Thank you.

Verizon has long been a bastard with regard to releasing updates. However, travel takes me where they are the only thing that works (other than a local carrier that makes no sense back at home). They also tend to have better coverage here at home.

BUT, they told me that one of the selling points of this model on Verizon was that they were committing to releasing updates in a timely manner.

My fault for believing Verizon. But... Google's fault for not pressuring them. iPhones on Verizon get updates. This becomes "simple math", for the user on Verizon. And, Verizon has a lot of users, here in the U.S.

P.S. Even if Google is not in a position to effectively do anything about this, they should recognize the pressure this applies to users to switch platforms. Something I would imagine they ARE interested in.

This is exactly why I won't buy anything except Nexus phones now. The updates are completely independent from the carrier (well, carriers can withhold OTA updates, but you can always flash the current system image from Google).

I'm completely happy with my Nexus 7 2013 (WiFi only).

I may look into jailbreak/rooting options that are compatible with ongoing Verizon service, for the phone.

In future, if I don't switch to an iPhone, I may well go with another carrier, and just eat the cost of e.g. a prepaid Moto G for the times when I travel and need the network covereage. Still, seems ridiculous. And if not Google, the FCC should be taking a good, hard look at Verizon Wireless. At some point, negligence should apply that, if nothing else, gets their spectrum allocations revoked. That would get their attention, fast.

P.S. Maybe a Google lobbyist and/or lawyer could have a quiet little conversation with their FCC contacts about this?

On the flip side, I'm not very happy with my Nexus 7 2013 (LTE, although I never have used it). As a disclaimer I am on CM since 12.0, but even before then there were a number of issues. Tablet would stop recognizing touch or it would inconsistently recognize it; core apps would start to randomly FC; YouTube in particular has an issue where it often would say (and this continued into CM) that there was no Network and you've to press retry 3 or 4 times and then things would work. Hangouts in both regular and CM versions of Lollipop consistently has a bug where switching apps then switching back to Hangouts takes you to a random location in the conversation requiring scrolling back to the bottom frequently. This is an annoying one because there's no way to clear the screen that I've found, you can either delete the entire chat history or you can archive, but the archive is "restored" to the chat window when you begin talking to that person again.

And I apologize, after that rant I realize it doesn't really have anything to do with the topic, but I've sunk the cost already!

To be fair, my Nexus mostly does streaming video and some light emailing and surfing, these days. The display is small but high quality. Netflix keeps prompting me to sign in again, but that seems to be Netflix.

There were some hiccups with the upgrades to 5.x, but I didn't get caught by those. News reports taught me to be a bit conservative, in exercising a bit of delay before applying OS updates if there was no looming security fiasco.

Compared to my parents' contemporary and more expensive Samsung tablet, with Verizon LTE (and thus, Verizon as well as Samsung in the middle), that is still stuck on 4.4.1 or 4.4.2, the last I looked... And with some crappy third party calendar app as the default that had my mother confused for a while...

Well, via that comparison and others, I'm agreeing with the other commenter that if you can go straight Nexus, that seems to be a better way to go WRT the Android platform.

I'm hitting "tired"; otherwise, I might be able to think of some of the software concerns I've had that are not OS / updates specific.

Oh, I remember the time I added some photos to Keep, to learn that there was no way to keep them from syncing while on the cell connection as opposed to WiFi.

And, I could lament the whole "fish around on the web for random articles, for your documentation" approach, these days.

Anyway, I'm mostly responding to show a bit of support, despite our differing satisfaction levels / experiences. When something doesn't work, too often the environment/app leaves us feeling SOL. They got my money, so f--- me! ;-)