It's not like manufacturers don't want the strong brand recognition of being well supported and giving their owners the latest stuff. That helps them sell future phones as well, by gaining market share.

The problem that Google apologists/Android fanboys forget... is that deploying an Android update is a HUGE cost to manufacturers for customization, testing, and deployment.

Google ships endless new versions without any respect to this, and leaves most of the work, and the cost, on manufacturers, who already had thin margins to begin with. Especially on entry level phones, hardware costs have been a race to the bottom.

These people are afraid to point out that Google has created an OS that's hard to update universally, requires a custom deployment for each and every hardware model, and is shipped without working hardware support for most of the hardware using it or even a modicum of stability even on their own reference platforms.