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There’s profit motive in having terrible forward compatibility.
Oh your phone can’t get new the version? Better buy a new one.
Even now, if it wasn’t for non-user replaceable batteries, I’m sure loads of people wouldn’t bother to upgrade devices for years and years. My dad is still running an iPhone X, sees no reason to upgrade and it’s just losing latest OS support now. Not that that would bother him 😅
It's quite sad that Google never figured out a way around this issue. The real problem is that they push the responsibility of updating to OEMs, which have no interest in updating their "old phones" (1 year old in most cases) because a new shiny one has been released.
I think the only way to really solve this is to make Android like Windows used to be back in the XP days. OEMs get a base system and they can customize it to their hearts content, but the updates to the base always come straight from the OS developer, no matter if the "OEM customizations" are ready for it or not.
This is really how Google should have built things in the beginning. Provide a stable driver API for hardware then upgrade the OS as needed without OEM cooperation. They are just now getting around to it with things like Treble, IIRC.
Even with things like Treble the updates still have to come from the OEM, so unfortunately I don't see the situation changing any time soon.
unfortunately all the OEMs are like "hey this is the new phone of the week, please buy this" and then "we don't have resources to do updates for the "old" phones, we have 100 devices to maintain...
this is how Android has been forever. Jellybean was the most popular until around Nougat.
People keeping their phones for a longer time shouldn't be considered a bad thing. Cheap brands using old versions isn't good though and that does represent some of the numbers.
I feel like at this point Google should ditch the annual OS level-up. Phones and their OSs have matured and pushing out a new version every year is just increasing the support Google has to provide without much benefit. I was running Android 9 until recently, and while I'm now on the 14 beta, I could easily see my current phone lasting long enough to outlive the current 5 years of security updates promised.
But they're doing security related updates. For example, in Android 11+ there's app storage isolation, no app can access the shared storage without permission from the user. Just for those kind of update I think updates are important.
My solution: Buy a Pixel, use GrapheneOS, good for five years.
What's graphene os? Sorry if that's a dumb questions.
GrapheneOS is a heavily security-focused fork of Android with no Google anything in it by default. Ironically the developers have chosen to support the Google Pixel specifically.
I really should get a new phone... didn't realize they drop old OSes so fast from security patches lol.
When buying a new phone, you could pick one that garantees 4-5 years of security updates.
Android update policy by top manufacturers for their flagships
Fairphone 4 has an incredible 5-year warranty, aims for 6 years of updates
Be aware of difference between security updates and features updates. For instance Fairphone 3 has Android 11 with regular security updates, I personally think that's good since it provides stability and security, and the phone works perfectly fine. Some prefer getting new features faster, but feature updates may be bumpier.
Take this with a grane of salt, garentee update doesn't garentee "speedy" update. OnePlus is notorious for this: their older phone stop receive meaningful update after at most a year. The update significantly lag behind that of google, despite their promise of long term support.
AFAIK google pushes update to supported phone at the same time. I don't know about Samsung.
Google isn't building an software/hardware ecosystem, it's building an ad empire. It justs needs its footprint calling back home on as most devices as possible. I don't think it ever cared about which android version is highest (except for PR)
Haven't we reached the point where it doesn't actually matter as much as it used to? A lot has been separated out into services that get updated through the play store. So being left behind isn't as big of a problem anymore as long as you're still getting security updates.
Yeah. Maybe improvements to cameras is still a thing, but even those are so much better now than they used to be. But even that is really dependent on what phone you get. A flagship will always have a better camera than a budget phone.
Other than that I see no reason to spend top dollar on a mobile device whose capabilities peaked 5 or more years ago. I just buy used unlocked mid range phones every three years or so. Can't say I'm missing anything.
I was looking at mp3-players, and some of those are running android 4. I don't think we're getting rid of legacy androids any time soon
Project Rockbox is also a great firmware alternative for old MP3 players