Carriers are a red herring. The world at large couldn't care less about how the customers of AT&T can supposedly only install AT&T-approved firmware. Most people can, but they're not seeing any updates.
Google needs to fix their upgrade story. Even if the North American customers continued to run old vulnerable versions forever, updating everyone else's systems would be a tremendous improvement. (It would also make it difficult for the US carriers to continue those particular business shenanigans.)
Prior to the iPhone changing how phones were sold-- carriers meddled with everything so they could get their hands in media playback, app sales, feature upgrades etc. I don't think much has changed in this where anyone gives them an inch (which is nearly everyone but Apple).
Note: I worked for T-Mobile for four years prior and a little after the originals iphone came out.
Facts to backup what? That most mobile phone users are outside the US? Or that most of the world buys phones in home electronics stores, not from their carrier?
The iPhone brought a bit of the outside world to the US telco market. This was only a matter of time, as the market becomes more globalized there is increasing competition in the consumer market, and carrier bound phones are less flexible and more expensive in the long run. Everybody knows this.
(I believe that even the US broadband market sooner or later will transformed in much the same way. For a long time it looked like Google was about to do it, but with that seemingly stalled for the time being we might have to wait a few more years.)
It is not reasonable to describe the iPhone as changing how phones were sold outside of a select few countries. Therefore we should not accept that explanation as to why Android phones do not receieve updates either. Those markets are small on a global scale, especially for Android which clearly dominates the lower end of the market, which is predominantly deregulated.
Funny, i felt that the iPhone brought the US mobile market crapfest to the world. Especially when i watched Apple play favorites with what operator in my country, down to dictating the style of plans the iPhone could be combined with.
Where I lived it was common before the iPhone for people to go to electronics stores or carrier-agnostic "phone stores" to buy their phones. You could get an unmolested phone on subsidy/contract and everything. This was in Europe though, where cheap prepaid SIMs for young people and MVNOs were already very popular.
You would walk in, and find a wall of phones, alongside a list of carrier plans.
Then you could pretty much mix and match plan and phone to find some price you were comfortable with.
Come the iPhone's "worldwide" launch however Apple sat down and insisted that only one carrier would get the iPhone, and defined in detail the kinds of plans that said carrier could offer.
Before the iPhone, how prevalent were software updates to phones? I know of no one who ever got had an update.
There is absolutely no reason for carriers to need to do anything at all, else it would not make sense that I can change the SIM card out and voila I’m on a new carrier. The manufacturer is the one doing the testing, and the carrier simply provides the infrastructure.
I feel US perhaps has a different experience, because of their ridiculous CDMA infrastructure. Is it Verizon or what, where it’s not a SIM card but the phone itself that’s setup to a specific carrier?
I only started using around Android 2.3 time frame, because I held to my trusty Symbian until it died on me, by then Nokia was already showing signs of not being sure what to do after Belle.
Belle already had lots of features that took Android and iPhone years to catch up with.
they had Maemo, they had Symbian. But they were afraid that focusing on Maemo would lead to Symbian dying before they could get Maemo to the same level.
And then boardroom meddling was added, and they went much the same way as HP...
It's not just just Verizon. AT&T, in particular, has a habit of locking important features (VoLTE, Wi-Fi Calling) to phones running AT&T-branded and certified software. So unless the device you want is sold by AT&T and you get the AT&T-branded version, you're SoL. They even do IMEI blocking, so even if your device could otherwise work...
I have the impression that Nokia had trouble getting into the US market because they refused to let US carriers modify phone firmware to disable features.
In particular when Nokia tried to introduce SIP support.
Sony Ericsson's non-smart phones (e.g. K800) had OTA software updates. They would pop up a dialog from time to remind you to check for updates, then download them and update, all on the phone. (Carriers would often hold them back, though, if you had a carrier-customized model.)
I'm pretty sure I got an actual update at least once.
Near the end of the dumbphone era I remember getting an OTA update to mine that added a chat-style view to SMS text messaging. I don't think the iPhone would even get OTA updates for years, it was all purely through iTunes.
Google needs to fix their upgrade story. Even if the North American customers continued to run old vulnerable versions forever, updating everyone else's systems would be a tremendous improvement. (It would also make it difficult for the US carriers to continue those particular business shenanigans.)