What happened to the Android Update Alliance?

Google’s Android keynote this morning was packed with announcements, most prominent among them the introduction of Jelly Bean, the next version of the Android mobile operating system. While it looks to be a solid update to last year’s Ice Cream Sandwich, there’s a big question that always looms large over the announcement of any new Android version: these features look nice and all, but will my device ever be upgraded?

At last year’s Google I/O, the company announced the Android Update Alliance, an initiative through which Google would work with its partners to ensure that Android phones and tablets would receive updates for at least 18 months after their introduction. This much-ballyhooed announcement wouldn’t have done much about the extreme diversity of hardware in the Android ecosystem, but it would have helped reduce the growing software fragmentation issues that the platform was facing.

There was just one problem: the Android Update Alliance hasn’t really been mentioned since, including in today’s keynote.

While recent Nexus-branded phones and other Android reference devices like the Motorola Xoom tablet are likely to get Jelly Bean upgrades sooner rather than later (the updates will start rolling out in July), another, much larger group of devices is still waiting on Ice Cream Sandwich updates that have been trickling out since that version’s introduction in October of 2011. This is a problem for any user who wants the latest features on their phone and any software developer who wants to leverage the latest tools and APIs.

It would be easy to blame Google for dropping the ball here, but the worst of the problems can’t really be laid at its feet—Ice Cream Sandwich’s code has been available to one and all for over eight months now, and the open-source community (primarily led by the Cyanogenmod team) has had no problem producing builds that run acceptably well on many devices, including some hardware that was never designed to run Android in the first place.

The real culprits here are Google’s partners, the very hardware manufacturers and carriers that helped build Android’s success. Why are they doing this, and what, if anything, can Google do about it?

Carriers and hardware makers aren’t keeping up

To better understand the difficult position that Google is in, it’s instructive to examine another mobile operating system that has to deal with multiple carriers and hardware partners: Windows Phone 7.

Windows Phone 7 was supposed to offer a middle ground between the integrated hardware and software of iOS products and the malleable but fragmented Android landscape—as originally pitched, updates would come straight from Microsoft without interference from carriers, but that rosy future quickly gave way to a reality in which carriers could hold back updates in “testing” for months before releasing them. Microsoft is making lofty promises about Windows Phone 8’s update process, but Windows Phone 8 itself won’t actually be available as an update for any existing Windows Phone 7 handsets.

Fragmentation on the Windows Phone platform isn’t as much of a problem as it is in Android because you’re still talking about a relatively small number of handsets and software versions and, delays aside, most phones have gotten their software updates eventually. Still, the disconnect between Microsoft’s early promises about phone updates and the eventual reality smacks of the same carrier meddling and general laziness that keeps many Android handsets so woefully out of date. Even Google’s Android reference devices are subject to carrier delays—for instance, while the WiFi only version of the Motorola Xoom received Ice Cream Sandwich in January of 2012, the Verizon-branded Xoom didn’t receive the update until June.

Carrier meddling isn’t the only thing keeping Android phones out of date—the smartphone manufacturers themselves are just as much to blame. Case in point, check out the brand-new Sony Xperia Ion we just reviewed: it’s a fairly capable mid-tier smartphone with a dual-core Qualcomm MSM8260 that is more than capable of running Ice Cream Sandwich, and yet it was released running the year-and-a-half-old Gingerbread operating system with Android 4.0 promised at some nonspecific future date.

At best, this sort of behavior is lazy, and at worst it’s an extremely disingenuous way to upsell consumers to higher-end handsets. It also shows just how little effect the Android Update Alliance has had on anyone’s behavior, just in case Android 4.0’s 7 percent install base left any doubt in your mind.

Why the foot-dragging?

You’d think that keeping users up to date with feature and security patches would be beneficial all around—users would get more out of phones that they’re continually paying to use, developers would have a more consistent platform to target, and phone makers and carriers who give their users a good experience would engender some brand loyalty that would pay off when the user’s contract was up. Unfortunately, notions like this are difficult to measure and monetize.

Part of the problem is that there’s very little incentive for most OEMs and carriers to keep their handsets up to date after they leave store shelves. In both the iPhone and iPad lineups, Apple typically keeps a version of an older product around to sell as lower-priced models, rather than coming out with two or three new models targeted to specific market segments. This means that continued software updates for those products don’t just benefit existing users, but they also ensure that those lower-priced phones that are still on store shelves continue to look appealing to new buyers. The market for Android devices is considerably more competitive than that for iOS, and new phones aren’t always intended to replace the top-end model, which ensures that no one phone or tablet is on store shelves making money for its manufacturer for very long.

This is the only way to explain the fact that 2009’s iPhone 3GS is getting an (albeit feature-limited) update to iOS 6 in spite of the fact that the nearly identical third-generation iPod Touch and more powerful first-generation iPad are missing out—both of the latter have been missing from store shelves for quite a while at this point, while the 3GS is still being sold as a lower-cost option. The analogous Android phone, the Nexus One, has long since stopped making much money for anyone and will never get an official Ice Cream Sandwich update.