Many providers have customized the OS for the look and feel along with adding their custom apps and settings including locking out tethering. One of the big advantages of 3.0 was it was suppose to provide an easier way to separate out the look and feel out of the OS so the providers didn't need to create a custom OS. This make pushing out updates very difficult.

For example, I worked on an app to be included with the device by the OEM. The OEM had roll a custom OS and kernel to handle their hardware and replace/update the mail and calender app because they are very tied to Google by default. We needed hooks into the the mail and calendar app in ways that are not supported by Google so the OEM also had to add those hooks for us. At this point, we were deep into unsupported territory by Google, but supported by the OEM. These things change unexpectedly with minor OS updates from Google which make them brittle to maintain. An update to a newer OS would be a hell of a lot of work.

All that said, if we could have based off of 3.0 instead of 2.3, many of these issues would not exist because of some abstraction layers added just for this purpose. I expect 4.0 to make that even nicer.

Thanks. At least there's some indication that it's getting better.

Too bad the providers have to degrade the experience with their crap, instead of just providing additional apps if they feel it's necessary.

For one thing, last I looked, Chrome Beta requires the GL_OES_egl_image extension for off-thread texture upload, and had support for the ICS-only SurfaceTexture (although judging by the WebKit source that's ifdef'd out). GL_OES_egl_image support is very spotty on pre-ICS devices.