GigaOM Pro

If mobile OS makers want to protect their brand, they'll need to get carriers out of the update process.

The smartphone market has grown in recent years, with sales increasing each quarter in spite of the poor economy. Consumers have come to expect a lot from their phones and users' experience is a critical factor in any smartphone's success. The operating system is the primary piece of the customer satisfaction puzzle. How quickly a company provides updates to fix flaws in the operating system is a big part of the consumer's perception regarding a particular phone. Unfortunately, it seems that the importance of this update process is often overlooked by the carriers that offer the phones to consumers. Mobile OS providers must come to grips with the fact that carriers are in the business to sell phone service, not handsets. Service provision is their core business, and the carriers have proven repeatedly that providing good phone support is not their big mission. It is up to the OS providers to make sure that updates can be distributed to customer's phones in a timely manner and if that means removing the carriers from the process, then so be it.