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Comment by bastawhiz | Hacker News Reader

That's not really a fair assessment. The Nexus 4 was released in 2012 and runs Android 5.1. The devices that didn't get Android 5 are pretty much a decade old. And essentially all of them can be rooted and upgraded to a more modern version of Android, if you want to. Do you want to, though? Probably not: even if the batteries in them still held a decent charge, the devices that didn't get Android 5 almost all have less than 1gb of RAM (Nexus S had 348MB non-gpu memory) and only one or two CPU cores, with a bunch of older devices shipping without 3g. Having internal storage measured in gigabytes was at the upper end of the market (Nexus One, Google's flagship device from 2010, had 190 megabytes of app storage). "Perfectly fine otherwise" really doesn't apply to the overwhelming majority of folks who use their phones more than any other device (hours each day).

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The OP said old devices, not old OS versions. In other words, the lack of software support is the problem, not the hardware.

I used a smartphone that was released in 2014 until the end of 2020. It worked perfectly fine, and would have continued to work perfectly fine—except for the software. The GPS date rollover happened and there was no official update to fix it to the new epoch. VoLTE support in custom ROMs was impossible (because this feature is locked in a closed-source binary blob), so it couldn’t make phone calls once my provider turned off their 3G network. Otherwise, it was fast and worked fine.

When I gave up and looked for a replacement, I found that most low- and mid-range phones sold in 2021 have slower hardware with fewer features than my 2014-era flagship phone. Lower-resolution non-OLED screens, lower benchmark scores, no wireless charging, no waterproofing, no replaceable batteries, no unlocked bootloaders. The idea that newer hardware is objectively superior is simply untrue.

> most low- and mid-range phones sold in 2021 have slower hardware with fewer features than my 2014-era flagship phone.

Unlikely. Top of the line then was a Note 4; 3 GB RAM, 32 GB storage, Snapdragon 805 quad-core (Geekbench 5 score--around 154/449).

Mid-range now--

Motorola One 5G Ace, $349 https://www.amazon.com/Motorola-battery-Unlocked-Camera-Silv...

6 GB RAM, 128 GB storage, Geekbench 5 score 660/1888

PLUS 5 G

So-2x RAM, 4x storage, 4x CPU + 5G.

At about half of the price of the Note 4 when it came out.

I think you’re probably right about the performance (though I did typo ‘2021’ instead of ‘2020’, so the specific model you mention wasn’t available at the time). I do remember feeling very surprised that contemporary mid-range phones seemed to have worse benchmarks on PassMark, but my old phone model (Galaxy S5) seems to be conspicuously absent as I look again, so I wonder if there was a data issue. It’s also possible that I misread something, or that the devices I was looking at weren’t representative of the best of the mid-range market at the time due to carrier restrictions and essential-to-me features (e.g. headphone jack) that have been getting cut from newer phones.

In any case, I regret bringing this specific point up, both because I try not to say things which are inaccurate, but also because I feel like it has distracted from the main point: my old phone did everything that most people do on their phones (phone calls, chats, video streaming, music streaming, web browsing, light gaming) with no performance/memory/storage problems, had a (subjectively) better feature set than many more recent models, and the only reason I had to buy a new one anyway was because the manufacturer made it impossible to keep the software up-to-date.

The OP said old devices, but in response to someone complementing support for old software -- you can see where the change in topic might lead to difficulties in communication?

Unfortunately, board support packages from the system-on-chip manufacturer limit kernel upgrades. Even then, Project Treble should make it easier to upgrade to newer versions of higher-level components. But Treble was introduced with Android 8.0, so while newer phones should be able to be upgraded more easily, that doesn't help hardware of the era you're referring to.

In any case, the problem isn't with app developers and older versions of Android -- although I'm happy that many try to mitigate the hardware vendors' lack of support. It's that phone hardware is insufficiently open or standardised (in contrast to x86) meaning that OS vendors can't support it.

I had a similar situation, where my 2015 Samsung S6 still seemed as good or better than most the mid to low range phones I saw in 2020, and open source support for the old phone through Lineage was spotty at best (one person would update new releases maybe). I eventually got a Samsung A51 which has about equivalent specs in most cases but has a slightly bigger screen.

