Why? Well, my ZDNet colleagues have differing views. James Kendrick believes that it's all about the money, while Ed Bott sees it as a business model problem. I tend to think that it's a mixture of both issues. Money, of course, comes into the equation, but the business model factors of binding contracts and subsidized handsets compounds the problem.
But who can solve this update problem?
Only one company can save Android users from years more of update hell ... Google.
So, how can Google fix this mess? Is it by tightly controlling the handset hardware like Microsoft and Apple currently does? Or is it by adopting virtualization, like my colleague Jason Perlow suggests? No, it's far simpler than that.
Far, far simpler.
Google needs to market OS updatability as a key selling feature of its Nexus line of handsets. Furthermore, Google needs to guarantee that all Nexus handsets will be upgradable to the next major Android release.
Doing this would accomplish two things;
To make this work Google would need to do several things:
Come on Google, help make updating Android handsets easier for owners! Only you can do that!
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