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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

I agree completely. Fragmentation isn't something Google wants; we waste a ton of engineering effort supporting old devices. For example, Google Wallet has to support Gingerbread for at least two years because one carrier won't upgrade their Nexus S to Ice Cream Sandwich. That's one extra test run for every commit for two years, eating up thousands of hours of CPU time, physical devices, and developer patience. Multiply that by about 50 for apps that run on all phones, not just ones with special NFC hardware...

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I know aa certain manufacturer who won't update their Nexus One phone to ICS either..

The Nexus One is two and a half years old at this point, it really can't be looked at as a "developer" phone anymore, even if it will works well for casual usage. And it's stuck with only 512MB of built-in flash to store the image. ICS as shipped on other device simply won't fit. It would have to be a custom spin, which for a device this far removed from the state of the art just isn't worth anyone's time.

I have a smartphone that is 3.5 years old already, and it's still getting the latest OS updates. It wasn't even sold as a developer phone either. I'll leave it to the reader to guess what phone it is.

No matter how you spin it, Android OS updates are one big pile of fail, even if you buy a Nexus device.

The iPhone 3GS is not quite three years old, and is the oldest device supported by iOS 5. Its predecessor is just under 4 years old, and is not. (i.e. your 3GS "got" the latest update, it isn't "getting" new ones and will be obsolete at the next major revision too). So Apple products are better supported by about a year.

Actually, you can look at this as an aliasing issue in the data. The 3GS and Nexus One were both the "oldest" supported phones at the release of a major OS version, and that happened about just about exactly 2 years for both of them. One fell on one side of the support decision and one on the other.

The "pile of fail" flameage is beneath this site. Stop that, you're polluting our nice community with your garbage. Argue. Don't sling poo.

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