issor":4lu5n7t7 said:
Until carriers get out of the way and stop putting their own makeup on the OS, we'll never see reasonable upgrade availability.
I don't think it's all down to the carriers. They seem to get all the blame, but they're only part of the problem.
Here in Australia, carriers do very little branding. In many cases, customers buy their phones outright and just get the SIM cards from the carriers. The update situation is no different to that in the US. Updates are problematic for Android.
My sister has a Samsung Galaxy Ace. It's a current phone still sold by the carriers, and she is running vanilla firmware, updated straight from Samsung's Kies software.
Supported updates top out at 2.3.6. It is a phone that is being actively sold right now, but can't be updated past Gingerbread, which was released in 2010.
It doesn't seem to be a hardware limitation. According to reports, Android 4.1.1 is installable and runs fine using CyanogenMod. However, there is no way I'm putting that on there for her - I'd prefer not to become responsible for the tech support calls.
I have no idea why Samsung don't just test and release 4.1.1 for one of their phones that is presently in the marketplace. However, since they refuse to do it even for phones sold outright with vanilla firmware, I can't see how it's the carriers' fault.
