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LG Arbitrarily Denying Android Lollipop Update To the G2 In Canada?
Lirodon writes: Its funky rear-mounted buttons may have left critics divided, but the LG G2 is still a pretty capable Android device. While it has gotten an update to Android 5.0 "Lollipop" in some major markets (including the United States, of course), one major holdout is Canada. Reports are surfacing that LG's Canadian subsidiary has decided not to release the update for unknown reasons. But, what about custom ROMs? Well, they handled that too: they have refused to release Lollipop kernel source for the Canadian variant of the device. It is arbitrary actions like this that cause Android's fragmentation problems. A curious note, LG has not specifically made reference to the bugs other users have been having with the update.
They told me it wasn't their fault if my TV was broken and they didn't have any replacement available, because my TV was made by LG Korea.
I bet they will use a similar lame excuse again.
Don't know if parent is trolling or not, but I had a similar thought. I've heard that Canadian carriers are even worse than US carriers when it comes to device freedom (and pricing, and reliability, and just about everything else) and a thought occurred to me that there may be carrier pressure to force the end users to buy a new device.
If so, it wouldn't be a narrative I hadn't heard before. I was on Sprint about 2.5 years ago and they were rather vicious when it came to that kind of thing.
As a Canadian, I will 100% concur this has a good chance of being the carrier.
My HTC Desire has a lot of stuff which was put on it by the carrier (Rogers) -- some of which I can disable but not delete.
It may well be that LG has decided they don't want to muck around with carrier specific crap. Which is why I think it should be illegal to have carrier specific crap in the first place.
A decade or so ago a co-worker did some testing with his Motorolla Krazr. It turns out the way Rogers had done the internet stuff was to push you through their proxy (with a lot of extra overhead), and which had the net effect of about doubling your data usage so that they could measure you and bill you for it. And this was when data usage was in KB.
Rogers are complete greedy bastards who put a lot of crap on phones to benefit themselves.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
My "obvious explanation" is the Canadian carriers added their own crap, and now we're not considered a big enough market to fix it.
I don't need to blame LG. My first thought on reading that was "yeah, that's entirely due to carriers putting their own shit on the phones".
Some devices are carrier locked. Some have crapware put there by the carrier.
This isn't the first time I've seen this with phones here.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.