My experience after switching to Android is not that though. Most of the major releases, including the upcoming N, offer performance improvements.
Granted, I don't know what that says about the code base, whether it was already so vastly inefficient that they find tons of room for improvements or whatnot, but it's definitely a refreshing change from iOS for me.
I long ago switched away from iPhones to Android devices, but I'd be lying if I didn't admit that Apple's public commitment to privacy and Android's recent security woes didn't make me think twice about what the next phone in my pocket will be. I look at the system updates page on my Moto X longingly, but it still says February 1st is the most recent update available. Not sure how long I'll have to wait but I hope I don't get exploited in the meantime.
But I also wonder what the story is behind that adoption rate discrepancy.
Apple makes their own phones, so they can push out upgrades easily. Most of the Android phones sold were made by Samsung right? And Samsung has a a wide variety of phone models and penchant for making mods that slow down updates and/or make them infeasible for other models.
Aging iPhones also tend to become less enjoyable (carefully selected words) to use on their last viable OS update, so people tend to either upgrade to the latest iPhone or switch platforms.
Speaking of Moto X'es, I just got a notification for an update right now, while my wife who has the same model on the same network got her notification over a week ago. I'm guessing they like to stagger their updates?
We often act as though the world we live in is the only way things could have possibly proceeded, but after WW2 U.S. manufacturing invented the idea of the consumer to cope with manufacturing capacity built up during war time.
We are still effectively living in a manufacturing boom time created by a war machine.
The thing that saddens me is that, business will always do that, it's the survival gene by making profit. On the other hand we could have nice open source, legit good software layers but it just doesn't happen the right way on smartphones so we're stuck with android / ios and their tricks.