It's sad how mostly fine hardware (just one replaceable component is bad) gets left behind, but it's not entirely limited to phones. A couple years back I had to replace the main board of my son's computer because the old gateway it was that came with windows 7 or 8 and that was updated to windows 10 stopped being supported in one of the fall or spring patch rollups. Windows 10 had worked on the computer for about a year, that mainboard wasn't supported in the update, so the update never applied cleanly. I understand dropping old system support eventually (even though the Linux kernel still supports everything, that doesn't always mean you can get really old systems to boot a modern distro without problem), but I would rather it wasn't mid-way through the OS lifetime. :/

> I found that most low- and mid-range phones sold in 2021 have slower hardware with fewer features than my 2014-era flagship phone

Slower hardware doesn't mean equally outdated, and I honestly can't back up your claim with any data. A $30 Android Tracphone on Amazon has 1-2 orders of magnitude more storage, a 50% bigger battery, twice the cores, a bigger screen, better camera, and 4g (compared to the flagship phones in 2011).

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09238C448/ref=cm_sw_r_apan_glt_fa...

The features you mention (wireless charging, screen type) have nothing to do with app or OS support.

Modern low- to midrange phones certainly have more RAM and storage than your 2014 phone, which matters more than the raw benchmark scores.

I'm using an Android which has seen two battery replacements in ~5 years, and it still holds a charge for 2-3 days.

All apps I use in regular life (Youtube, Google Maps, Gmail, Signal, a shopping list, music player, virtual train ticket) run absolutely without issue. I'm sure they'd run at 30FPS more if I bought a new phone, but this is a tool, not a toy.

In fact, the biggest issue I'm running into is exactly what parent said. Thoughtless companies (like my credit card issuer) just build apps which could run on a phone from 2012 (basically just displaying my monthly credit card bill), but then make them unavailable on devices older than 2 years.

> just build apps which could run on a phone from 2012 (basically just displaying my monthly credit card bill), but then make them unavailable on devices older than 2 years

How is this the app developer's fault? There's plenty of Linux, macOS, and Windows software that only runs on recent kernels because they use new APIs. Why would ANY developer target OSs that the overwhelming majority of their users don't actually use, skipping out on supporting modern functionality?

Edit: Really eager to hear from the folks downvoting about their great experiences bending over backwards to support SDKs from 2013 to target devices that literally can't even connect to a mobile network anymore.

I'm typing this on a Thinkpad X220 released in 2011, and running the current Debian.

Did Lenovo push the current Debian to your device? Have the apps when you bought your laptop increased in resource use by an order of magnitude?

It's not the same kind of device running with the same constraints. Phones were pushing the limits of miniaturization. The difference in the underlying technology is vastly different. Comparing a laptop from 2002 trying to run the current Debian is more apt.

I don't understand what you're getting at. I bought this X220 about a year ago on Craigslist for $100 and installed Debian on it. The main app on it whose resource use has bloated a lot since 2011 is Firefox, and that's a persistent sore point for me, since it's the web that has bloated rather than just the browser. The other stuff I use (mostly Emacs, Python, and Xchat) hasn't really bloated. I have a Thinkpad X40 (from 2004) that I used for similar purposes but its hardware eventually got too flaky.

I would say I keep a lot more data on the X220 (using a 0.5TB SATA SSD) than I could store on the X40 which had a 40GB PATA drive. It had USB2 and SD card ports though, so I could in principle have added a high capacity SD card or whatever. The X61 of the same era is still a viable machine and I think it had a SATA drive slot, which means it would be pretty usable with today's ssd's.

I am sure you get Lineage OS, or something like it to run great on an old phone, just as I am sure you installed Debian yourself.

Mostly when we are talking about phones getting upgrades or not getting upgrades any more it is about updates from the manufacturer, so I don't see where you are going.

I think that is not so easy but I haven't looked into it too much. Only a limited set of phones work with it and I think their functionality is also limited. I do have a Nokia N900 from around 2008, but despite its coolness it has never really been usable (too slow and too small).

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