This isn't quite true: XP drivers are incompatible with later Windows versions, and there's been a lot of problems with Win10 not working with drivers for older

This isn't quite true: XP drivers are incompatible with later Windows versions, and there's been a lot of problems with Win10 not working with drivers for older Windows versions. When this happens, users end up throwing away perfectly good hardware. Obviously, it's not nearly as bad as Android where every single version is incompatible with any other version, but it's still there. The problem with Android is that Google has done an absolutely terrible job of managing it and getting vendors to participate correctly (by open-sourcing their drivers so that the OS can be updated). Linux was never meant to be a commercial product, it was always designed with the open-source philosophy, and what you're seeing there is the result of the conflict here. The kernel itself absolutely does have a stable API, but the drivers have always been considered to be part of the kernel, by the devs.