Let me be brutally honest here, but before I begin, I want to emphasize, I've been a die-hard Samsung fan for a long time. This is my honest, real-world assessment: they dropped the ball on this one. Hard.
This has cost them countless (400k+ – maybe even a million or more) fans who have left in droves. Not just bec of a delayed update but lack of acknowledgement, transparency, lack of communication, all the removed features, bugs, etc., on top of not even listening to our feedback through the betas.
The truth needs to be front and center. Probably not all of us, but many, especially the tech enthusiasts here, have heard of Project Treble, right? When Google introduced Android 10 and 11, Treble wasn't just a buzzword; Google meticulously integrated it into the very core of Android, improving it with every release since. (Search for phrases like “treble improvements changes each Android release” if you want more in-depth info on changes over time). Treble has been a silent but powerful force in every release.
To help give some perspective and an eg: Thank to Treble, a volunteer dev on XDA, likely juggling a family and full-time job, can craft a fully functional Android 14 ROM for the Nexus 7 tablet – a device Google hasn't updated kernel code for in over 7 yrs. That's the power of Treble. It makes creating Android releases easier, faster, with minimal/no coding – depending on hardware compatibility – and Google supports most common hardware straight out of the AOSP box.
What Treble brought us are Dynamic System Updates and Generic System Images. One can boot up a GSI on an old Android 11 phone that hasn't received updates, in under 10 min. If Samsung graced us with unlockable bootloaders, we could do the same. No special anything is required.
With each Android release, Google hands over the base code to manufacturers (OEMs) *before* the developer previews even begin. Then follows months of public dev previews (public tasting). OEMs couldn't have it easier. Sure, for each release Sammy still needs to iron out their custom features and fixes that break with the new Android versions, but the heavy lifting for each release is handled by Google.
There is a crucial point that Google has consistently emphasized to anyone forking their projects, from Chromium to Android: create non-breaking changes. *Don't* delete code; comment it out or override it. They've even highlighted how this approach allows for seamless integration with tools like GitHub Actions, enabling automated builds of your fork with minimal intervention for code conflicts. This is precisely how Android forks and custom ROMs like LineageOS (formerly CyanogenMod) boast large lists of officially and community-supported devices running their fork of Android 15 – it's all built automatically with non-breaking changes thanks to Project Treble.
I fully expect Samsung to chime in about the immense effort involved in developing and testing Android, the engineering hours, and so on – because they said the exact same thing in response to my last comment.
Each release Samsung makes their phones look more like iOS, add more bloatware, and overall they give me less reasons to pay $1200 for a Galaxy phone vs competitors.
