Bullshit. There are any number of ways Google can fix this issue: Subsidized engineers to write drivers for them Free/Cheap consulting team to write drivers a

Bullshit. There are any number of ways Google can fix this issue: Subsidized engineers to write drivers for them Free/Cheap consulting team to write drivers and package releases for them Supporting open source projects for porting firmware forward for the phones They can create a HUGE code and VHDL library for phone development which can be used by anyone building a phone, thereby increasing the ability to release interfaces that fit with the new Android releases Then can take on the vendor specific builds (a la a build farm). And most importantly: Re merging Android with the Linux kernel, and pushing heavily for phone vendors to merge their source in as well. Those are just technically oriented ways they can do it. From a business standpoint: They can make an "Instant Upgrade" seal they put on phones that will have upgrades available X days after the vanilla Google release is out there. I know many people would look for this. They can add a marketing division around android which gives a top tier to android phones which support a reasonable update timeline. They can add future proof specs for the next 3 versions of Android, and anyone with at least those steps can run it out of the box They can step up the GPL enforcement, making sure people are releasing all the drivers for all the phones as they're created, then take those source code drops and vanilla android, release a vanilla android build for all phones (or all phones that don't release an updated version in X days). Google is providing pisspoor integration support for vendors, and the vendors certainly have no interest in updating handsets. If google doesn't fix this, Apple wins.