What causes this delay is that phone makers have neglected to hire enough staff to push out the updates fast enough. Most seem to have only enough employees to develop the software for the firm’s next phone release, with updates to current models taking a backseat.
This is made worse, ironically, by Android’s greatest asset – its open nature. Every company sticking Android on its handsets is allowed to customize the OS however it chooses. Typically, this results in OEMs putting in so much of their own code that updating the underlying Android build becomes incredibly complex.
And here is where things get really ridiculous; rather than have one version of each phone so software can be pushed out to all SKUs, the various carriers also complicate matters by demanding that the software be operator branded, further fragmenting and complicating the update issue.
That means that instead of having one build of phone, you have one for every operator who carries the phone, which means instead of building just one software update for that phone, you now have 20 plus builds that need quality testing, bug fixing, QA etc, thus further drawing out the update process.
This is simply not sustainable, and we’ve already seen more than a few murmurs from people refusing to buy the next ‘great’ device from the top phonemakers simply because they know they won’t get timely updates and will be stuck going through the same thing all over again.
One thing phone firms don’t seem to have grasped is that, these days, the company known for putting out updates to its devices the quickest will get the most business from customers wishing to keep up.
No comments:
Post a Comment