You can certainly try...

Posted Oct 22, 2011 16:37 UTC (Sat) by njs (subscriber, #40338)
In reply to: You can certainly try... by rgmoore
Parent article: Andy Rubin: Android 4.0 to be open sourced by year end (The H)

If someone is actually buying a new phone every 12-18 months, then the phone company probably does end up making money off that, since that means they've gone off the 24-month upgrade cycle... but I think that's a pretty small proportion of the userbase, and it's a pretty affluent one that's probably also paying for some top-of-the-line plan.