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Comment by H1Supreme | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to run the latest Android, but my two year old phone can't run it. In fact, I'm stuck on 6.0. My iPad II (the second one) runs iOS9. Still runs fine for youtube, which is it's primary purpose.

When I finally retired my iPhone 4S after years, it could still run the latest iOS.

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And more importantly than just features, the high rate of latest-OS-adoption on iOS means security updates get out fast.

This has a side effect of "herd immunity" in that iOS is a less-desireable platform to develop exploits for than Android, since the shelf life is much better for an android exploit.

I'd love to see google innovate here, for now it seems like they're not even trying to match Apple when it comes to this metric.

Have you not heard about Project Treble and the HAL separation efforts going on? Google is indeed trying to innovate here. With Android 8 at least, the situation should improve - it might take some additional enforcement through Play agreements and such to really get it locked down though.

The OEMs are still the ones expected to push updates....

For now, yes, but it opens up the possibility of changing that down the line or for users to manually perform those updates.

As we say in Portugal, better wait seated.

It's primarily the chipset vendor (i.e. Qualcomm, Nvidia, etc.) at fault for lack of updates, not the OEMs. Treble removes one more excuse for OEMs to hide behind. (Not to mention the infrastructure is now in place for Google to push device-agnostic system images directly.)

I don't belive it will change anything, unless Google actually forces them.

My brand new 2017 LG stuck on Android 6.0 kind of proves the point.

That won’t help with many kernel related issues or issues in the HAL drivers themselves, only userland.

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