How Google is solving Android's fragmentation issue

One of the things I hear countless apple fanboys bash Android for is it's fragmentation issue where one phone could be running x version while another could have y version and how Google is doing nothing to solve it. That is far from the truth

In the last couple of years Google has been migrating more and more of Android's base apps to the play store

• Browser = Google Chrome 
• Calendar = Google Calendar 
• Gmail 
• Google Maps
• Google search  
• Music = Play Music 
• Play Store 
• YouTube 

By Google doing this they are potentially making firmware updates more redundant, this is unheard of on IOS and Windows Phone.

Sure you will still need firmware updates for bug fixes and new features to the system itself but even then Google can make it more modular like it is with Linux distributions like Arch, Ubuntu, etc