Sure. I don't know enough about those companies so I'm not complaining about them.
But I know Samsung has the money and manpower to drastically improve the situation, yet they don't care.
With the right abstractions, they would only have a single version of "Samsung OS", like you only have a single version of Windows/Ubuntu. And all devices within reason would be able to immediately update to the latest version of Samsung OS, like PCs can.
Go to a developing country and see the share of PCs that are running Windows XP and you will realize that things aren't that simple. The majority of the world doesn't care about OS updates, and they are definitely not spending money on it. They simply want stuff to continue to work exactly as it did when they bought it. Mobile phones already get updated at a much higher rate than PCs. The vast majority of PCs in the world stay on the version that the manufacturer installed throughout their lifetime.
And say in your example Samsung does get its shit together and spends a ton of money to upgrade every phone in the world...that's still ~25-30% of the Android population. What about the rest?
The situation is understandable for budget phones sold in developing countries, but that's almost entirely irrelevant to what companies like Samsung and Google do for their flagship products.
> With the right abstractions, they would only have a single version of "Samsung OS", like you only have a single version of Windows/Ubuntu. And all devices within reason would be able to immediately update to the latest version of Samsung OS, like PCs can.
Sorry, but that's just not how developing for mobile SoCs work, and, regardless, Samsung ships Qualcomm chipsets in many of their phones. Once the latest version of "Samsung OS" needs a kernel version beyond what Qualcomm is willing to provide binary blobs for on a particular chipset, that's it for updates to phones that use that chipset.
And sure, maybe they could keep "Samsung OS" limping along on an older kernel, with some missing or broken functionality, but that costs time and money. It's not unreasonable for Samsung to not want to spend it.
But I know Samsung has the money and manpower to drastically improve the situation, yet they don't care.
With the right abstractions, they would only have a single version of "Samsung OS", like you only have a single version of Windows/Ubuntu. And all devices within reason would be able to immediately update to the latest version of Samsung OS, like PCs can.