I'm not sure I am following how Android has been hindered world wide. Don't they have somewhere near 80-85 percent market share?
There aren't any monetary incentives for telcos to pay a team of people to update those aging phones. That is why it won't happen. Jellybean, Kitkat, and now Lolipop were all designed by Google to kill fragmentation. When Google rolled over on its back by letting carriers continue to not update phones they switched to something the carriers couldn't control...Play Services.
Yes, Ollie, you are right. Android does have nearly 85% of the marketshare worldwide (see below), however a large portion of that is with many older models and fragmentation is still a huge issue across the entire spectrum of Android phones, old and new.
Marketshare worldwide (
IDC Smartphone OS Market Share 2014 2013 2012 and 2011)
Period Android *iOS* -Win- BB Others
Q2 2014 84.7% 11.7% 2.5% 0.5% 0.7%
Q2 2013 79.6% 13.0% 3.4% 2.8% 1.2%
Q2 2012 69.3% 16.6% 3.1% 4.9% 6.1%
Q2 2011 36.1% 18.3% 1.2% 13.6% 30.8%
Source: IDC, 2014 Q2
But the "telcos" wouldn't be tasked with the process of updating the older phones, the manufacturers would, and only if they wanted the phones to look and feel like they did when originally released. The downloads and flashing would be a Google process and from the Google website (or the play store). Otherwise the hardware would be the same, the only difference would be the OS and GUI. The phone would lose the manufacturers' custom "skin" and become like a Nexus device. In fact, Google could "assume" first position on the phone and make the OS more "Google" representative, thereby taking over older phones and making an instant "google phone" marketshare.
My argument is that when it comes to Android, it's clearly what people want as evidenced by the rapid trend and huge position now, however it comes at a price...fragmentation. Those who "enjoy" the uniformity of the iOS experience are unaware of the benefits of Android, or they're unwilling to give up the "it just works" mentality they've been trained to believe that the iOS iPhone experience is. If fragmentation hadn't been an issue those incredible growth trends would have been faster and steeper. It's all too obvious as well that Android has taken from ALL the other OSs marketshares as indicated by the downward-trending numbers across the other choices.
We all know that from a functionality, versatility and customization standpoint Android blows away the competition (read iOS mainly but all competing OSs in general), but even the remaining 11.7% of the marketshare that iOS holds is still a monumental number in terms of potential marketshare and profits. If you don't believe that, just look at Apple's stock price, having mainly been driven to the stratosphere by the iPhone's monumental success. Heck, I'd give my right arm to have even one tenth of one percent of the 11.7% that Apple enjoys. If I did, I'd be a multi-multi millionaire.
And can we blame Google, well in a way yes, and in a way no. They (and the manufacturers), NEED the carriers to provide the cellular towers for the phones, but the carriers NEED the manufacturers and Google (and iOS, Windows, Blackberry, etc.), for the phones. So it's a two-way street. They're all interdependent. So if one of the interdependent forces (read carriers), makes it clear to the others that it must be this way, they have very strong incentive to comply. The only part that they must comply with though, is the part that connects with their networks and communicates, i.e. the radio communcations and supporting protocols, which is now but a small part of these phones.
But could Google create a plain vanilla OS that could be completely compatible with the majority of older devices and would NOT interfere wih the communications portions of the kernel, allowing the phones to remain compliant with the cellular networks but simply bring them into a commonality as far as the user experience? Sure they could, and I believe that's what they're trying to do. At least that's what I'm hoping they're trying to do. If they couldn't, then the Nexus wouldn't exist.
