The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has requested the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to re-examine policies of the various wireless carriers in U.S. which reportedly take a long time to upgrade the Android operating systems they support. According to ACLU, the lag in software updates will make the smartphones out of date and prone to dangerous systems.
A 17-page complaint was filed by the group this week in which carriers like AT&T, Sprint, Nextel, T-Mobile and Verizon were blamed to have ignored warnings from many experts and government officials who had stated that failure to update the software could give hackers a chance to steal personal data. The carriers have been accused of allowing their customers to get substantially harmed by not pushing out software updates promptly. As has been observed often in the past, carrier apathy has resulted in only top flagship devices being assured timely updates, which leaves dozens of mid-range handsets out in the cold for many months after an update has been released.
In the complaint, ACLU has also mentioned that only two percent of the millions of Android devices existing in the market run on the most recent version of Android. Most of the users have handsets running on versions released in the last two years and the rest run on versions older than that. This fragmentation of the Android market, which is turning out to be a serious issue for Google, has caused many users to be unable to experience the latest software features and apps like Facebook Home. There is also a small level of discontentment among the developers who feel that independent developers may end up getting ignored and left out because of their difficulty to develop across so many different versions.
Android is available free of cost for manufacturers. By working with those manufacturers, Google ensures that all updates to the OS work on the devices that can support it. The device- tuned updates are then pushed to the corresponding wireless carriers which further test them for network compatibility. The third largest wireless carrier in US, Sprint, has stated that it complies with ‘industry-standard best practices’ to protect its customers whereas Verizon has claimed that it pushes out patches as soon as possible.
