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 They don't even particularly care if you prematurely decide your phone is janky and outdated and you need a new one on account of no OS updates, because.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?