This is changing... but slowly...

This is changing... but slowly...

One would hope that any company putting out a smartpone has an engineering process in place: that is at least some kind of source-control system and a build, package and QA processes.

Smartphones are new wave and the companies are starting to develop these things. For dumbphones and even featurephones it was just not needed: you made the firmware and hardware, you tested it and sold it and then you forget it. It was not easy to reproduce build: it was not uncommon to have no scripts commited to VCS and to have just one or two guys in the 10'000 person company who can build said code. This is still true for most Chinese companies (they just don't care about licenses and happily build fake iPhones using Windows CE, for example).

How hard is it to Tag a release and put a tar-gz on a web site ?

Quite hard actually. You need to track origins of all components (you can not release what you don't own, after all) and it's not easy to do if it was not done in the course of development. When contractors are involved they need to do that as well - and they often don't bother.