AT&T’s CEO Blames Google For The Delay In Android OS Updates

Up until now, it was a known fact that Android updates for a majority of the Android handsets in the United States was intentionally delayed by the carriers. While Google has not publicly mentioned this, one of the key AOSP Android engineer had clearly mentioned this in a post on Google+.

Now, it looks like AT&T’s CEO wants to completely change the blame game and has blamed Google for the delay in the release of Ice Cream Sandwich update for some the handsets. Here is the official statement from AT&T’s CEO Randall Stephenson -:

Google determines what platform gets the newest releases and when. A lot of times, that’s a negotiated arrangement and that’s something we work at hard. We know that’s important to our customers. That’s kind of an ambiguous answer because I can’t give you a direct answer in this setting.

This new certainly put a lot of bloggers and Android fanboys confused. Was Google really behind the delay in Android OS updates? Thankfully, before this news went viral, Google released a statement that it is not sure about what AT&T’s CEO means -:

Mr. Stephenson’s carefully worded quote caught our attention and frankly we don’t understand what he is referring to. Google does not have any agreements in place that require a negotiation before a handset launches. Google has always made the latest release of Android available as open source at source.android.com as soon as the first device based on it has launched. This way, we know the software runs error-free on hardware that has been accepted and approved by manufacturers, operators and regulatory agencies such as the FCC. We then release it to the world.

I am kind of shocked how AT&T’s CEO publicly blamed Google for the delay in Android OS updates, while Google has been pretty transparent about the whole process. It is the ‘ software testing’ from the U.S. carriers that take up more than a month or so to finish, before any OTA update is rolled out to Android handset in their network.