Go read this Android engineer's explanation of why OEMs are bad at updates

Today, several Android engineers are conducting a Reddit AMA. As of publishing this article, the AMA is still live, so if you have any questions you’d like to ask the team, get to it. If you just want to read some answers though, we highly recommend the one where slow Android updates are explained thoroughly.

In an interesting outcome for a Reddit AMA, a redditor asked a very simple question and got a 1,500+ word response. The response was so long that it actually spanned two comments because the writer was approaching the 10,000 character limit. In it, an engineer breaks down why Android updates are slow, why some OEMs deliver updates quickly and others lag behind, and what Google is doing to make it easy and inexpensive for OEMs to deliver updates faster and more consistently.

Related: Are Android updates getting faster? Let’s look at the data.

There’s too much in the post for us to go over it all here, but we’ll give you the main reason OEMs are bad with Android updates: they are just too expensive. While this should hardly be surprising, the engineer does an amazing job of breaking down what makes them so tricky — and why the solution isn’t just to make Android easier to update.

If you’re a developer, you likely will know (and understand) everything in this Android updates explained post. But for the laymen out there who are genuinely curious why they won’t be getting Android 11 or even next month’s security update, this post will help you out.