They know that we for the most part want the newest Android OS in our phones.
Speak for yourself. I don't want a memory leak in my phone no matter how new it is. I want new features, but I don't want new bugs. And I don't want a UI that eats my battery for lunch. (LP is absolutely terrible on Amoled displays. All that current-eating
white.)
Before the S6 and S6 Edge were announce, we saw updates for Lollipop were flowing and now they are almost at a holt.
Too many phones being brought back because of bugs, probably. Every phone that comes back means a loss (actually a loss, not just a profit they don't get) for Samsung. If they "sell" enough phones that are brought back they could go bankrupt.
This is something that Apple has it right, they always update their devices to the latest software. I don't like Iphone but this is one of the reasons they keep their customers happy, always giving them the most up to date OS and almost immediate bug fixes.
Right conclusion, wrong logic. Apple makes sure that all the bugs are out of a new version LONG before announcing it. (You'll see rumors of a new iOS many months before Apple makes the first announcement of what they're "planning" for it. [It's debugged, alpha tested, beta tested and ready for release by that time. When they say "planned release date is next Thursday", they mean "we're going to let it sit on the shelf for a week so you don't catch on to what we're really doing".]) So Apple can announce a new release, have it out in days and it has no bugs.
The only difference is that Google announces a new version when it's barely out of the think tank, no code has actually been written, then it's months before it's released for the Nexus it was designed on - without even alpha testing. "It loads? It runs? Good, release it. Let the users find the bugs." They both take about the same time between "It's time for a new version" and "It's pretty bug-free", it's just when the public announcement is made, and who does the testing, that's different. Jobs didn't ship bugs, Google does.
Then each manufacturer has to make it work on its devices, which means more coding and more bugs.
Then the manufacturers have to rewrite it, so more code, more bugs. (Apple can say "you don't like it the way we put it out, don't sell it", and the carriers have to sell what Apple gives them or shut their doors. No iPhone? Half their customers walk.)
That doesn't make iOS a better system than Linux with Android running on it (a few other things do, and a few things make it worse), and it doesn't make an Apple phone better than a Motorola, Samsung, HTC or any other manufacturer's product. And it doesn't say "Conspiracy", it says "Google didn't see the problems when they decided to get into the cellphone business". If they said "this is the system - make phones that run it, and no carrier modifications", we'd see one stock ROM for each version and a lot fewer bugs. (Microsoft does. You want to build a desktop? It has to run Windows the way Microsoft writes it. There's no "HP version", "Acer version", etc., there's a Windows 8.1 version. Your hardware better run on it or you can sell bare boxes and hope that someone comes out with a Linux distro for your hardware.)
@nemopsp:
You
could root - if someone came out with a 4.4.2 with a pre-June 3, 2014 kernel for the 4. That's how we do it on the 3. Root 4.4.2, then flash a 4.4.4 kernel and a 4.4.4 ROM runs fine on it - rooted. There's even a 4.4.2 kernel flash that runs from 4.4.4, so you can get back to SafeStrap on bootloader-locked versions (which won't be updated, since Hashcode is doing important things - like
Project Ara).
Start talking to the devs on the XDA Note 4 forums.
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