> As for everyone else, how quickly they update seems to depend on how complicated their skin is and how much they take advantage of the update mechanisms Googl

> As for everyone else, how quickly they update seems to depend on how complicated their skin is and how much they take advantage of the update mechanisms Google has created. Honestly, as someone who worked at an OEM, all that matters is how many engineers are assigned. There are usually hardly any assigned to port a new Android version to an old product, and almost all are assigned to the next product release. The skin often isn't even a huge issue. At the company I was at there were two different software divisions, and the one that ported a new version of Android to platforms (ripping out all the software drivers and getting the hardware ones working, mostly) was completely different from the one that worked on getting the skin framework many levels above running on the vanilla version of Android then produced for the target.