At $300 and being from Russia, one would assume that they wouldn't just release it as a DRM-free application...which raises the question whether they add DRM to it, and how they're going to protect it, especially if they've got the means of decrypting all of these high-security encryption mechanisms.

I'm wondering if there isn't an alternative business model here - a bounty for encrypted laptops, decrypting the data internally, and using that data for ransom. I'm pretty sure it'd work much better than selling licenses at $300 a pop.

When Microsoft "won" the browser wars, Netscape's software quality wasn't too hot, and there was no Firefox or Chrome. It took some time, but IE isn't the de facto standard it once was. Also, no one has yelled at Apple for bundling Safari with OSX, or Canonical for bundling Firefox.

When MS took its stab at the media player market, it was indeed trying to win based on 'bundled default'...but really the only thing it did was cost Winamp/MusicMatch/Realplayer some download stats. At the time, there *wasn't* a standard media player on Windows. Microsoft never really 'won' that battle, Apple did...and for what it's worth, Windows Media Player rips to MP3 now, and has since WMP10, I believe. Bonus points: they lost to Quicktime, and later Flash, for in-browser video streaming, too.

Microsoft is trying to make the App Store model work for Windows 8, but any success they have in this regard will undoubtedly be in spite of the Windows 8 store, not because of it. MS seems to be under some delusion that people want tablet apps EVERYWHERE. I was actually in the Microsoft store the other day, talking to several of the staff members there, asking for *one* app that took advantage of a reasonably-powerful GPU. Not a single one could give me a title of an app that would make my Nvidia GeForce 460M kick up the fan speed beyond its idle RPM rate. Sure, this is just fine for people who are perfectly happy playing "Cut the Rope" on their Intel integrated video chipset, but Valve's millions of users tell me that there are at least a handful who put a modicum of stress on their machines. If Microsoft doesn't cater to these users, then sure, you'll get sales from the handful of Surface users and Office 2013 sales, but Microsoft's success won't come from ignoring the strengths of the desktop computer and treating everything with i7's and dual Xeons like a Surface tablet.

If nothing else, it behooves them to keep the antitrust lawyers at bay. If bundling IE was enough to get them a monopoly conviction, preventing Valve - a company with plenty of cash in the bank - from selling their software on their platform would be an open-and-shut case that they can't afford to lose.

There's two things to address here. First, the comparison to IE6 is somewhat apt, and somewhat not. See, IE6 had some serious problems that are inherent within its nature. The one I most famously remember is that it didn't do transparent PNGs, but I know that its CSS handling was terrible, ActiveX was its own therapist-requiring nightmare, and we won't even get into its memory management issues. Comparing that with a genuinely usable release of Android raises questions in that regard. Are developers literally unable to add features to their apps in order to retain compatibility with Gingerbread? Or are they feature complete and just require a little extra QA testing? There are no doubt plenty of apps that fall into both camps, but the ultimate question is whether apps that fit in the first category are in sufficient quantity to prevent better application developments on the platform as a whole.

Regarding your issue with SIP calling specifically, I don't know if CSipSimple will be of any assistance. That said, I question that example specifically because I know that I've had SIP calling working on both GB and ICS (possibly Froyo as well, IDR), whether on Cyanogenmod or an official ROM. If the issue is with your phone specifically, then Sony's additions (and/or subtractions) to the firmware likely caused the problem at hand. If that's the case, then the solution here is for Sony to get their act together. We are talking Sony here, and there's no guarantee that the issue won't persist even if they do give you an OTA update to ICS/JB. Therefore, one could equally argue that a working 2.3 release would solve this issue just as well as a 4.0 upgrade.

Well I'll bet that the developers who are upset over this level of fragmentation never had the pleasure of dealing with Windows Mobile development. A particular handset may or may not have, in basically any combination, wifi, bluetooth, cellular data, a resistive touch screen, a capacitive touch screen, a GPS, a compactflash slot, an SD card slot, a vertically oriented screen, a square screen, two softkeys, four softkeys, anywhere between 150MHz and 1GHz processor, and anywhere between 64MB and 1GB of RAM. Android devices are diverse, but nowhere near that bad.

If your app is targeting people who upgrade quickly, then the year-old landscape is basically all ICS with a handful of GB devices. Admittedly I'm not completely well versed in how Android devs deal with screen resolutions and densities, but it must be possible because apps have looked close-enough-to-fool-me between my Droid Incredible, Inc2, modded HD2, and Galaxy S3. The phone-sized apps do admittedly show scaling issues on my 10" tablet, but they still look very good there as well; certainly well within the bounds of usability. If you're shooting to make an app look pixel perfect on every device ever released, then yes, this is a significantly lower bar to clear on iOS. However, the argument seems to be that iOS doesn't have the problem at all, and the "app users update hardware frequently anyway" sounds a lot like a 'No True Scotsmen' fallacy.

the 'a.)' point was addressed above, and I'm not certain if it's necessarily a positive thing that users that keep their handsets around for longer are left out to dry. Sure, it's great from a developer standpoint, but if Google prevented OS versions older than 2.3 from being developed for (or at least listed in the Play Store), would that be a positive direction for them to take? Yes Apple keeps things moving, and I realize that you can't support everything for all of eternity, but is the alternative of "you must buy hardware at least this frequently" the kind of ecosystem that should be desirable from a consumer standpoint?

