I'm not a fan of carriers, but Google's the one at fault here for creating this "open" Frankenstein of an OS at the expense of user experience. Everyone knew this would happen and I don't blame the carriers or the OEMs for customizing what was designed to be customized for financial gain.
Google accomplished its goals quite effectively. They created an open standard that would be desired and accepted by the masses. An environment which would be adopted by numerous manufactures, and provide customers with an alternative to the iPhone.
If they had used Apple's strategy, then Android would have been just a single phone manufacturers OS, and there'd be dozens of other OS's out there from each manufacturer.
There would be extreme fragmentation in the industry as every phone would be on a different OS and software options would be limited.
What they have accomplished instead, is giving the customers a wealth of useful apps that universally run on every phone out there except the iPhone. And this benefits the iPhone as well, because developers who release cross platform apps only have to develop 2 versions to capture the entire market.
Google made the right choice. And it's benefitted the consumer greatly, and given the consumer the freedom of choice without sacrificing capabilities.
If Android had been around earlier, some of my prior smartphones likely would have been more useful. But at that point it was the iPhone, windows phones, or dozens of incompatible smartphones that each used different incompatible apps that you'd lose access to if you switched phones.
Google had made android a strong player in the industry. And they've developed impressive backwards compatibility without noticeably sacrificing knew capabilities. It's impressive that I can take my Android 2.x phone and install anything I want without the need to update or buy a new phone. It's also impressive that my old Android 2.x phone had never demonstrated a glitch. Compared to the extreme number of times my iPhone has crashed without warning.
iPhone people love to bash the droid and complain about bugs. But I'm less concerned with bugs I never see. Though the bugs may technically be there, if they never show themselves, I'm not going to worry about it.
How about this comparison. Every house has spiders. It's unavoidable. Usually they're in the walls, ended the floor, etc. And occasionally one comes out where you can see it. And we accept that as fact, and don't really concern ourselves with what isn't harming or bothering us.
But when the bugs come out and swarm, then we do something.
My experience with android is that I never saw the bugs. My experience with the iPhone is that I have always run into bugs on a frequent basis, but they've been the minor ones that you just pause a second and go on with life.
