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One thing that annoys me is that some Android phones are released with an older version of the Android operating system, and it not updated to a newer version until around 6 months later. Why is that? What are they having problems with? What takes such a long time?

E.g. I know that Sony Ericsson X10 was released in April this year with Android 1.6, while Android 2.1 was available and already on phones sold on the market. Sony Ericsson stated by the time that they are going to update the phone to Android 2.1(?) in september. But now in september Android 2.2 has been out for a long time?

Really, what is the biggest reason to why manufacturers are not updating their phones to the latest Android?

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It's rather easy to explain: Device manufacturers earn money by selling new phones/tablets/etc. and not by upgrading them. In the short run this leads to more sales. But this will alas not stop, because almost all manufacturers do this, with the exceptions of Apple and Google's own Nexus brand. – ce4 Mar 9 at 23:02

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6 Answers

up vote 17 down vote accepted

To be honest the single biggest reason I can find is their proprietary software.

All the Vodafone and Orange only gadgets / services you get. These are programmed by the carrier against a specific Android version. This is why when an upgrade comes out, Orange might not get it as quickly as Vodafone, and Vodafone might not get it as quickly as Sprint etc, because they have to check that all their proprietary goodies still work as intended in this new version which involves programming and testing.

Unfortunately some carriers aren't as fast as the others at testing this, hence we have a mashup of versions out there.

If you want to be at the forefront, I suggest getting an "Unbranded" device which isn't tied to a network. You will get your updates from HTC much faster then.

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so if I understand correctly, Google comes out with a new version of android, the manufacturers like HTC make driver modifications, and then the carrier provider like Orange/Vodafone etc must make individual alterations before allowing your phone to update to the new version? – Vass Sep 20 '11 at 14:26
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@Vass: in short, yes. This is why if you get a Nexus phone, you get updates almost as soon as they're available; you cut out the "middle man," so to speak. – TK Kocheran Dec 11 '11 at 18:29
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I would say the single biggest reason is... why would they? You bought a device with the software at that time and have no claim to any future versions. Personally I love the modding community, as I already have a very stable ICS on my Fascinate. – Fosco Dec 12 '11 at 16:01
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+1, this is actually very important. For example, we found that some of our Android app code (which is no more that several hundred lines) worked on earlier version of Android, but not a later version. The reason was an error in our code, but this wouldn't matter for users at all. So of course if there's any software added by the manufacturer they will want to perform thorough testing before switching to newer OS. – sharptooth Jan 12 '12 at 10:22
up vote 11 down vote

Its simple , economics :-) . It's too much investment for them unless they plan to sell a device for an extended period of time , eg the Motorola Droid. This is also true if the device gets outdated too quickly (bound to happen) or the manufacturer has to phase it out to sell their newer devices.

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Dont forget you can root and modify your device heavily probably waaay after the carrier has stopped. Check out the XDA-Forums forum.xda-developers.com – Pace Sep 14 '10 at 10:05
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@Pace: Yes, I can. But I would not recommend my father, mother, sister, grand mother, grand father to root their phones. – Jonas Sep 14 '10 at 10:10
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Ravi: I don't think it's only economics, since if a manufacturer don't customize the Android OS, it can freely get updates when they are available. It must be a choice or a lock-in-problem by them. Maybe they write code that is hard to maintain and update? – Jonas Sep 14 '10 at 10:59
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@Jonas They have to modify the interface coz someone else did it and they have to better that to make sales , and if everyone was getting updates no one would buy new phones. Companies are investing heavily to have differentiators and if people don't buy new phone the company will perish. – Ravi Vyas Sep 17 '10 at 5:44
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Hardware manufacturers don't want you to keep the same phone for too long, they want you to upgrade often. It's not in their interest to improve the software on old phones. – James Oct 19 '10 at 13:49
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up vote 5 down vote

Some of the older phones like the G1, have a small ROM. (256mbs for the G1) The ROM is partitioned between the OS and apps. Releases after 1.6 are to big to fit into the G1's limited OS partition. In order to update the phone, it had to be repartitioned leaving less space for the applications. This is a much riskier type of update to do, and one they opted not to do to the phone and thus abandoned OS updates to it after 1.6.

For newer phones, I imagine that the OS updates came out in the middle of that phones development cycle and were ignored for various business reasons. Google has been pushing out phone OS updates much faster then it's competition.

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up vote 5 down vote

Recently there was some articles published about this by some Android phone manufatures:

From slashdot:

Motorola described the long testing process involved in getting the new code out there, whereas Sony focused on explaining the time-consuming certification process.

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up vote 2 down vote

It's due to android provides functionality to customize OS vendor specific. And most of the vendor had customized their UI on top of Android. So its time lag due to upgrade their UI rather than OS.

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up vote 2 down vote

I'm surprised that nobody mentioned that Android fast release pace, there is new major updates every roughly 2 months. This fast pace makes it hard for manufacturers to release a phone with the most up-to-date version since they must play catch up all the time, well unless for the Nexus line which got early access to the OS from Google.

In any case, we had to admit that the majority of users doesn't really care about getting the very latest version; but they will complain loudly if the phone crashes or loses data. The mentality of power user (including me) is a bit reversed, we want the latest and greatest, even when it comes with crashes.

Even for custom ROMs, even if they can release an update that boots in a few days after a new Android is released by Google, it always takes several weeks or months until they can release a version that is relatively stable and have all the features working correctly.

If an Android update takes several months to complete, you can't really blame the manufacturer. That's just how long it takes to test something as big as an OS. You also can't blame manufacturer wanting to differentiate and try to innovate by creating their own skins; the last thing you want is for all Android phones to look exactly the same, as that will be the end of innovations, and the end of innovation marks the end of a platform. Especially recently, it has been shown that each manufacturer skins has their own fans, and often features in the stock skin turned out to originate from manufacturer skins.

However, if it takes more than a week from manufacturer releasing an update to the carrier releasing the update, then blame the carrier. Your carrier really in no business in adding extra applications to your phone. The carrier's main responsibility is for testing that the device will work with their network, which shouldn't take long unless there's a major fault in the telephony driver. They shouldn't be adding extra software on top of the phone as they're not supposed to be designing a device (that's the manufacturer's job). Even if they added some useful extra software (e.g. data usage counter), they shouldn't be crucial to the basic functionality of the phone and so shouldn't block the release of the update.

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