I suspect that the way the carriers each demand slightly different feature checklists and releasing a new phone every month (c.f. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Android_devices#Samsung and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTC_phones#A_Series_.28... ) means their hardware engineering budget is much larger than Apple's, and their software budget isn't far behind.

The margins on Androids simply aren't high enough to justify the costs of making one-time customers into fans or repeat buyers.

Maybe they should start selling phones instead of carrier products...

They get free code drops, but that's probably why it's so expensive for them to do upgrades. Samsung has to merge their customizations with each new version, and they have to adapt the Android base code too their hardware. If they don't customize they have no competitive edge, buy if they do they have a harder time upgrading to new Android versions. Apple has it easier, with developers knowing ahead of time the exact hardware their code will run on.

It's true, but I have to marvel at how slow they are or how poorly or dirtily encapsulated their modifications must be. The CM team already has ports running on many devices and is in progress on getting many of their features and customizations merged in. Enough that I was shocked yesterday at several things my phone did because of the CM9 kang I'm running. And these are all a bunch of guys (I don't know of any CM female devs to be honest) working in their spare time.

Considering that every major Android manufacturer behaves in a similar fashion tells me that is it a problem for the entire platform.