Touch screen phones were around nearly a decade before the iPhone. App Stores are the centralized, address-bar-free evolution of Download.com/ftp.cdrom.com/Softpedia (and Handango on the mobile side). Data plans were expensive, but available since 1997. Yes, the iPhone refined and paved the way for these things to become mainstream instead of more niche/expensive things. However, mobile OS updates are a different breed than your list. One is a hardware feature that was refined, the next a service from the OS manufacturer that enables them to make money by cutting out the middleman, and the last a service from the carrier. Apple's best asset and greatest weakness is the fact that they are completely vertical - if you're in the Apple ecosystem, Apple takes care of EVERYTHING...but no one else can. HTC might be more likely to provide Android updates for two years if they only had one handset...but then that relegates them to a one-size-fits-all scenario, which is highly unlikely to work for anyone *but* Apple. Motorola may do a better job of this starting next year or so once they've got both a hardware and software manufacturer under the same umbrella, but even the Nexus units don't get updates as long as Apple does. A point for Apple? of course. A point against Android? I don't think so, because "because Apple does it well" isn't exactly the iron-clad reasoning to the ultimate question of "who cares" that I was looking for.

I'll concede this one a bit, Windows does indeed patch itself, including some pretty hefty service packs, as does OSX. I was referring to version upgrades, at which point the semantic debate between "update" and "upgrade" comes into play, especially since lots of phones don't seamlessly upgrade from 2.3.5 to 2.3.7 with issues only being seen at the 4.0 level. The point I was trying to make is that OSX doesn't go between cats for free, nor did MS give Vista users Win7 for free. That principle exists in the mobile market at the exclusion of the desktop market.

Windows machines exist in various states of unpatching, at different releases.
Apple desktops exist in various states of unpatching, at different releases.
Apple phones mostly exist in a close state of OS release, but only because Apple cuts off architectures.

Finally, it *still* doesn't answer the foundational question of whether it's truly a detriment for users that their phone doesn't have Jelly Bean forced onto it.

That may be the case, but that still doesn't answer the question of "so what?". So Apple users tend to install the iOS updates when available while Android users don't/can't. The question being posed here is "what advantage to the end users is there to staying on the bleeding edge?" "Because Apple users do it" is a bit of a shallow answer to that question.

People on tech forums always complain about how fragmented Android is. "ZoMg iM sTuCk On TiArAmAsU!!!!!111 WhEn WiLl i GeT wHiTe ChOcOlAtE MoChA??? WAAAAHHHHHhhh!!!!!1111 $MY_CARRIER iS tEh SuXoRz!!!"

In my experience, it's more version number bragging contests than anything else. The only apps that don't run on every version of Android I've used since 2.2 (now a three year old release that counts for less than 3% of devices combined with all of those below it) are LBE Privacy Guard (doesn't run on Jelly Bean but runs on anything else; XDA-Devs has a translation of the Chinese variant that works fine), 4EXT Recovery (which is more hardware specific than OS specific since it's actually a recovery environment), and a few power widgets since ICS and up don't allow widgets to directly toggle GPS and the baseband. Everything else, from Amazon daily free apps (usually games) to Netflix, to media players, to Root Explorer...it all works flawlessly on every Android device I've owned.
Yes, Jellybean gives us Google Now and pseudo-Swype. Yes, ICS gave us a somewhat different UI (I prefer the vertically scrolling app drawer myself...and yes I know about the third party launcher apps; that's not the point) and MTP instead of USB Mass Storage (another change I somewhat-understand but can't stand). If your hardware supports NFC, ICS can also utilize that, although its utility is still in the "because I can" / "the iPhone doesn't have it" stage. Beyond those changes, I have to Wikipedia the rest.

Really, the bigger differences tend to follow the OEMs. I personally really like HTC Sense, though I know plenty of people (especially here) disagree with me. Touchwiz doesn't completely suck like Motoblur does, and the bone-stock nexus/cyanogen UI seems a bit too minimalist for me. For end users, the differences in those skins is going to be a bigger change than between different android versions, especially since, once again, they all run the same apps.

Everyone complains about how fragmented Android is, but literally every OS that's ever had more than one version will have that. Windows? XP/Vista/7/8, to say nothing about the asymptotic number of 2000/9x users clinging to their 15 year old desktops that still work perfectly and refuse to die. No one complains that Windows is fragmented. OSX? Tiger/Leopard/Snow Leopard/Lion/Mountain Lion all exist, all happily running Final Cut Pro, Logic, Photoshop, and iLife. Linux? There's an extensive SVG-formatted family tree of flavors over on Wiki, all doing something. iOS? Perhaps the closest to a unified platform, but there are still plenty of 3GS devices and older-gen iPod Touch units running iOS 5.x (including every first-gen iPad), 4.x, and likely still a handful on 3.x.

No matter what you compare Android to, you'll be comparing it to something with plenty of fragmentation of its own. Fragmentation has never stopped a computing platform from adoption, and just because there is a version of $WHATEVER_OS newer than yours doesn't instantly prevent all the existing applications from running unless the OS maker royally messes with stuff or involves a completely different flavor of hardware or something equally drastic. So why is it that Androidland always has their knickers in a twist over the fact that their hardware isn't running THE LATEST version? If it was really that big of a deal, most phones have fairly simple rooting instructions over at xda-devs or sdx-devs.

Mobile OS updates were RARE before the iPhone; I remember my HTC Dash getting exactly one (official) update. Desktop Windows never gave free updates, and neither did OSX - that was always something the Linux community prided itself on, but the Linux community isn't attempting to perpetuate a business model.

I'll conclude with posing the question again: Why does Android get the 'fragmented' label as a derogatory stigma and a 'problem' in need of 'solving', when literally every operating system ever can also wear that badge just as well and no one cares?