The big problem is one of customer expectation. End users don't really care about which version of Android is which. They care, for the most part, about being a

The big problem is one of customer expectation. End users don't really care about which version of Android is which. They care, for the most part, about being able to run their favourite apps on a device. When a customer buys an Android device, rightly or wrongly they more or less expect it to behave in the same way as their friend's. Even if their friend has a SG SII and they've just bought a ZTE or Huawei. After all, that's how things (more or less) work for iOS. What a lot of operators have found is that when they flood their network with cheap, low end Android devices (which are not adequately explained as such), that many get returned. Many of these returns are 'No Fault Found' - meaning that there was no technical fault with the device at all, but it didn't meet the customers expectations. The argument that it was a feature would work if there were tighter minimum hardware specs for running Android, but too often fragmentation means the Android platform being misused by being loaded onto poorly equipped devices.