Google confirms Android attacks; no fix for most Samsung users

>But in reality, Samsung (and the other Android OEMs) cannot compete with Google and its unique control over hardware and software.

Yes, they can. We are talking about applying provided security patches to source code, and then releasing a new version of their OS. For patches that have existed for months. The time from patch to release should be on the order l of days from receiving the patches to having a validated OS release with the fix being sent to users. It's not the control of Android which makes Google possible to patch their Pixel branch of AOSP faster than Samsung can patch their own. It's that Samsung doesn't care about prompt security fixes so they don't allocate engineers to do the work.

The problem is that each OEM releases 50 different models per year, vs Google (or Apple) that release 3 or 4 models.

If that truly is an issue then Android is a fundamentally broken OS.

How many different models of PCs get released? How hard is it to patch any of their OSs?

>How many different models of PCs get released?

If you want to go that route, each manufacturer is responsible for their own drivers for windows, linux, and possibly Mac (though if it’s novel enough, they will do it). Then think about the components that make up a PC. Motherboard, CPU, Memory Control, IO, OS, Audio, Video. Each of those needs to release patches. So its orders of magnitude more than any Android OS. It’s just pure laziness on the hardware manufacturers that don’t want to invest in software/support. They want Google to do that.