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Comment by sirn | Hacker News Reader

They've been doing this since Mac OS X 10.3 or so. It's nothing new.

I didn't realize that. Then why is this news? And why is it news when a phone company decides it's not worth the trouble to build out ICS for a 2 year old phone?

Honest questions. As people in this thread with more knowledge than myself have stated, there's a tradeoff in introducing new technology and maintaining legacy hardware support. OS fragmentation seems natural. And the better our tech gets (longer life of devices), the worse the problem will get. Considering how fast phone technology works, why is/was Android fragmentation such an issue?

Because (as far as I know), lots of currently shipping phones ship with old versions of Android. Everything that Apple currently ships will be upgradeable to iOS 6 or Mountain Lion.

I don't think the problem people are complaining about Android fragmentation is a phone company decides it's not worth the trouble to build out ICS for a 2 year old phone but rather there's still brand new Android 2.x on sale today with no upgrade path.

Optimus L3 was released earlier this year, ships with 2.3 with no foreseeable upgrade path (thanks to its low price). The software is outdated the moment it was released.

I'm looking for Android phone today and still undecided of what to get (inclined to get HTC One X) because I'm unsure whether it will get a 4.1 update or not.

HTC has a good track record of updating their phones, at one time they were the manufacturer that was best at updating their androids.

For me it was just the opposite I got an HTC phone with 1.6 (when it was already obsolete) and newer got an upgrade (except Cyanogen which doesn't count as HTC)

I was saying compared to the others manufacturers, specially motorola.

>"but rather there's still brand new Android 2.x on sale today with no upgrade path."

But the fact that there is still an Android with 2.2 available, brand new is what gives Android it's market advantage: cheap phones. For all people who aren't really techies, Android 2.2 does everything you need, and far more than my original Motorola RAZR. That's bad for Android?

It's one thing to drop support for computers that are several years past the end of their extended warranties, based on mostly sound technical reasoning, and another thing entirely to stop issuing updates for phones that are still under contract. And I say this as someone who waited for the update to 64-bit CPUs and then got screwed with 32-bit only firmware. If I had been paying a subscription for my Mac or if the OS updates were as expensive as Windows used to be, I would very upset at Apple's decision to never overhaul the firmware on my Mac, but as it is I'm just disappointed in Apple and Intel for not having a 64-bit EFI ready when the Core 2 processors shipped.

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