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Comment by jeron | Hacker News Reader

customers would be more inclined to buy from a vendor that does use Treble

Would they? Or would 99% of them not know about this kind of stuff until it was too late?

A huge percent of people with Android phones think they're Google phones (not Motorola or Huawei or Acer or whatever), so if they decide to avoid their old 'brand' wouldn't they try to avoid Android?

Of course if they know they have a Samsung they can avoid that, but...

This is what, the third or fourth try at fixing this problem? It needs fixing, but I'm rather skeptical at this point. Just because the hardware interface doesn't need to be re-created doesn't mean the vendors will ship updates. It will just be waiting on something else like vendor/carrier software customization that they're not going to bother with because they'd rather work on the new model.

Good luck Google. This would be a great thing for everyone. I just don't hold much hope.

By this logic, shouldn't the Nexus/Pixel phones be a lot more popular than they are?

They can't become popular if they're difficult to buy.

exactly

I haven't looked at the numbers, but they're unavailable in a lot of countries, and are kind of expensive since a few generations.

End customers don't even know that Nexus/Pixel phones exist (because you mostly cannot buy them everywhere) and they don't know the benefit from such devices and they also don't care deeply enough.

I agree that the Nexus phones are advertised poorly, but the Pixels have a lot of advertising in the carrier's stores here in Canada.

The Rogers where I got my last phone, for example, had a dedicated display in the middle of the store for the Pixel phones.

There's also the issue that the Nexus line were perfect budget phones, while the Pixels are high-end. So even with much better advertising, cost becomes the Pixels barrier to entry.

Totally agree with this. Nexus was good performance for an affordable price. Pixel is so much more expensive that Nexus owners are likely to balk at the price tag.

And Google can't keep up with demand for Pixels: http://www.androidpolice.com/2017/03/14/nearly-5-months-goog...

They might be, if people actually knew that they existed...

The way people buy phones is a lot more complicated. Most people pick a carrier first, and then the phone; and most people buy their phone from their carrier store (or a carrier booth at a place like Costco). Thus the consumer choices are controlled by the carrier. If a carrier doesn't want to sell a Pixel phone, then few will be sold, regardless of what consumers might 'want'.

Apple is obviously an exception to this due to their own advertising and stores.

Not in Europe, generally.

Most countries have more pre-paid users than on contracts, so we get our phones from computer or phone stores instead of carrier stores.

Even Google abandons their products after a couple of releases. Perhaps better supported than other manufacturers but I'm running 7.1.2 on a Nexus 4 only through Lineage OS.

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