The new UI style and notifications means all the skins have to be revamped. That takes a lot of investment, and the only other benefit users are likely to notice is slightly better battery life. Lollipop has better security, but unfortunately that's still not a big selling point. Hopefully cell phone makers have had enough time to update their skins to look good with (or pave over) Material design, and we'll see more updates for M than we did for L.
Then they would have basically no way to compete with one another other than marketing and specs. Touchwiz and all those other gimmicks really do sell phones. That's just speaking from anecdotal evidence, but I assume big corps have done their homework on this one. Remember that the types of people reading this comment are not your average consumer. We might hate it, we might know it's not as good as stock android... but we're a very small segment of the market (especially for Android). You probably don't see a ton of nutritionists/personal trainers eating at McDonalds, either.
The downside of having an open platform is that OEMs will add crap to differentiate themselves - just look at the weird media bs that comes pre-installed on tons of windows laptops.
I suspect this is temporary. A lot of the big OEMs from just a couple years ago are massively losing money on Android. HTC, Sony, LG, etc all reported signficant losses. I imagine the market will tigheten up with one or two premium OEMs (Moto, Samsung) and some bottom feeders selling super budget phones. When things finally tighten up there will less incentive to make these difficult to maintain Android custom distros and more incentive to get closer to the stock as a way to make updating easier. Google may also put in a full theming engine to help this along. Marshmallow has a basic theme engine form what I've read, so that's a start.
I think Google knows that the status quo with Android is unsustainable and will need to migrate to a more tightly controlled business model. Samsung's flirting with Tizen hasn't paid off and they're more or less stuck with Google dictating policy now. The monthly security updates thing sounds promising as well. Its time Android got serious about security and updates.
I tried both and I was all about going back to iPhone, until I tried Cyanogenmod, which puts (a lot of) the sense back into Android. It uses the Google launcher (without the Google Now page integrated on swipe left), but it removes the insanely annoying design decisions by Samsung, e.g. displaying a confirmation dialog when you increase the sound volume over a certain threshold even with your Phone locked in your pocket and you bombing it on your bike downhill. Or the "cannot use camera" and "sorry, dimming your screen" on 5% battery threshold. I don't know what they are smoking at Samsung, but it's not good.
> displaying a confirmation dialog when you increase the sound volume over a certain threshold
Don't blame Samsung for that, my Nexus 7 did that as well. And in Netflix the dialog appeared behind the active window so you couldn't see it or hit the button.
Critics of Android embraced a meme that Lollipop was Android's Vista, substantiated by users anecdotal claims about poor battery life from a given upgrade, or the changes to notification levels, etc. So you still see the echos of that. I've never seen someone go so over the top to claim that it justified vendor skins, though, so this is a new pinnacle.
Yeah, the ritual of rebooting the device every two days because of the memory leaks and camera crashes were quite an incremental update over stable Kitkat.
Even ignoring the placebo effect, and a contingent of people carrying forth a message between advocating the amazing world of task killers, what in the world would a skin have to do with that? TouchWiz and others are literally layered over stock Android, so if there was a fundamental issue it would have the same issue. The notion that the skins are somehow superior is nonsensical, despite the comical, ignorance-induced downvotes I've predictably received.
Lollipop's first release was a bit of a mess in terms of bugs (it has since gotten a lot better, at least on devices that have kept up with releases, like Nexus devices), but I'd still run a stock 5.0 release as a daily-use phone OS over any Touchwiz release ever.
I can't begin to describe how terrible I find the Touchwiz interface relative to stock.
