If you care about mobile devices, which you do if you work in the industry you probably should… this is interesting information.
There’s been a lot of buzz around Google’s Android, and for good reason – it’s a good product and it’s making it’s way into the hands of a lot of people. But there’s a catch. Maybe Android doesn’t love you as much as you love it. Based on this research there appears to be a pump-and-dump approach to Android phones. This data suggests the game is to get the phone in a customer’s hands and then move on to finding the next customer.
This isn’t good news for many Android phone owners. This chart suggests that if you want the new features Google has been working on, or at least security patches and fixes to what you have now, quite likely you’re out of luck.
No data on Windows Phone 7, possibly because it’s too new.
Read more here:
Android Orphans: Visualizing a Sad History of Support
I went back and found every Android phone shipped in the United States1 up through the middle of last year. I then tracked down every update that was released for each device – be it a major OS upgrade or a minor support patch – as well as prices and release & discontinuation dates. I compared these dates & versions to the currently shipping version of Android at the time. The resulting picture isn’t pretty – well, not for Android users.