Platforms are differentiated. Devices and OEMs are as well. But I think you're misusing the term platform. Putting TW on a phone doesn't make it a non android device.
Also nexus is worthless for this because it uses hardware a ton of phones don't. It isn't just the base OS. Drivers and such are also important. One phone cannot reference an entire hardware ecosystem unless you control the base specs like Microsoft. Google has 0 control over that.
No one mistakes android for Windows phone. The issue is the platform was designed to allow carriers and oem this control as a means to get them to use it. They further monetize android with bloatware and baking their services into the FW.
That's why they love it. They can't do that on other platfoms, which prohibit them to profiting mostly from device sales and baseline smartphone services (voice, sms, data).
iOS and Windows Phone doesn't so they don't suffer this kind of update lag.
And to the person who said not to expect the radio to improve with a FW update. That's false and it's like saying Moto X users shouldn't have expected the camera to be improved with any FW updates. These things can be improved, and the issue that VZW had earlier was with the phone not maintaining an LTE connection IIRC (which is still fails to connect to LTE forcing me to reboot at times, so that hasn't be totally fixed either), which is not the same as bad reception/low quality signal.
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