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Comment by sespindola | Hacker News Reader

Yes but, in the case of android, the assembly work is rather trivial if they wanted to offer a standard android rom.

Most of the complexity lies in the gui elements added by the manufacturers (TouchWiz, HTC Sense, etc) in an attempt to differentiate themselves from the rest and foster brand loyalty.

In any case, I don't think the software customization cost per unit in android phones it's anywhere near those MS license costs.

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> Yes but, in the case of android, the assembly work is rather trivial if they wanted to offer a standard android rom.

Only if you want to ship an SoC already supported by Linux. (Even then, there is tons of board specific code.) If not, you are looking at a very non trivial amount of work.

By now Android supports most of the ARM chips architectures. The only case where this might not be true is when a completely new one appears, and Google chose to launch with another architecture and not support that one. But even then, the chip maker will do most of the work to support the latest version of Android.

You really don't know what you are talking about, Android is only originally built around the Nexus device Google is launching with the particular version of the OS, it is a huge effort to make compatible drivers for all the different pieces of tech that goes in to the different Android devices. Hence why it took so long for the Nexus S to get Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, not to mention the plethora of other devices still waiting on a port.

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