The overhead of these phone manufactures comes from their horrible customizations and differentiation practices. I find the idea of paying $10 for the privilege of updating the OS just so I can get the new version of Sense, or TouchWiz, or MotoBlur, or whatever Sony runs now repugnant. I think this idea pushes the market in the wrong direction.
The fact that volunteers create functional ICS installations shows that it doesn't take time or money to get ICS itself running. The vendors themselves add cost by leaving their taint on every interaction I have on the phone.
And the article itself says "OEMs that want to engage in paid updates should have a bootloader unlock solution for users that want to update on their own." with no reasoning at all besides it would make the writer feel warm and fuzzy.
????. I'm certain it does take both time and money. The volunteers are spending time on it.
The volunteer worked a non-zero amount of time. Thanks for pointing it out! I'll make sure to carefully guard my language in the future for fear of being unclear.
Well, they don't have much to differentiate do they? They all get the same Android, the hardware is pretty much the same between classes of phones (the customer doesn't really care it's a Tegra 3 or a S4) and there are not too many ways you can tinker with the hardware design so they have to add their own interface to make it different.
I don't think anyone chooses carriers based on the phone's bloatware (although maybe on the lack thereof), so I don't see why they need to differentiate at all.
They are playing both sides of the coin by locking things down.
Their headlines never say the true intent of their article, and their article never comes to the conclusion that has been set up through the arguments. There is extreme bias and non sequiturs riddling the entire site.
It's a difficult read because of the logic errors, and everytime an article is posted from Extreme Tech, it seems everyone comes away with a different opinion of what was really meant. This isn't creative literature class. This is not a good way to run a website.
What Google has done is for ICS+ phones they must contain Android's stock themes so applications developed against said theme will look consistent on every device. The manufacturer can still have their own themes, and developers can detect if they exist and use them, but the stock theme must be available.
Imagine a world where you had to buy a new desktop because the vendor provided you with Windows XP service pack 1 but decided the machine would no longer be supported? That situation does not exist, thankfully, because PC vendors never had the nerve to lock owners out of their own property.
The cell phone industry still thinks they should control every little interaction on the handset, forcing their bloated UI overlays, restricting features, and nickel and diming customers. I refuse to entertain the notion I should be giving these people more money for the sole purpose of formalizing their control my property.
I run ICS on a Samsung Galaxy S. Samsung officially will not support it because their resource intensive "improvement" called TouchWiz can't run on the older handset when ported to ICS. Meanwhile some kid, for free with spare time, managed to build a fully functional ICS version I run without issue.
At this point in time, locked bootloaders only exist to keep customers on the hardware upgrade treadmill. It needs to stop.