Good question. When a phone stops working, people want their money back. Guess where most people in most markets buy their phone from?

Further, who do you think customer's call for support?

Now you know why carriers are hesitant about frequently updating a product they've already made a sale on. If an update breaks something, guess who pays the price?

Not defending them, and it's not the only reason, but it's a big one.

Whether or not they should have a say is a great question. Now that they do, I'm not sure it can be taken away without them simply choosing the next os that they do have more say over.

Which is why I prefer to buy my phone independently from the carrier service.

The parent is pointing out one possible motive for a large carrier, who has to deal with what I call the "general public".

> Which is why I prefer to buy my phone independently from the carrier service.

You're clearly a tech literate person, which is great! But I've worked at a phone/computer repair/resell store for 2 years, and let me tell you, the "general public" can be very interesting.

It's common for many people to not know that their "phone runs android". Let alone the which version LOL!

What I'm trying to say is, it's great that you buy your phone that way, and that's the smart way to do it. We've had plenty of customers looking for unlocked phones too, but even then many don't understand how there's different radios in the phones that work with different carriers, some didn't actually know what being "unlocked" means, etc.

I’m able to buy a Windows computer from third parties and still get an update from Microsoft....

Then they should also be held responsible for the fallout (technical or financial) caused by an unpatched security bug.

Then it's just a liability and risk choice for them. If the user is not able to update, then they shouldn't be the ones on the hook if there are problems.

Because carriers have a tremendous fear of being simple data pipes.

Apple pushed the carriers to allow it to update its own operating systems over a decade ago.

Apple's situation is completely different from Android. Demand for iphone devices was the leverage Apple had over carriers to do this, and it's not a fragmented ecosystem in the first place.

Apple created that demand. They were exclusively on AT&T at first, and aggressively negotiated that contract so they wouldn't have to have carriers' horrible bloatware. Then the exclusivity made negotiating with other carriers easier.

Google didn't even make any phones until much later. Instead they gave phone manufacturers the green light to do whatever they wanted. They ended up designing phones later because of how crappy the Android phone ecosystem had become. Google could have made Nexuses from the get-go.

Google had plenty of leverage early on with carriers that didn’t have the iPhone. Google still has leverage by threatening to withhold Google Play Services. The last thing carriers want is not to have an alternative to Apple and no cheap phones to entice customers.

Yeah, I know this. I don't think anyone at any of the other phone manufacturers has the weight to throw around that Jobs did, though.

Is there really some expectation for a carrier to be more than that? I just want a fast, reliable service that connects my phone to the internet. Is there actually profit in providing more than that?

From the carrier: yes.

The phone subsidies (in the US at least) are very reminiscent of the old leased phones of yore.

But if you look at the actions of mobile phone carriers and ISPs they're desperate not to become dumb pipes. They design all kinds of clever mechanisms and marketing strategies to distinguish themselves.

> Is there actually profit in providing more than that?

Well, in a free market, competition is intense. So if they can find ways to distort that, then yes: they will make more money. Many of us don't have much allegiance to particular gas station brands. But they create rewards programs to try and get some of that loyalty. Otherwise you just compete on price.

Let's not be silly, there is no market in this case. It's an oligopoly and occasional cartel.

There is only so much competition you can have in wireless. Different carriers have to have different bands of spectrum and only certain frequencies can be used for cellular.

That's why it's not a market. Like I said.

Being just a dumb data pipe means you aren't differentiated from other dumb data pipes, making it harder to compete with other carriers on anything other than price (reducing revenue) and service reliability/speed (and we all know how awful ISPs are at building out better infrastructure). This does make it much harder to be profitable.

well there's usually a bundle of shit in a carrier OS, it's just not profit from you.

From the carrier perspective, sure. Being a dumb pipe is a race to the bottom market-wise.

