Just about every article on Android that I've read in the past year and a bit has lamented its fragmentation: partly it's the simple the proliferation of models, with different screen sizes, aspect ratios, availability of functionality such as Bluetooth etc., but mostly it's the sheer number of devices running old versions of the OS that's causing the distress.
The good folk at Google clearly want as many people to be using recent versions of Android as possible — they are releasing minor revisions on a three monthly basis and major ones every year or so. Coming to this from the PC industry (in the most general sense), they seem to think of the devices the way any tech guy thinks of his own PC: buy the best processor available, the best power supply and the best case; make sure the board can take twice as much RAM as you can currently afford because you'll be adding the other half in a year or two as a mid-life kicker; install the latest version of your chosen operating system and continuously update it with patches as they are issued, and with major revisions and new versions fairly soon after they become available.
Manufacturers, just as clearly, aren't playing ball. There are two reasons, and neither of them is going to go away.
The first reason is that manufacturers aren't designing their phones with OS upgradeability in mind, nor are they much interested in supplying OS upgrades to older devices, for the obvious if short sighted reason that each OS update installed represents the delayed and therefore possibly lost sale of a new device. It's a mentality common to manufacturers of consumer goods worldwide (you'll know it as built-in obsolescence or some variation of the term) and it's diametrically opposed to the one I'm crediting to Google.
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Google remember sell adverts, not mobile phones.
Google are used to the "plasticity" of the PC -- new software makes your PC new again, as long as it's got good enough hardware to run the new software.
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