????. 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.
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.