Do OTA updates allow manufacturers to ship “unfinished” phones?

There was a time when you bought a phone and the software that came with it was software you had to struggle with until you decided to give it away, sell it, or throw it in the trash. And I’m not just talking about feature phones — the early days of Android were like that.

But with the normalization of OTA updates, an unintended consequence has come the ability to modify software after a phone has launched. It allows manufacturers to release phones that are, for lack of a better word, unfinished.

Listen, software updates are great and bring a lot of benefits

Software updates are fantastic and are now a major part of what buyers look for when choosing a phone. There are major OS updates that bring all the magic of new versions of Android, and there are security updates that are smaller and can fix bugs and vulnerabilities, as well as add minor fixes and new features.

Imagine using a Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, as expensive as it is, and using the exact same feature set for four or five years? Nobody would want that these days, so it’s great that we’ve reached a point where software updates are so common.

That’s the good side of software updates, and I don’t think anyone hates that side of the business. But let’s talk about the bad side of OTA updates.

The ability to modify a phone’s software after the fact has made manufacturers lazy

Manufacturers couldn’t always afford for consumers to install updates themselves from anywhere in the world. Previously, you had to go to a store and ask a specialized software company to install the software. It’s not very convenient, but it was the only real way to fix serious bugs in released devices. That’s why it was rare for older devices to have buggy or unfinished software.

However, it’s now a relatively common occurrence for early adopters of new smartphones to have to deal with a variety of issues, whether it’s a faulty fingerprint reader, a tinted screen, or flagship cameras that don’t work as expected.

For example, the Samsung Galaxy S24 series came out earlier this year, and users are still waiting for camera updates to get their cameras working as expected. In other times, these cameras would come out of the box fully polished and ready to compete.

Aside from Samsung, Google’s Pixel phones are another major culprit, and they’ve been for almost every generation. Often, the key features Google likes to tout to consumers don’t work properly out of the box. For example, with the Pixel 5, some regions had to wait for a 5G update. When the Pixel 4 came out, Soli Radar was unreliable out of the box. There were also serious battery complaints with the Pixel 7. The list goes on.

Don’t expect this to end there though; producers are happy with the current arrangements

I’m fighting a hard fight in hopes that smartphone manufacturers will put more effort into the way their devices are released. After all, making sure the software is perfect before launch would sometimes involve delays that would completely derail financial projections for the year, and we know how important money is to these brands.

But can we get to the point where manufacturers put a lot more effort into how their devices will perform at launch? At least one Pixel launch without press articles about some screen, battery, or fingerprint issue. That’s all I ask.