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Comment by jakub_g | Hacker News Reader

The problem is partially on the customer side (and I am part of it): typically new Android is available first (or at all) on newest aka most expensive devices. I don't necessarily need the most expensive device on market and I accept being a bit behind (which usually has an added value of not being a beta tester with a bunch of stupid regressions thrown at you). So I typically buy a one-Android-behind device, with great hardware for half price essentially.

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We'll see what happens as the sale to Lenovo takes hold, but Motorola has continued to ship pretty decent lower end devices, with pretty rapid updates.

Not the very bottom of the market devices, but they are pretty good for the $200 price point.

Regardless of who's to blame and all that meta conversation, Motorola has not been doing great with the updates these days. The original Moto G was updated to 5.0 something like 9 months after the launch of 5.0. Moto E (2015) was updated from 5.0 to 5.1 and then abandoned. Turbo II got 6.0 a month or two ago.

There are almost certainly worse OEMs who never update anything, or update 2 years late, but I would not describe Moto as rapid on updates.

I have 6.0 on my 2015 Moto G. Since December.

I blame customers too, but for a different reason. I only reward manufacturers for devices that are well-represented on Cyanogenmod. Granted, someone like my mom has no hope of installing Cyanogenmod on her own, given that she knows nothing of Google or Android. But as long as people have friends or family to help them out with technical matters, they only have themselves to blame for devices whose software quickly go stale.

> But as long as people have friends or family to help them out with technical matters, they only have themselves to blame for devices whose software quickly go stale.

That part makes no sense to me. People who don't have the technical skill to deal with upgrading are typically the people least interested in upgrading.

No, they are not interested enough to care about version upgrades, but they do want to keep running the latest apps and games. This was a real problem until Kitkat came along. These days, app developers seem to be aiming for a minimum of Kitkat, so users who don't upgrade don't suffer as much.

They also should be interested in case of security updates. If Apples update numbers are true, they somehow manage to get the majority of their users to update to the latest version and this is something Android should aim for too.

Cyanogen went stale on me. If I tried to update, it would not boot. Nexus for the win.

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