How did Android's update support become so inconsistent?

ALostInquirer@lemm.ee to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 128 points –

As a point of comparison, Microsoft ships its OS across a variety of manufacturers and largely keeps it maintained across them (give or take some exceptions like enterprise environments & the like).

Even unlocked Android phones purchased independently of carriers have inconsistent lengths of support, so it doesn't seem to be entirely a result of carriers, so...What happened here?

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But your answer could be interpreted as "a FOSS OS can never maintained for a big variety of hardware over a long life cycle" which would be totally wrong. Android's driver situation might be shit but that has nothing to do with an "open system" vs a "closed system". My knowledge regarding this topic is not deep enough to give a perfect answer but I think other posts here sound more plausible.

I don't wanna sound too defensive but I did say this

That takes considerable effort, although if they chose to focus on a select few devices every year, they'd be able to do so.

I agree that I can reword it to make that clear, but I don't think, nor do I hope anyone will make that conclusion about FOSS...

That sentence is completely correct from my point of view and has nothing to do with Foss. That's an issue for Windows as well as Linux and Android. I think the difference is that that for the former two driver developers just take the extra effort to support hardware long term. So I think you're right that a little rewording would help.