Yeah, but this argument...
Is superficial. It isn't real accurate to compare the support or availability for iOS upgrades to Android. I mean, don't get me wrong, it is a tangible issue that is worth discussing in a review of the merits of the two different platforms - but it doesn't align very neatly.
With Apple you've got a single manufacturer with a very small number of devices, a single model at a time (sometimes with some overlap with the previous generation, at MOST), and tremendous clout across a number of different industries and a willingness to really stay in the fight, even if it is financially uncomfortable, to get things their way or have them not be at all.
With Android you've got more than half a dozen major manufacturers, multiple models per manufacturers, many of them overlapping, a huge range of device quality and price points and hardware capabilities, each making their own custom modifications to a base OS provided by a traditionally hands-off platform developer, and then delivered through carriers who are notorious for controlling and manipulating the market to their benefit and treating their customers and handset manufacturers like second class citizens if they can get away with it.
It is a problem, and it HAS been a worse problem in the past than it seems to be headed in the future. But the REALITY of the situation is the people who complain the LOUDEST about this issue are almost inevitably those who own the *competition's* product. Most Android users don't know and don't care on Froyo vs. ICS vs. JB. It is like the difference between a 1st generation Escalade, a 2nd generation and a current generation. Only a very small group of people who REALLY care can tell them apart. To everyone else, they look like giant Cadillac SUVs - all the same and basically capable of more or less the same tasks.
And I'll tell you what... most iOS users I've encountered, they're the same way. They don't care and won't upgrade their OS until something MAKES them upgrade. This issue only matters to us propeller heads... and the bigger propeller head, the more likely they're on machines that either offer quick manufacturer upgrades to the latest, or they've rolled their own ROMs anyhow.
It becomes a real non-issue. It matters to people who it matters to, and they're the people who can get around it, and it doesn't matter to people who can't, and they don't care.
