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Comment by squarecat | Hacker News Reader

Aside from the strong note of Android OEM apologist emanating from this piece, the fact that this idea isn't /entirely/ preposterous speaks volumes about the sad state of the platform. What Google releases and what most buyers eventually experience are as different as day and night.

As a long time devotee and early-adopting "evangelist" (especially Maps, Gmail/Apps, Picasa, and eventually Android) it seems we are witnessing Google's decent into terminal failure to grasp the concept, and value, of "customer"...

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I think that Android OEMs deserve some apology, if anything so that folks can better understand the realities of the situation. People want updates like Apple provides with iPhones, but given how vastly different the business structures are in the Androidverse, that may not be realistic.

Apple provides updates to old phones because it has a strong financial incentive to do so: They don't just sell phones, they also operate an app marketplace for those phones, and they get a cut of the sale price of every app sold through that marketplace. So they want to keep all their users buying apps, even the ones with old phones. Part of doing that is giving existing users a reason to stay checked-in - and pushing new features to users of old phones through OS updates allows them to do that. They also want to have as much "awesomeness" in the app store as they can get, and one way they can facilitate that is by minimizing the hurdles that might prevent developers from using all the latest and greatest features in their APIs. On that front, the biggest hurdle imaginable would be if only a minority of the platform's users had the ability to run apps that depend on the latest API. So Apple really, really wants to keep old iPhones up to date as long as they can, not out of some sense of corporate altruism, but because doing this maximizes app store profits for them.

On Android, on the other hand, there is absolutely none of that. The only time Android OEMs see any money is when you buy a new phone. They don't care if you can run ICS+-only apps, because they don't see money from the app store. They don't care if you keep buying new apps, because they don't see any money from the app store. They don't even particularly care if you prematurely decide your phone is janky and outdated and you need a new one on account of no OS updates, because. . . oh wait, they do care there. They want that to happen, because the only time they see money is when your current phone gets tossed in the dustbin.

Meanwhile, as the article points out, providing updates to old phones is quite an expensive process. Especially if you're doing anything beyond pushing patches.

So. . . given that the incentive structure built into the Androidverse serves to heavily disincentivize OEMs from providing iPhone-style support, the question remains: Why on earth, then, should they?

Well one might hope that the incentive for providing iPhone style support would be iPhone style customer satisfaction.

The situation you describe is basically that the OEMs didn't get a good deal from their OS provider and are choosing to pass the costs on to their customers in terms of poorer after sales service instead of higher up-front costs.

As for Apple, they clearly don't do anything out of altruism, but they seem to try to have deliberately structured to maximize customer satisfaction over time so as to justify higher margins.

Why? Long term viability -- a concept that many large successful companies seem to increasingly, and mistakenly, assume is assured by their sheer mass. This, despite plenty of recent examples to the contrary.

With no suggestion of altruism or the like, it is simply good business in most markets to invest in the satisfaction of your customers. Since they were brought up, Apple is an excellent HIGHLY PROFITABLE example of this correlation to the bottom line -- possibly the poster child of the foreseeable future. There are other good examples to be found, very likely in the form of far smaller enterprises in your own area.

Pleasing your new and incumbent user-base is certainly no guarantee of success, but can anyone produce data that supports the idea that it would be net loss in the long run, all things considered? I mean, if the definition of a business is intent to profit, doesn't it stand to reason that the longer you operate, the more profits you generate? (In the most generalized sense, not discounting the possibly complex specificities of a large operation nor the vagaries of human behavior and progress...)

> Why? Long term viability

Given how Android's been doing in terms of phone market share, I don't think Android OEMs need to be too terribly worried that failing to provide updates is seriously affecting their long-term viability. At least not for the moment. These kinds of complaints mostly only crop up among HN geeks like us; the bulk of the market at large doesn't know about, doesn't understand, or doesn't care about the issue.

On the other hand, paying for the development resources it would take to supply those kinds of updates would force an OEM to raise their prices. For reasons related to the above, It's reasonable to surmise that would be a suicidal move for any Android OEM. None of them are fueled by customers who love that company's product so much that they'd be willing to pay a premium price for it. On the contrary, the Android market is characterized by heavy price competition and razor-thin margins. It's like the PC market of 10 years ago: There's simply no mercy to spare for a company that blows any significant money on happy-warm-fuzzy customer support.

The average customer is MORE likely to act on warm-fuzzies. Human psychology dictates it and the marketplace demonstrates it. The stock market takes that behavior to the bank daily.

