Are Wireless Carriers Responsible For Fragmentation?

Carriers release few updates for phones as compared to the OS updates created.

 
And it is the lack of updates being released which should be raising some big concerns amongst all the manufacturers of phones. While there is no empirical proof of the number of updates which smart phone owners never seem to get, there are enough examples of this which point out problems. The upgrade process for the OS on a smart phone should be multiple times over the course of a year and yet it seems that there is often only a single update. That is unless you have an Apple iPhone where they force these on wireless carriers and prevent them from adding their items to the puzzle. For Android devices, this is turning into a big problem which is not going to go away until some things change in the process.

It seems that wireless carriers are at odds with the largest OS provider in Google's Android OS. Recently, there has been some finger pointing between AT&T and Google which in this case made AT&T look bad. This is all over the problems with the slow roll out of Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0). The slow roll out is a big problem for Google right now as they only have 4.9% of Android devices on the latest OS for all active Android phones. Given that Android 4.0 has been out since November on the Galaxy Nexus, it makes one wonder exactly what is going on.

This seems to point squarely at wireless carriers for the delays, though manufacturers of smart phones are to blame as well. They all seem to want to add their pieces to the Android OS and that slows things down. There is the development time and then testing for each step along the way. If a problem is discovered in testing, it goes back to development for a fix and then a repeat of the process. If this process were to be changed so that the stock Android 4.0 was used and no other changes to the OS were done other than to support the individual hardware, that would significantly speed up the process. Or would it.

In a post from Gotta Be Mobile by Adam Mills, he is relating his experiences with his Galaxy Nexus which he purchased from Verizon 5 months ago. Since he purchased the phone, he has not seen an update from Verizon. Not one. He is currently running Android 4.0.2 which came with the phone when he purchased it. Since that time, Android 4.0.3 and Android 4.0.4 has been released. Android 4.0.4 started rolling out to Galaxy Nexus phones, but only for the GSM version. To date, there has been no release of the latest version of Ice Cream Sandwich at Verizon since the Galaxy Nexus was launched. This is a very bad sign.

I owned a Blackberry Storm for a time which I purchased from Verizon back in January of 2009. This was a few months after the 9530 model was released and it had a number of reported bugs associated with the phone which could be easily fixed by a software update. Ever 3 or 4 weeks, there was another updated OS from Blackberry to fix problems, but these were never released by Verizon. This seemed to continue for what seemed like an eternity. Finally, in October 2009 came the official word that Verizon was releasing the 5.0.0.328 OS update for the Blackberry Storm. This was great to download and fix problems, but that was the last update for the phone that I ever saw.

This is not to pick on Verizon as all the other wireless carriers in the US have probably done the same thing at one time or another. And it is probably more widespread than we would all like to believe. The pattern that I am seeing is that you get one significant software update and that is it. You are done until you purchase your next phone. I am sure I am blowing this out of proportion, but then again maybe I am not. In an article about Android Orphans, the number of devices which are one or more versions behind is not how it should be. I am sure that you can find other examples of this by doing some searches on the web.

The idea of only getting a single OS update on a phone is very discouraging and something must change. If not, people are going to start looking elsewhere for a phone where they are able to get multiple updates over the course of the year. And a phone where they get a major update close to an annual basis. At the moment, Apple is the only one that has been able to fulfill that and Google had better take notice. I am not an iPhone supporter and prefer the Android OS, but the idea of only getting a single update from my wireless carrier is discouraging.

Have you had a similar experience of only getting a single OS update to your phone?