It's a game I wish they'd get out of entirely. There's no such thing as a useful carrier overlay.
Six months and counting, waiting for Verizon to approve the Nougat update on my HTC One M9. It has literally hit everyone else:
[0]http://www.androidpolice.com/2016/12/09/unlocked-htc-one-m9-...
[1]http://www.androidpolice.com/2017/02/23/android-7-0-nougat-o...
[2]http://www.androidpolice.com/2017/03/21/t-mobile-variant-htc...
[3]http://www.androidpolice.com/2017/04/12/htc-one-m9-sprint-ge...
[4]http://www.androidpolice.com/2017/05/16/atts-htc-one-m9-upda...
Honestly, what are they doing, and why does it take them multiple months to do it?
This problem is made worse on Verizon and Sprint which use CDMA 3G networks, as opposed to the worldwide GSM standard.
Also this could be a result of marketing as well. You can get the latest Android on a new device, or you can wait an indeterminate amount of time (a few months to never) to get a free update on your old device.
Why? The whole point of GSM is that carrier and phone can (and should) be entirely disconnected, decoupled and only connected through the means of whatever SIM the user puts in his phone.
The notion that a carrier needs to be involved in the making of a phone makes about as much sense as if my ISP needed to test and "approve" what Ethernet hardware I use at home.
It's frankly none of their business.
> This problem is made worse on Verizon and Sprint which use CDMA
So don't use them, just like you wouldn't use an ISP which doesn't speak IP.
Google needs to fix their upgrade story. Even if the North American customers continued to run old vulnerable versions forever, updating everyone else's systems would be a tremendous improvement. (It would also make it difficult for the US carriers to continue those particular business shenanigans.)
Prior to the iPhone changing how phones were sold-- carriers meddled with everything so they could get their hands in media playback, app sales, feature upgrades etc. I don't think much has changed in this where anyone gives them an inch (which is nearly everyone but Apple).
Note: I worked for T-Mobile for four years prior and a little after the originals iphone came out.
The iPhone brought a bit of the outside world to the US telco market. This was only a matter of time, as the market becomes more globalized there is increasing competition in the consumer market, and carrier bound phones are less flexible and more expensive in the long run. Everybody knows this.
(I believe that even the US broadband market sooner or later will transformed in much the same way. For a long time it looked like Google was about to do it, but with that seemingly stalled for the time being we might have to wait a few more years.)
It is not reasonable to describe the iPhone as changing how phones were sold outside of a select few countries. Therefore we should not accept that explanation as to why Android phones do not receieve updates either. Those markets are small on a global scale, especially for Android which clearly dominates the lower end of the market, which is predominantly deregulated.
There is absolutely no reason for carriers to need to do anything at all, else it would not make sense that I can change the SIM card out and voila I’m on a new carrier. The manufacturer is the one doing the testing, and the carrier simply provides the infrastructure.
I feel US perhaps has a different experience, because of their ridiculous CDMA infrastructure. Is it Verizon or what, where it’s not a SIM card but the phone itself that’s setup to a specific carrier?
I guess not. I guess instead they rely on the GSM specification to allow seamless independence between the phone and the carrier for 99.999% of the phones out there (if not more).
So why do they need to "test" the remaining 0.001% when they have a update in user-facing functionality the carrier will never see or interoperate against?
No carrier in Europe does this.
Does your ISP control what OS updates you can download? No. And why should they?
That carriers needs to do testing is a lie perpetuated to allow for customer-hostile business-practices. Stop repeating it.
It happens with Apple OS updates too, Apple just have sufficient market clout to tell networks they must complete the testing in the week between the gold master release and the public release.
GSM isn't some magic specification. It's entirely possible for a crappy radio firmware to cause significant disruption to a network it connects to (indeed, I've seen a pre-release firmware from a mid-tier Android manufacturer that managed to cause a reboot in every cell tower it connected to from one of the UK's networks). That's an extreme example, but carriers frequently do testing on that basis, and it often holds up the European releases of Android software updates.
>That carriers needs to do testing is a lie perpetuated to allow for customer-hostile business-practices. Stop repeating it.
Other than your opinion, what evidence do you have that this is a lie?
The carrier can still, of course, test the new firmware all they like - they just shouldn't be able to interfere with its release.
Moreover, in some European countries it is normal to buy a phone and a subscription separately. In some countries bundling is even illegal. I have never had a carrier-branded phone since I switched to smartphones, including my Android excursion (Nexus 4, Moto X 2013, Moto G, Moto X 2014) and some Windows Phones that I played with (Lumia 710/920/640). They all worked on multiple carriers.
Everyone should stop perpetuating the carrier testing myth. For this we have the GSM standards and in many parts of the world a large number of phones are not carrier-branded.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/17/13306776/apple-iphone-7-...
