From the AC review:
"when this phone would expect to see Android 6.0, but the closest thing we got to a solid answer was "sometime after the new year.""
Any idea how long it took BB to "harden" Lollipop?
One thing I got from my years as a Crackberryhead was that RIM was 100% consistent in their complete lack of ability to deliver timely and reliable software updates. It was so bad that a "battery pull" was a totally standard thing to do. Compare that to most any current Android phone. The majority of them, you can't do a battery pull if you wanted to. But, BB software was so bad that virtually every single BB user accepted that routine as perfectly normal.
If BB is now taking builds of Android from Google and going through a process to "harden" the build before it then adds its own "enhancements" to the build, what evidence is there that BB will be any better with the timeliness of its updates, and the reliability, than it ever has been in the past? I have no experience with BB10, but I watched the original development and launch of BB10 and it was clearly no better (on timeliness, anyway) than RIM ever was with previous versions of their software. Has anything been SHOWN to be different more recently?
However long it has taken BB to "harden" Lollipop, why would we think it won't take them even longer to harden Marshmallow? I mean, right now they don't have any previous Android devices to support. Which means, they don't have any portion of their Android development team dealing with doing updates/bug fixes/patches on devices that are already out in the field. They could devote the whole team just to getting this new release ready. Now that they have actually just released it, part of their team is going to have be spending some time doing updates/bug fixes/patches to their software that is (now) out in the field. That takes away from the resources they can use hardening Marshmallow and updating their own modifications and applications. So, all things being equal, in their Android development team, getting Marshmallow hardened and ready for release could easily take longer than it took to get Lollipop hardened. The other parts shouldn't take so long. Updating their code that works on Lollipop to work on Marshmallow shouldn't be a huge effort. But, again RIM's history makes me highly skeptical that BB will be anything like as timely as even the other Android OEMs, like Samsung, HTC, and Motorola.
The quote that BB will have an update to Marshmallow "sometime after the new year" should be a huge red flag to anyone who has paid attention to the history of RIM/Blackberry. I've got a dollar that says it won't be released in Q1 of 2016....