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Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

> And that's pretty much the answer...

Not really. Android got big because OEMs can do as they like with it. And what OEMs like doing, apparently, is not updating the OS on their device. An Android OS that, from the start, controlled OEMs in some way (by e.g. forcing them to ship updates on a certain schedule) would likely not have become a viable contender in the market.

It's not the fault of Android that OEMs are stupid, but Android was created specifically to cater to OEMs and their stupidity. Android's existence is itself the problem.

(It'd be great if their licensing model up until now was just a bootstrapping strategy, though, and they began requiring things of their OEMs.)

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It would be nice if they forced OEMs to use stock Android and update regularly, but they're already under government investigation for requiring Android branded phones to use certain Google services like Play...

To a certain degree, they're forced to either be open as they are now, or sell devices. Given absurd government rulings, forcing stock Android on OEMs would probably bring an antitrust suit against them.

Wait how is Google under investigation when they are even more open than Apple, regardless of what they ask of OEMs?

Apple's market share is fairly small compared to Android, on a world-wide basis. And because Apple is closed and proprietary, it can do what it likes. No other companies are installing iOS or Mac OS X on devices, so Apple has nobody to mess around.

Apple isn't forcing anything on OEMs. Google is, similar to how Microsoft was forcing things on PC OEMs back in the day.

> An Android OS that, from the start, controlled OEMs in some way would likely not have become a viable contender in the market.

I'm not sure... From the start, Android was the only viable contender for OEMs. Their choices were create their own OS (good luck catching up to iOS) or take Android with whatever restrictions it had.

Don't forget that were alternatives and I'm sure the large manufacturers were playing Google off against Microsoft, Nokia (Maemo), Samsung (Bada), Palm (WebOS), etc. Those were bigger names in mobile than Google and it wasn't obvious that Apple was going to steamroller the entire industry so quickly.

As we saw, the established companies wasted years and billions trying to play their same games with customer neglect, pointless restrictions and marketing deals, etc. Android became big precisely because Google was desperate to get into the market and agreed to all of it.

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