Comment ding ding ding (Score 2) 579
there's no *point* in Google writing a patch, none of the hardware companies involved would ever bother to deploy it.
This has been my experience in the industry as well. I don't see OEMs scrambling to get the latest updates from the chip vendor or from Google. And I see chip vendors who basically abandon support for older chips on newer releases.
I blame Google, OEMs and Vendors for the problem and not really the carriers. While carriers usually want software to be qualified before an update is allowed, there are many carriers with different rules and many phones that are not under contract.
Carriers are less particular about OS updates(patches) than they were a few years ago, and have switched mainly to being worried about OS upgrades. Either because it might cause lots of customer support calls with broken phones or it will cut into their phone sales (they sell phones through 2 years service contracts, you thought they were free?).