Have the latest Android version on your phone? Welcome to the 0.4% club

> Obviously, this isn’t the Android users’ faults. The problem is that the OEMs and carriers are holding these updates up for a wide variety of reasons, 99 percent of which are undoubtedly bullshit. [Here’s a perfect example](http://androidspin.com/2011/01/12/breaking-t-mobile-internals-confirm-samsung-is-holding-the-android-world-hostage/). Supposedly, the Android 2.2 update is all ready to go for Samsung Android phones on T-Mobile, but Samsung doesn’t want to push it out so that they can entice people to buy the newly announced Vibrant 4G+ instead. > > Lovely. > > Instead, many Samsung T-mobile Android users are struck with Android 2.1. An OS that while perhaps only a year old, is now two full revisions old in Android land. A dinosaur, in other words. And they’re hardly alone. Some 35.2 percent of *all* Android users are stuck on this same version of the OS. > > Imagine if 35 percent of all iOS users were stuck on iOS 2 (which is so old that it wasn’t even called ‘iOS” at the time), while a few of us had iOS 4 and the majority of us had iOS 3? Yeah… > > Even more humorous is the fact that over 12 percent of Android users are still stuck on Android 1.5 and 1.6. I mean, Android 1.5 is nearly two years old now. And again, more importantly, it’s *four* major revisions ago. iOS hasn’t even gone through four major revisions yet. This is one of the many fundamental flaws of the Android ecosystem. More importantly, it’s a stat that almost everyone fails to acknowledge when they talk about iOS vs. Android device market share. Most of the millions of users stuck on very early versions of Android are not exactly having the same experience as those using the latest and greatest 2.3. Some of the early versions of Android were barely better than feature phones. The same could be said for early versions of iOS, but there are very few iPhone users out there still using the early versions.

And EVEN MORE important is what this statistic suggests about Google’s level of concern for its users. People make jokes about the Apple “religion”, but that’s just an excuse created by companies who can’t compete. The bottom line is that Apple EARNS customer loyalty by paying attention to detail and actively encouraging long-term commitment. Jobs fought AT&T and every other carrier in order to improve the experience for the users. And users notice these things. They notice, and they remember. Google, on the other hand, caters to the carriers, because the carriers are the customer to them. Google probably hopes that you will blame the carrier or the handset maker when you don’t get your update, but I’m willing to bet a fair amount of users are going to resent Google for not sticking up for them, either.