanogenMod gave me a workable system at a time when Samsung abandoned my device having never fixed major bugs. However, with newer devices, CyanogenMod seems to be slipping behind. If you're buying a nice Android device today and putting out $200, you're getting something like a Galaxy S III, a One X, or a RAZR M and it isn't clear that you'll be getting much support for your device (from the manufacturer, carrier, Google, or third parties).
I bought into Android with high hopes. I understand how crappy Apple's closed model is. However, Android is making you beholden to the device manufacturer and your carrier in the same way iPhone users are beholden to Apple - unless you can reverse engineer device drivers. I know, in theory, you could hire someone or whatnot, but in practice Apple supports their devices for many years while Android phones may never see updates. Buying an Android phone has to be a purchase where you assume you won't even get an OS that exists today unless it's pre-loaded on the phone. Android manufacturers bought themselves a year of "but it's going to change" when they made the pledge. That pledge fell through as soon as it came time to actually provide the upgrades.
Saying that they aren't stuck is somewhat akin to saying that poor people could just go out and become rich. Sure, in theory, there are always opportunities and whatnot, but it just isn't that easy. In reality, Google didn't free us, but tethered us to manufacturers that care less and carriers that are even worse. If Google were to be credited here, I think they should have insisted on a model where device manufacturers release drivers (ala Windows) so that users could install Android from any source. Even better would be to have those drivers be open source so that users could update them (providing updates is going to be easier than reverse engineering). That would have led to real options.
In May, Google announced the expansion of the Nexus branding to multiple OEM partners simultaneously.
LG has recently shown off a Nexus phone, and one can expect more such announcements.
Nexus now resembles Microsoft's "Signature" branding for craplet-free PCs. All reasonably recent Nexus devices get upgrades directly from Google, much like iOS devices.
Also, not all OEM extensions are evil. Samsung's mobile device management extensions can be very useful in some use cases. If only we could get such extensions a la carte.
HTC did the same with their HTC Desire phones. I own a HTC Desire HD and I regret buying an Android phone as the only update I received was 2.3 with their Sense UI crap-ware. I've lost faith in Android ecosystem with early users being denied new features and security updates because they want users to upgrade to newer phones.
I was actually very happy with it when I bought it, for the first few months. The battery life wasn't great but it was tolerable and the UI was simple and responsive.
A few months back I got an update, which I hoped would give me a new version of Android with some extra useful features. Instead all I got was a ton of bloat and crap which made everything harder to use, slower and the battery lasts about 1/2 what it used to. Naturally it doesn't let you turn this crap off.
If they advertised this in conjunction with their devices, I imagine consumers would be able to get their consumer protection agency involved because of false advertising.
"Soni admitted that the company wasn't quite there yet. But he believes the decision to cut off some upgrades would position the company to meet its future commitments." Bad business practice. Keep this up and you won't have any customers who would want to touch your "future" products. People are not that dumb. Some actually do research on a company's reputation before buying their products and others, well......they just don't forget when they were screwed over.
I hate to say it but that might be the right solution. They sold phones under false pretenses, so it would be reasonable to attempt restitution for that.
There's really no reason for this to happen with so many excellent community roms. Open source is a give and take. Motorola and others could most likely keep their promises if they started with a community rom and focused on QA.
Also, Android needs a better method of updating the os that is more in line with how apple allows updates through iTunes.
The first company to ensure constant android updates for a decent amount of time (ex. 3 years) is sure to make a fortune even if they don't have the best phones.
You may argue that it will still take months to upgrade, but that should be OK given that you're pretty much guaranteed you'll get an upgrade (well, hypothetically speaking).
I think the relative poor sales of Nexus devices proves that a fortune isn't really a guarantee if a company ensured updates. The amount of people who care about updates aren't enough to keep a business profitable.
Right now, the only sane expectation to have with most android phones is that the version of Android you buy it with is what you get (unless you are able/willing to install your own mod). That's definitely a downside compared to iOS, but most Android phones are a lot cheaper, which helps compensate for it.
"But Android is such an open platform! /QQ" Meanwhile, my iPad 2 just asked me if I wanted to upgrade to iOS6. It did it over wifi, and the whole thing took maybe half an hour.
Same thing for me with HTC ('Hero'.. Really?), and no different now with LG (P990 / Optimus 2x). Update to ICS was promised a year ago. Look at link like this (or any LG source on the net that allows comments) to see angry (and .. childish) people:
EDIT: Android phone recommendations?