Google has compiled a list of (Original Equipment Manufacturers), ranking them based on how up-to-date their handsets are, reports Bloomberg. It takes into account the security patches and operating system version present in phones to formulate manufacturer rankings. Google hopes that this will provide OEMs with enough motivation to start prioritizing Android updates in future. The report mentions that Google has shared this list with Android partners earlier this year, and has discussed making it public to highlight manufacturers that provide quick updates and shame ones that are slow, or don’t provide one. However, it's not clear when the company will make this list public, if at all. Currently the Android market is heavily fragmented with everything from Android 2.2 to Android 6.0 in circulation on various phones. This results in a vast majority of the phones unable to access security patches to known vulnerabilities, the latest Google services or new OS features. This hurts Google’s bottom line as well as developers, as they end up developing not only for various screen sizes and resolutions but also for significantly different versions of Android. Users are also doomed to use an unpatched phone with the only other choice being to buy a new phone. The Android Developer platform provides an illustration of how fragmented the Android market is. Note that the data used to create the above chart was collected from the new Google Play Store app, which only supports Android 2.2 and above. Google has been working on fixing Android…
