> As the networks currently pay a subsidy they're effectively Android's customers, at least in part The networks have nothing to say in this in 90% of the worl

> As the networks currently pay a subsidy they're effectively Android's customers, at least in part The networks have nothing to say in this in 90% of the world. They're not phone-vendor's customers. They merely want the latest data-gulping phones on their network so they can charge their real customers (people like you and me, which are also the phone-vendor's customers) money for consuming bandwidth. I get that things are messed up in the US, but don't generalize this to the rest of the world. Most networks and cellphone operators around the world sell generic phones, with unmodified software, unlockable bootloaders and carrier-provided SIM cards. And for those phones, which you will find in big parts of the world, having Google responsible for software-updates would work just fine.