Hacker News Reader

Comment by realstuff | Hacker News Reader

This is why for the first time since I started owning smartphones (2010), I am going to switch to iPhone.

That's not going to fix the problem. Installing updates on an iPhone older than a couple years bogs performance down to unusable levels.

I am aware but at least I won't get hacked which is more important than performance.

But even if Apple may be better than most android manufacturers, Apple still doesn't support devices it considers "Obsolete"...and there is nothing you can do about it other than buy a new phone since the bootloader is locked down. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_iOS_devices anything before iPhone 5 is considered "Oboslete" and they don't seem to be releasing updates. On the other hand, I've been happily using my Samsung S3 which cyanogenmod has been pushing latest android updates to nightly...and that is likely to continue as long as there are enough of us who care, even if cyanogen and samsung goes away.

cyanogen is no more.

For the record, the Galaxy S III was released in the same year as the iPhone 5 (2012), so for now your device hasn't lasted any longer than an iPhone. But I don't doubt that it will.

SII last got an update a month and a half ago (https://download.cyanogenmod.org/?device=i777)

Without any updates for the vendor blobs.

Does the S3 get security updates to all the kernel-level vendor-provided blobs?

I have an iPhone 5 (4 year old phone) running the latest OS and it works fine. No, it's not as fast as the latest devices, but it works adequately if one desires to keep using their 4-year-old device.

While I agree that's been the case in the past, supported devices are fast enough now that it really doesn't slow them down anymore. Even the lowest supported device runs well on iOS 10, and it has gotten official updates years longer than all android devices I know of.

Sure, one could install an updated and more secure rom (assuming it exists for your device). But, the vast majority of users don't care or won't bother to go through that process, rendering it a completely ineffective solution for the general consumer market.

> supported devices are fast enough now that it really doesn't slow them down anymore

That happens to be true now because Apple has dropped support for many iPad models with iOS 10, accounting for up to a third of all iPads in use.

Running iOS 9 on the iPad 2, 3, and iPad mini was frustrating. This was only three months ago, so I wouldn't rule it out for the future yet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com