oems

There's such a pressure to save cost and so many OEMs involved that ease of integration motivates the rest.

If they didn't they would probably get sued and bashed on HN for promoting walled gardens and abusing OEMs.

When OEMs are no longer challenging the status quo, sometimes you need to join the battle.

Fact is, the OS was free to the vast majority before, either through OEMs, corporate systems, or pirating.

Left to their own devices, OEMs and carriers will not approve updates because they simply don't care and have zero motivation to.

OEMs pay to install Windows 10, exactly like every other version of Windows.

From Windows 8 onwards, Microsoft stopped doing it; you could either pay them to do it again, or OEMs would do it for you.

As for the Android OEMs, Google doesn't need them to succeed, and only that there is reasonable choice of devices available in the world.

I expect OEMs will still do it on new devices, but upgrades are anybody's guess.

Google sets the terms by which it does business with OEMs.

Let the OEMs own the cheap and nasty space but actually build something that enterprises would want to roll out and workers would love to use.

They make all their consumer money off of OEMs.

Those cover a large (and growing, because Google and the OEMs are both aligned on this) chunk of your "left hanging" users.

Every other Android OEMs are bleeding cash, even if Nokia had adopted Android it likely would have had to be sold eventually because of industry capitation in "dumb" phones.