> I would happily pay $30 or whatever for each major update if it motivated the vendor to have an interest in keeping it up to date.
That would just be a different user-hostile incentive. The path forward is for Android to actually become consumer open source (GPL3). Let device manufacturers concentrate on shipping hardware and adding any new device drivers to a public repository. Updates can then be directly applied by eager users, or eventually pushed out by carriers with minimal integration effort. Proprietary "value adds" like SenseUI can still be done through the package system.
You're assuming that there's a decent amount of people who both have a pressing need for an OS upgrade and wouldn't revolt at the manufacturer charging them to access what is primarily a free update from AOSP. Furthermore, once one person pays $30 for the upgrade, that image can be freely passed around the tinkering communities, so the manufacturer has an incentive for even stronger consumer-hostile DRM.
(Yes, integration takes work, but that's exactly why manufacturers need to push their modified code upstream so it can be tested/changed along with the rest of AOSP. A carrier-blessed release should take QA and some minor bugfixes instead of a horrifically large merge-and-debug.)
That would just be a different user-hostile incentive. The path forward is for Android to actually become consumer open source (GPL3). Let device manufacturers concentrate on shipping hardware and adding any new device drivers to a public repository. Updates can then be directly applied by eager users, or eventually pushed out by carriers with minimal integration effort. Proprietary "value adds" like SenseUI can still be done through the package system.