Exactly. Contracts, identification, phone numbers are not necessary for this. It could be dead simple: the application on your phone generates a pair of private and public keys. You pay some satoshis to a carrier and get some amount of Internet traffic, using your private key for authentication. If you want to switch to other carrier, you just generate a new key and send some satoshis to its account, and your modem generates a new random IMEI. You generate a new key and new IMEI for every new payment so it becomes difficult to track you and sell data about your location. And you can switch between different providers any time. You can even switch depending on who has a better signal in your current location. No need for identification, making a contract, getting a phone number, selling data about you (because carrier doesn't have it) or reporting your location to the government or courts.

This is ten times better than what any provider offers today. If someone implements this, nobody will want to use old scheme anymore.

Also this should promote competition between carriers.

My (no-carrier) WiFi-only Android tablet ... is also wholly dependent on the hardware vendor for updates, of which to the best of my knowledge has never seen an OS update since date of purchase (though vendor apps, which I've never used and cannot uninstall, have updates pushed, routinely demanding greater permissions).

Of all the monopoly-leverage-based requirements Google could make of Android vendors, demanding update SLA and EOL minima are apparently ones they've never contemplated.

0/10, would not recommend, ever.

I don't even buy my phones from the carrier, which makes it even more perplexing.

This comment and most replies use "carrier" as shorthand for "carrier and/or manufacturer". This looks funny to me because my carrier is T-Mobile and doesn't add bloatware AFAICT. Using "manufacturer" as the shorthand would make more sense to me.

T-Mobile does add software to phones. Wi-Fi calling requires T-Mobile-specific OS-level modifications. You won't be able to use it on unbranded unlocked phones. It's definitely not bloatware though.

WiFi calling is supported on iOS devices across carriers and without T-Mobile making os level modifications.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204039

I'm pretty sure the Nexus 5X I got off of craigslist is an unbranded, unlocked phone with an OS from Google, and it makes wifi calls on T-Mobile.

It would not surprise me to see kind of an opposite thing - such as other carriers selling phones where they purposefully turned off or hid settings for wi-fi calling, turning on hotspot and similar.. in which case if tmobile sold the same phone, then it would be a matter of them not turning off / hiding.

Would be an interesting chart to show the things the various carriers had turned on / off... added / removed which similar phones.

I think its already a part of the Android software. I certainly see it enabled on the phone I bought outside of T-Mobile. The only thing I see I need is a the T_Mobile visual mail app but I don't use that much since everything is SMS these days.

This has been somewhat fixed in recent years as my latest unlocked Sony phone has working Wi-Fi calling on T-Mobile.

The carrier wants your phone to work on their network. A software update could change brick the radio (or just disable the channel they are using) if done wrong.

Yet Apple has been able to do that for well over a decade and sells phones via carriers. Even if you buy an unlocked Android phone directly you can update it without carrier intervention.

Yes but apple only has ~10 phones that have to be updated at a time, and all share similar hardware with software specifically designed for that hardware. There are so many different hardware setups for android that getting software to work perfectly on all of them is exponentially harder

Apple has much less risk surface/device variant.

OK, you're a carrier and have millions of Apple and Samsung devices on your network. 0.01% of your users know how to update the OS on their Samsung phones themselves, or jailbreak their iPhones. A software update from the manufacturer could brick millions of those phones on you network.

Which risk keeps you awake at night:

  A few Samsung phone users bricking their phones occasionally
  A few iPhone users bricking their phones occasionally
  50 million Galaxy phones being bricked by Samsung at once
  50 million iPhones being bricked by Apple at once

I'm not saying it's impossible Apple could do it, but in terms of ratios how much more or less likely is it versus Samsung?

What does jailbreaking phones have to do with updating them?

Could, would, are known as 'weasel words' for a reason.

What the carrier actually wants is to force some applications to always be installed in the customer devices, because of shady business deals, a.k.a. 'partnerships'.

>Why should your carrier have any say so in updating your operating system?

You made that choice when you decided you wanted a carrier subsidized phone.