“A new breakdown of Android updates has shown that most American models have had far worse support than the iPhone,” Electronista reports.
“Looking at at models released 2010 and earlier, Michael DeGusta showed that most were abandoned by their makers quickly. Of the group of 18, 15 don’t run Android 2.3, 12 were current for weeks at best, and seven ran obsolete versions even when they launched,” Electronista reports. “It’s considered likely that ‘at least’ 16, though more likely all of them, will go without Android 4.0. Google just recently ruled out the Nexus One.”
“The worst offenders were Garmin, Motorola, and Samsung. Most of their phones shipped at least one version of Android behind, had very short support cycles, and were left two or more versions behind for the majority of an owner’s contract,” Electronista reports. “iPhone owners, meanwhile, have always had up-to-date OS versions for the length of a contract and often beyond. The original iPhone only stopped getting support in February 2010, over two and a half years after it went on sale. While iPhone 3G owners complained of slow iOS 4 performance, they were current up to November 2010. The iPhone 3GS is not only fully up to date almost two and a half years later but still runs smoothly and is very popular, according to AT&T, which noted that more new customers picked the 3GS than any individual Android model.”
Full article here.
DeGusta, who produced the chart for the understatement.com, writes, “It appears to be a widely held viewpoint3 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 and abandoning your users isn’t going to engender much loyalty when they do buy a new phone. Further, it’s been fairly well established that Apple also really only makes money from hardware sales, and yet their long term update support is excellent.”
In other words, 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. – Michael DeGusta
“All of the even slightly cheaper phones are much worse than the iPhone when it comes to OS support, but it’s interesting to note that most of the phones on this list were actually not cheaper than the iPhone when they were released. Unlike the iPhone however, the ‘full-priced’ phones are frequently discounted in subsequent months,” DeGusta writes. “So the ‘low cost’ phones that fueled Android’s generally accepted price advantage in this period were basically either (a) cheaper from the outset, and ergo likely outdated & terribly supported or (b) purchased later in the phone’s lifecycle, and ergo likely outdated & terribly supported.”
“Also, at any price point you’d better love your rebates. If you’re financially constrained enough to be driven by upfront price, you can’t be that excited about plunking down another $100 cash and waiting weeks or more to get it back. And sometimes all you’re getting back is a ‘$100 Promotion Card’ for your chosen provider. Needless to say, the iPhone has never had a rebate,” DeGusta writes. “Along similar lines, a very small but perhaps telling point: the price of every single Android phone I looked at ended with 99 cents – something Apple has never done (the iPhone is $199, not $199.99). It’s almost like a warning sign: you’re buying a platform that will nickel-and-dime you with ads and undeletable bloatware, and it starts with those 99 cents. And that damn rebate form they’re hoping you don’t send in.”
See the “Android Orphans: Visualizing a Sad History of Support” chart and read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: If you’re financially constrained enough to be driven by upfront price, you can’t afford a smartphone, droidtard.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Ergoman” for the heads up.]
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