Get Ahead of the Slow Rollout Curve

Earlier this year, Google introduced staged rollouts for app updates. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. However, in many cases, you can find early releases or APK downloads for the apps that you really care about. While app rollouts might take days to reach your device, the APK for popular devices are usually available within hours. Getting OS updates is a bit trickier. Your only route for getting unofficial updates to Android if you can't wait is custom ROMs. As stated in the section on stock Android, these will get you as close as possible, but unfortunately your best bet for getting fast OS updates is buying a Google or Google-ish device. Again, the Nexus, Google Play Edition, and Motorola devices are the current leaders of this pack. This doesn't help if you already own a device that's getting neglected, but if it's time to buy a new device and updates are important to you, you have plenty of options.