The average consumer doesn't know or care if there phone is on 4.0 or 4.1 or whatever. They care if their phone works well and integrates well with the services they care about. There isn't much sign that Apple is going to overtake Android in the ways that matter anytime soon, regardless of which exact version your are running.

They care when the app the want to install doesn't run and they can't upgrade their phone. I know that's been a factor for many who have switched back to iOS that I know.

Furthermore, I made ZERO claims iOS would overtake Android (very likely never will, in fact I'd bet on it never happening), I answered a question re: fragmentation. I also responded factually with a link to an unarguable source (so the down voters prove their hater mentality denying facts, but alas).

There hasn't really been a major issue with app compatibility since 2.3. Even so, all but 2.3% of android phones are running 4.x or above.

http://www.statista.com/statistics/271774/

If you are stuck targeting Android API version 14 forever, that is a problem. It means Google can never introduce anything new that people can actually use without alienating a portion of the userbase.

Albeit, that was also a perceived huge issue four years ago with 2.3 and version 9, and today all those 2.3 devices are mostly gone.

But in the same way the mhz race was a limited time thing, and after that personal computer sales slowed drastically because the year over year improvements have been much more minute, Google cannot just assume that the planned obsolesce of contract phones will force users to change hardware to keep pace with the OS. A lot of the 4.x era Android devices will be "good enough" for many people in the same way Core 2 was "good enough" for most casual PC users.

And we have seen the fallout of that. Users do not care if their Windows XP is catastrophically insecure when no longer updated, they keep using it until disaster strikes. And the same is bound to happen to all these Android phones that stop getting updates.

I don't think I've ever seen greater technical debt than the accumulated mess of Android device drivers and the OEM habit of forking the kernel and violating the GPL to stick proprietary blobs in and then freeze the kernel, which means every device is on a forced obsolescence cycle whenever their kernel can no longer work with the latest Android requirements.

> They care when the app the want to install doesn't run and they can't upgrade their phone.

Do you have any figure about that or it is just an impression?

I said the source of that info in the immediately following sentence. :)

They won't tell you if you don't ask them directly, but they do care about security. Android's bad reputation at security partly comes from the fact that most devices in existence are completely outdated.