Hardware Makers, You’re Losing Half Your Potential Customers By Shipping Old Firmware [Data]

We frequently fall in love with new smartphones only to be shattered once we discover that they’ll ship with old firmware. plenty of shoppers feel a similar-and it’d be costing hardware makers half their potential customers.

Last week we discussed the phenomenon of latest devices shipping with outdated firmware -a pattern particularly evident with recently announced and released Android devices-and asked Gizmodo readers a very important question: How much does outdated smartphone firmware matter to you?

The general feeling was clear pretty quickly: Nearly half of the readers doesn’t wish to purchase a device unless it was shipping with the most recent firmware and about a third of the readers is likely to be swayed with promises of quick updates. The message inside the comments of the post was pretty firm though: Not anyone likes to look forward to new firmware when holding a sparkly new device.

Now with this information and the overwhelming commenter response in mind, we repeat our suggestion:

Hardware manufacturers, once a new firmware is released, stop churning out old phones and get what’s already that you can purchase updated asap. Stop putting crazy skins on top of Android that do more harm than good and slow the update process. And-especially when an Android update has been inside the open for a couple of months already already-make an effort to incorporate the most recent and greatest firmware onto your handsets so that your customers know exactly what they’re getting. It’s time to get desirous about hardware/software synchronicity.

Chart by Christina Bonnington

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This post is tagged: customers, Data, makers, old, shipping