Linked by Radio on Mon 2nd Jul 2012 19:15 UTC
It was time somebody cleared that up: the oft-decried skins put by OEM and operators on Android are not responsible for the lateness or lack of updates. The truth is that skins are easy, hardware drivers are hard. That is not to say skins do not have other problems, or that the problem is unsolvable, but asking for "stock" Android OS is not going to help on the update front.
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I still think it contributes to the problem. Maybe not for point releases, but certainly for anything that breaks whatever hooks into the OS they call into to achieve custom skinning.
I just can't imagine that skins from say 2.3 work as-is with 4.0, things just undoubtedly have changed and it contributes (albeit maybe not the main contributing cause) to update delays.
Besides that, there is still the major implication that in my opinion I've yet to find a skin which in its totality does something good for Android that stock doesn't do. Small things that HTC and Samsung do are helpful, but as a whole, hell no.
In my opinion they just make things slower and are a net loss in UX for the consumer.