Android Owners Left Behind - Wall Street Journal (blog)

By Nick Clayton

Android owners often have the feeling their smartphones are not quite as up-to-date as they could be. It turns out this is more than a feeling. They really are being left behind.

For his blog, The Understatement, Michael Degusta looked at every model of Android phone shipped in the U.S. up to the middle of 2010. He then tracked every software update for each device. (Although he is based in the U.S. there is no reason to believe the pattern would be much different in Europe.)

The results he reports are grim for the owners of these phones, almost all of which remain under contract:

7 of the 18 Android phones never ran a current version of the OS. 12 of 18 only ran a current version of the OS for a matter of weeks or less. 10 of 18 were at least two major versions behind well within their two year contract period. 11 of 18 stopped getting any support updates less than a year after release. 13 of 18 stopped getting any support updates before they even stopped selling the device or very shortly thereafter. 15 of 18 don't run Gingerbread [a version of Android], which shipped in December 2010. In a few weeks, when Ice Cream Sandwich comes out, every device on here will be another major version behind. At least 16 of 18 will almost certainly never get Ice Cream Sandwich.

As Mr. Degusta points out in his blog, this is unfair on consumers who bought phones expecting them to be updated. Developers, as well, have to produce apps for old versions of Android to make sure they can work. And there are also security risks to handsets which never receive support updates.

It appears to be a widely held viewpoint that there's no incentive for smartphone manufacturers to update the OS: because manufacturers don't make any money after the hardware sale, they want you to buy another phone as soon as possible. If that's really the case, the phone manufacturers are spectacularly dumb: ignoring the 2 year contract cycle & abandoning your users isn't going to engender much loyalty when they do buy a new phone….

Apple's way of getting you to buy a new phone is to make you really happy with your current one, whereas apparently Android phone makers think they can get you to buy a new phone by making you really unhappy with your current one.

The Understatement: Android Orphans: Visualizing a Sad History of Support