I suppose you're right. Seems strange for those things to apparently be so badly broken by OS upgrades that they need months/years to fix. You'd think the savin

I suppose you're right. Seems strange for those things to apparently be so badly broken by OS upgrades that they need months/years to fix. You'd think the savings on support costs alone would be substantial from not having to support older, presumably buggier, versions of the OS. Though I suppose most of the support for these devices comes from the telcos not from the handset makers. Anyway, here's a radical and not necessarily good idea: what if the base "Android" release didn't have a launcher/etc at all, leaving what's commonly called "the UI" entirely up to handset makers. Sure, spin off the existing launcher as a separate open source project, but make it just one competitor among many. If diversity in this area is good and manufacturers really do want to differentiate themselves, make that a core part of the platform. It's not like it's that expensive to write a launcher.