• Length of time for upgrade to reach current flagship: 158 days (39.6/60 points) for Galaxy S6; 152 days (39.6/60 points) for Galaxy Note 5
• Length of time for upgrade to reach previous-gen flagship: Still waiting (0/30 points) for Galaxy S5; 172 days (18.6/30 points) for Galaxy Note 4
• Communication: Poor (0/10 points)

Samsung has two phones that are essentially equal in flagship status: the Galaxy S and the Galaxy Note. So for its score, I measured performance for both lines of devices and then averaged the figures together.

The results -- well, they ain't great: Sammy took a full 158 days to get Marshmallow out to its then-current flagship, the Galaxy S6, which first saw the software in the U.S. via the Sprint model on March 10. (Verizon got the rollout almost a month later, at the start of April, while customers on other carriers are still waiting.) The then-current Note 5 flagship was in the same league, with Android 6.0 hitting the Verizon version on March 4 (and Sprint's version a few days later, with other models still on hold). No matter how you look at it, five-plus months is way too long for a current flagship to get a major OS upgrade.

But wait -- there's more! Things are even worse with the previous-gen flagship, where Samsung took a whopping 172 days to get Android 6.0 to its Note 4 in America (via the Sprint model, which alone received the software on March 24) and still has yet to get Marshmallow onto any U.S. Galaxy S5 phone.

Adding insult to injury, Samsung seems to have a policy of keeping its customers completely in the dark about its upgrade plans and progress. Once upon a time, the company did actually provide detailed info about that stuff -- but after it repeatedly failed to keep up with its promises (and, ahem, received a fair amount of negative publicity for the way it handled those failures), Samsung sealed its corporate lips firmly shut. And it's kept 'em glued closed ever since.

It's too bad, because while Samsung's sales numbers may be strong, the company's commitment to ongoing support is steadily slipping from bad to just plain awful. And its customers are the ones who are suffering.

The Honor 8 is probably going to live or die by its software, and it's running Android 6.0 with Huawei's "EMUI 4.1" skin. EMUI is a super-heavy skin that is very close to Xiaomi's MIUI skin. We're talking a full Android conversion to make it look and work like iOS. There's no app drawer, icons get square backgrounds with rounded corners, and overlays like the notification panel are displayed in a frosted glass panel. Recent Apps is now a horizontally scrolling thumbnail view, and the settings are an exact iOS copy. We'll have to dive in to see what stock Android features are missing from this, but it doesn't look great. We also asked Huawei if it was going to provide its customers with Android's monthly security updates. Huawei could not promise it would do so every month.

After Chinese company Huawei introduced the phone for the US in January of this year, I gave the Honor 5X a full review. But maybe you can’t even call it that. More than a review, it was mostly just some thoughts on the phone that I had pent up after an exhausting week at CES. Basically, the gist was this (although I recommend you read the whole thing): You get a lot for your money ($200) on the hardware side of things with the Honor 5X, but the software leaves a lot (and, really, I mean a lot) to be desired. After that, the phone sat in my drawer and I hadn’t touched it since.

Until yesterday…

What spurred this experiment? I received a Huawei Mate 8 review unit just a few days ago and the software was so ugly and buggy that I felt determined to flash some custom version of Android to make the beautiful piece of hardware my daily driver. Of course there isn’t a build of CyanogenMod available for the Mate 8 (yet), but there are some slightly-modified versions of the stock Huawei-modified OS. They’re better, but — at least in my experience so far — not enough. My failure in finding a good working alternative to the lackluster EMUI on the Mate 8, though, made me wonder if I could do something with the Honor 5X.