Your chances of getting ICS on your legacy device are virtually zero. whereas getting IOS 6 on the iphone 4S is assured.
Yes, but how important is this really in practice? With both platforms approaching maturity deploying major OS updates OTA is going to be less important.
Google can ride the natural device upgrade cycle to get out new versions. If they can make the browser and email client and a few other key apps independent of the OS they can rev those a lot faster. No doubt they'd like to have Apple's upgrade muscle but I'm not convinced they really need it in the long term.
It's pretty important to user satisfaction that Joe can say to Sally "You have an iPhone, right? Check out what they can do now!" And Sally be able to say "Mine does that too? Awesome!"
As opposed to Android, where Joe and Sally can barely help one another through the various UI skins half the time, let alone share enjoyment in cool new software features on devices purchased mere months apart.
(Sure, with iOS there are updates and features that don't get patched into older devices. But those situations are vanishingly few compared to Android.)
So, as an answer to the various times this question has been posed in this thread: Yes. It's a big deal to normal users that reasonably contemporary devices behave the same and generally have the same software features. And it's a very big deal for them to find out they bought the 'wrong' phone, not six months ago, because they got a model that will likely never get the cool new software feature their friend just showed them.
The degree to which updates don't matter, is the degree to which the users are barely interested in the device at all and use them as little more than a flip phone with better email and browser.
Which, while accurate for a certain population of users, hardly supports the relevance of any possible Android feature advantage.
It's pretty important to user satisfaction that Joe can say to Sally "You have an iPhone, right? Check out what they can do now!" And Sally be able to say "Mine does that too? Awesome!"
Sally won't be able to do Turn by turn if she has a 3GS or iPhone 4, whereas even out of date Android's on 1.6 can.
"Sure, with iOS there are updates and features that don't get patched into older devices. But those situations are vanishingly few compared to Android."
But the "vanishingly few" are often the most significant features of a particular years iOS upgrade, whereas Google's 1st party apps are for the most part decoupled with the major differences between 4.X and 2.X being UI.
The situation is much more nuanced than you state.
No, they can't ride the natural device upgrade cycle to get out new versions because there is no requirement for new devices to install the newest version. Apple on the other hand, can ride the device upgrade cycle because when you go pick up a new phone at the Apple store it is running the newest version of the operating system, and the features get rolled out to everyone.
I would argue that as new features in newer versions of operating systems become more and more of a spectacle that people everywhere, not just geeks are watching, Pushing major OS updates becomes more and more important.
If you're going to show off a new feature to the world, it's nice if most people can actually get at it.
there is no requirement for new devices to install the newest version.
No, but only the really low-end Android phones are coming out with 2.x anymore and that number is going to dwindle quickly over the next year. And ICS is not as crucial as some people make it out to be since 2.x is a decent platform already and a lot of features have been backported.
The international versions of the S2 and the Note have already been updated to ICS, as have many of the carrier versions (the AT&T Note and Epic 4G Touch, at least).
I'm not saying that we've seen the last word in mobile operating systems, but neither iOS nor Android have made any fundamental UX changes in the last few major updates.
If "last few major updates" means, say, at least 2 major updates, I believe you've been hiding under a "few major rocks", because that's certainly not the case. Both platforms have seen tremendous UX changes/improvements.
Like what? Yes there have been some enhancements but the fundamental UI vocabulary and representation is the same. iOS was a big leap forward from the alternatives in 2007. Nothing we've seen since has been even close to as radical.
I find it really fundamental to swipe left and right to change the foregrounded app, and have the other apps still there where I left them when I swipe back. That's a huge huge change, and takes it from toy to tool.
Agree that notifications pull down and similar are gravy, but tasty gravy nonetheless.
Yes, but how important is this really in practice? With both platforms approaching maturity deploying major OS updates OTA is going to be less important.
Google can ride the natural device upgrade cycle to get out new versions. If they can make the browser and email client and a few other key apps independent of the OS they can rev those a lot faster. No doubt they'd like to have Apple's upgrade muscle but I'm not convinced they really need it in the long term.