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Comment by cbmuser | Hacker News Reader

iPhone 5s (2013 IIRC) is also still receiving security updates for iOS 12.5.x.

While I love that Apple provides security updates for older iOS releases (The iOS 12.5.2 security upgrade from March[0] for eg) - Apple doesn't have any guarantees around it.

The closest guarantee you get from Apple is that "iPhones on the latest iOS release are supported". The latest iOS list of supported devices is at [1], and Wikipedia[2] also considers that as the "list of supported devices", because Apple refuses to provide clear guarantees.

The Apple guarantees are on service[3], and only seem to apply for Hardware issues[4]. If someone has a better citation for iPhone 5s being officially under security support, I'd love to update https://endoflife.date/iphone accordingly.

[0]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212257

[1]: https://support.apple.com/en-in/guide/iphone/iphe3fa5df43/io...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_iOS_and_iPadOS_devices...

[3]: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201624

[4]: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/370530/is-ios-12-s...

This is good to know. I don't care at all about using the latest iOS; if my iPhone 6S was still running the original version it shipped with, I'd never know the difference.

But I do care about security updates.

You probably would notice, because system apps like Safari are tied into it. I'm not sure how much of the web is broken on Safari 9. Or whether iMessage or Facetime still works.

I would say that's the one place where Android got it right, you can keep having updated system apps for a long time after the OS itself is abandoned (which is shamefuly quickly).

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