It shouldn't matter if you buy a "cheap" $50-$100 phone with a 2 year contract. Google is building a brand and it needs to keep people excited about their product. Buying a new phone that is 3 or 4 revs behind will certainly dishearten people.

If you buy a cheap phone ($50 is just enough to buy a garbage cell phone in the states) then you shouldn't be upset that the carrier isn't supporting incremental updates to the phone's operating system. It might not be cost effective. Most people I know that look for cell phones on the super-cheap do not know the difference between Android 1.6 and 2.0. They probably couldn't tell you the difference between 98 and XP.

Edit: In short, I'm saying that if you cannot tell the difference and are a low-end cell phone consumer, then you can just as well do without voice search on your $50 phone. Beyond that, the good phones update themselves.

A big mainstream consumer market isn't going to be so forgiving. Can't really expect them to carefully research which handset is likely to get quick software updates or hack on a custom ROM. My bigger concern is the disparity in hardware. The slower Qualcom based Android phones are still going to be shipping brand new throughout 2010 while the higher end is likely to ascend into multi-core 1Ghz+ CPUs with 4-5x as much RAM as the low end models. I'm not sure how a developer can target all those devices successfully over the next few years.

For most apps it doesn't matter.

For those that do (e.g. 3D games), you simply state that it requires a snapdragon or whatever CPU. Customers will soon be more familiar with their phones specs, as they are with their computers.

Which is a ghastly future to contemplate.

Could you explain how you see it as ghastly?

As long as customers understand that their low-end phone won't be able to run the sexiest games out there, I don't see too much of a problem. The developers just need to figure out how many people have the highest-end phones (and what they'll pay for games that utilize them).

"As long as customers understand that their low-end phone won't be able to run the sexiest games out there, I don't see too much of a problem."

INT. WHITE ROOM

We see two men -- (pudgy but adorable comedian, wearing a robot costume) and (douchey hipsterish guy) -- standing side by side.

DOUCHEY HIPSTER

Hi, I'm an iPhone.

ADORABLE COMEDIAN

And I'm an Android.

DOUCHEY HIPSTER

Hey, Android, have you played this great new game?

You can fill in the rest of the script from here, and perhaps in so doing you'll realize how quickly this could become a major marketing problem for Android...

That already exists with the iPhone today, where the 3GS often runs CPU-intensive apps much better than the earlier models. Segmentation is unavoidable as long as hardware is improving.

"3GS or better required" is much more understandable than "1Ghz Snapdragon or better required", since the package the customer buys says "3GS" prominently - it's even in the name of the device. In fact, customers already are faced with the decision of "3G" vs "3GS" when they buy an iPhone.

What this suggests is that the solution for Android will be to have some easily-understandable number or naming scheme to roughly classify the power of the phone, so apps don't have to list compatible phones en masse. For desktop software, most people basically used the required and recommended CPU speed as such a number. Even though it didn't really capture the full nuances of whether an app required more RAM or more CPU, it was a good enough rough metric.

Not sure what parent meant exactly, but I'd say that requiring a consumer to know what a "Snapdragon CPU" is is a bit of a non-starter.

I'm not so confident that it is that much of a problem. Customers seem to know that a Core 2 beats a Pentium 4. Once 'can this device support x game' becomes enough of a question, users will start paying attention.

And most "normals" are way way happier gaming with their Xbox, PlayStation, or Wii than with their PC, in part because of that very reason. Some user start paying attention, lots of others leave.

I disagree and think it is, potentially, a big problem for android. For example I was all set to buy a (yet to be released) Xperia X10 series phone, but I'm holding back for fear of being stuck with a 1.X phone while the rest of the android world moves on to 2.X.

Generalizing from this if too many vendors start to arbitrarily decide to only run certain versions, then android as a platform could be in jeopardy since developers will have to decided between targeting some lowest common denominator, only developing for a subset of android phones or developing several versions of their app. Once users experience that they can't run certain android apps on their new android phone then they'll lose faith in android as a concept.

If it's not a problem for you, it doesn't mean it's not a problem for anybody else. Especially the more tweaked UI versions (like the Hero) do need work by the manufacturers to be updated. They do have to do that befor you can upgrade, and not all will.

It's actually a big problem. You do not want a 'buyer beware' type of issue to come out when trying to promote your product. At this point, the mobile carriers should be pushing out phones only with the latest release or clearly indicate the version of Android supported by the phone. I'll actually be in the market for a smartphone in a couple of months, and very glad I saw this article. I'm still leaning strongly to Android, but this type of issue could change my mind.