The purportedly high cost of OEM development would be mismanagement at best and is simply an informal fallacy at worst.

Your rebuttal supports my statements, as captured by this statement: "It's like the PC market of 10 years ago..." Pray tell, which players remain from that era and, of those, which are not on the brink of insolvency?

The average customer is more likely to act on what they perceive as warm fuzzies at the moment that they're making a purchasing decision. That may or may not correlate with what geeks such as ourselves feel warm and fuzzy about in the abstract.

Regardless, you misinterpret me. When I said warm fuzzies, I meant companies doing things just to be nice to customers, regardless of whether there's reason to believe it will draw immediate profit. These things can't be reasonably expected to affect revenues for companies that don't have very strong brands (say, Apple) simply because they're things that people generally aren't thinking about while they're in the store. People in general are barely aware of HTC as an actual entity, so they have a hard time having any sort of emotional reaction to it, positive or negative.

Pray tell, which players remain from that era and, of those, which are not on the brink of insolvency?

Dell, HP, Acer, Samsung, IBM/Lenovo, Toshiba. . . and they're all doing fine. I just double-checked on their rough financials, and all but HP had healthy increasing revenue and profit over the past year. HP's profits are down, but still deep in the black.

I stand corrected on the financial point.

And while we can agree that most people are largely brand agnostic in a number of tech-related purchases, sentiment still plays a role, even if it isn't as explicitly expressed in the way a typical Hacker News reader might.

I believe the only reason 3GS owners got iOS 5 was because of iCloud. Normally, Apple is quite happy to leave the oldest hardware editions in the dust with nary a care.

So they issue iOS 5 to every supported device and, lo and behold, iCloud has 80 million users overnight. It doesn't matter that most people think iCloud is useless, what matters is they frictionlessly transitioned 80 million people onto their servers. Now that they have those users they can figure what to do with it.

I don't believe Apple is doing this out of altruism for users or developers. I think they are honestly going after Google, Microsoft, Dropbox, et al. at the same time. And the most effective way to do that is to have...80 million users on day one.

It's important to note that unlike older phones and Macs, Apple is still currently selling the 3GS.

The original iphone and the iphone 3G stopped receiving updates 3 years after release[1]. It's important to note, though, that in both cases the update cycle continued for a significant amount of time after the devices were no longer available in stores.

The original iPhone received its last update 1 year and 6 months after the device was discontinued: iOS 3.1.3 was released February 2, 2010 while the original iPhone was discontinued July 11, 2008.[2][3]

The iPhone 3G received its last update 5 months and 18 days after being discontinued. In this case, given that it had the same specs as the original iPhone except for the 3G modem, I think that iOS was rapidly becoming too resource intensive to continue updating for this device, considering that by 2010 the majority of the hardware was already 3 years old. That said, iOS 4.2.1 was released November 22, 2010, and the 3G was discontinued as of June 4, 2010.[2][3]

Contrast this to Android where some flagship phones don't even receive security updates after even a year (the chart in my references only includes notable Android devices, and ignores cheaper ones that go after the free w/ contract market etc.)

Paying for updates is not the solution. Unfortunately, unless Google or consumers grab the vendors by the balls, the only thing that I honestly think will do anything at all about this situation is a rather nasty worm that manages to do some serious damage to devices that haven't gotten timely updates. I don't want to see that happen, it would really hurt Android's reputation in the eyes of those who won't understand that the HW vendor is to blame for the problem, not Android the OS.

[1] Chart of device updates published some time ago: http://theunderstatement.com/post/11982112928/android-orphan...

[2] iPhone discontinuation dates and final iOS version: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_iOS_devices#iPhone

[3] Release dates of iOS versions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_version_history

> I believe the only reason 3GS owners got iOS 5 was because of iCloud.

I think it's more because they're still actively selling the 3GS, as their $0 entry-level iPhone.

Well, that and the 3GS is still being sold. Previously, Apple would retire the phone that came out 2 years previously when they brought out the new model.

> I don't believe Apple is doing this out of altruism for users or developers. I think they are honestly going after Google, Microsoft, Dropbox, et al. at the same time. And the most effective way to do that is to have...80 million users on day one.

Isn’t it beautiful when a company’s self-interests are aligned with their customer’s?

They get users and money, I get an updated OS and new features on my old phone. Everybody wins!

(iCloud useless? you might think that documents on iCloud is useless, but iCloud is also the brand name for email service, contacts, calendar, photos sync and automated daily backups. seems hardly useless to me.)

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