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The problem is that the rebuttal was misinformed and did not understand the basic critique. This is one of the major critiques I have always wanted to see people raise about Android... Because I think consumers should realize that Android has a less sure upgrade cycle before buying.

And the rebuttal also assumes that people actually give a shit why it takes 9 months (as with the Droid Incredible and Gingerbread) to get a new OS update for their phone. Blame the carriers / vendors / blah ... blah ... blah. Personally, I'm tired of their excuses. As someone who paid a lot of money for a high-end smartphone, I expect to receive timely updates when they become available, assuming my phone has the horsepower to run it. If you can't provide that for whatever reason, then you fail. End of discussion.

If the Google Nexus phone is the only one that can be updated in a timely manner without carriers slowing down the process, then the Google Nexus phone is the only one that should be released.

Or at least, that's my perspective. As far as I'm concern, the Nexus phones are the only Android phones that exist anymore. The rest are like bastardized FrankenAndroid devices that should be avoided at all costs, unless you like voiding your warranty in order to get updates.

And I'm tired of the dumbass argument that says most users don't care what version of the OS they're running - I promise you they're going to care when their phone gets hacked and starts making random phone calls/texts because the version of Android they were running had a vulnerability that was exploited, and was fixed in a newer version that never got ported to their phone.

I swear, if you bought a PC and the vendor told you that you shouldn't expect to be able to install the latest updates for whatever reason that did NOT have to do with the hardware being obsolete, there would be rioting in the streets. Yet Fandroids are telling people that this kind of bullshit should be tolerated on phones, which is just their way of trying to create their own Steve Jobs-style reality distortion field.

Edited 2011-10-30 06:40 UTC

It's a critique that's repeated all the time, so I'm not sure why you always want to see it raised. It certainly sucks. Still, it's not like you've been missing out on all that much if your phone stays on Froyo (being stuck with Éclair and no app2sd is worse). The improved cut & paste in Gingerbread is certainly nice, but not needed for software running under it, and the old one won't stop working. Software written for Android usually supports older revisions of the OS. It's not like on OS X, where developers tend to immediately jump to the newest API, forcing anyone wanting to run new software to upgrade the OS.

Keep in mind that people still happily run Windows XP. It's a well supported OS. So is Android down to version 1.6.