Samsung Attempting To Receive Android Upgrade Fees From Carriers

You might want to think twice before you decide to buy your next Samsung Smartphone with Google Android. It turns out that the company wants to start charging carriers an “upgrade toll” for each new version of the popular OS they roll out to older devices.

The “upgrade toll” is a first from any major cell phone manufacturer, typically the likes of HTC, Motorola and LG among others simply provide Android updates free of charge as a service to their customers, thus ensuring that user devices are up to date with the best offerings available and newest fixes that have been discovered.

U.S. carriers are not happy about the toll fee, causing a stand-off to occur which currently means that Samsung customers are being left behind in the Android race.

An insider for XDA-Developers said of the deal:

“They [at Samsung] are essentially charging for the Android Open Source Project’s efforts, and the effort on Samsung’s end is rather minimal,” while adding, “As a result of perhaps, corporate collusion, [sic] all U.S. carriers have decided to refuse to pay for the Android 2.2 update, in hopes that the devaluation of the Galaxy S line will cause Samsung to drop [its] fees and give the update to the carriers. The situation has panned out differently in other parts of the world, but this is the situation in the United States.”

Since the stand off began very few updates have been issued and a class action lawsuit has even been filed, claiming that the lack of updates has meant no fix to a major flaw with GPS found in Android versions previous to Android 2.2.

The move shouldn’t surprise Samsung Smartphone users, as the company has always been slow to issue updates and fixes for their devices after launch. In fact Samsung rarely provides more than one OS revision to each of their devices if any at all, placing them far behind HTC and Motorola on the Android side and just as far behind Apple who releases new iOS updates as necessary and rather quickly in many cases.

What are your thoughts on the Samsung update issue? From battery issues with the Galaxy S to minor flaws and GPS issues, I would personally think Samsung would be acting more quickly to help their customers, apparently that isn’t part of their Smartphone strategy if this current rumor is in fact true. [via Electronista]