Just when I thought I would take a break in my google rants for a while, Google releases Android 4.4 KitKat and promptly announces that they will not be upgrading the Galaxy Nexus to it.
I don't know about you, but in my opinion the lifetime of any phone should be 2 years plus the active marketing time (the time when the phone is "the new thing"). Not to mention that the Nexus phones take almost 6 months to arrive in Finland and I'm sure a lot of other countries as well. And that is through third parties, so they are nowhere near as cheap as they are through Google, the Nexus 4 is 450€ at this moment. I know there is a lot of people who buys phones twice a year, but for normal people 2 years is the absolute minimum.
I know that Google did the same thing with the Nexus S, but that phone shipped with Gingerbread, and I seem to remember something about Jelly Bean not running well enough on it. KitKat however is marketed to phones with considerable less hardware oompf than the Galaxy Nexus, a phone that runs Jelly Bean quite well.
I also know that there is not really that much new in KitKat, but the whole point with buying a Nexus phone is so you get the damned updates before anyone else. And I know I can get the update through XDA, but I can do that for more or less any phone.
I'm not going to say that it's Googles duty to update the phone, they can do whatever they like, but I will not be buying another Nexus anytime soon. Other Brands don't suffer the "Google sucks at retail" penalty that Nexus phones do in Finland, so I'm just going to get something else. Of course after having ruled out all Samsung phones, and all Google phones, there aren't that many left. But HTC one X+ look like really good value at the moment, and if the software sucks, you could just install KitKat on it as easily as you could on a Galaxy Nexus.
Rant over!