Hacker News Reader

Comment by bigiain | Hacker News Reader

If you're targeting general consumers (ie, not the HN crowd or only people who upgrade their phones every year to two), there's still double digit percentage of Android devices in the wild running older than version 8 Android.

https://gs.statcounter.com/android-version-market-share/mobi...

Some of the inexpensive phones you can buy new right now (where I am) come with Android 7.

View on HN

Honestly as a society we should not be putting any effort into supporting manufacturers who are producing hardware that are immediately e-waste.

Right to repair needs to cover this issue. Either keep devices in your ecosystem up to date, or open it up for third party support.

> Honestly as a society we should not be putting any effort into supporting manufacturers who are producing hardware that are immediately e-waste.

I am staring right now at two mobile dev test devices I have on my desk, a Samsung Galaxy S6 and an iPhone 6. iPhone is running iOS 15 released this week. Galaxy is stuck on Android 7 because Samsung don't bother providing updates to devices beyond 2 years.

It's no coincidence that my latest personal phone purchase was from Apple.

(Well, that's not _quite_ true. I have a PinePhone on the way. But I'm expecting everything I deserve for buying a beta version of a Linux phone from a niche manufacturer with _that_ one...)

I have a Samsung Galaxy J1 (2016) that runs Android 5 and was (I later realised) already out of manufacturer support when I bought it new at retail in April 2018. That’s insane.

It’s as if Samsung was selling dishwashers and Apple was selling entry into an ecosystem.

Glad that this behavior from Sams is changing. I have S10, that were on Android 9, now it's updated to 11. I guess there will be no major releases, but I still will and do get now security updates for a few years. At least there is now predictable pattern on device support.

(iPhone 6s). The latest release for the iPhone 6 is iOS 12 due to having lower RAM (1GB vs 2GB).

Also didn't see it mentioned in your comment, but both were released in the same year (2015). Additionally, although the iPhone 5s (2013) and 6 (2014) are stuck on iOS 12, they're still getting security updates! [0] That's 8 years of support so far.

I'm still using a 6s, but planning on upgrading in the next few months. It's nice to have the option to keep using the phone though without losing support.

[0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212548

I know this ship has sailed but I think building on a trust system that by design has an expiration and no built-in method for rotating certs date would go a long way in helping the e-waste problem.

> Either keep devices in your ecosystem up to date, or open it up for third party support. Infinite support for old devices is not viable so you are just trying to force open source.

The brand new Garmin GPS I purchased in June is running Android 6. Completely absurd. Granted, it does its job of navigating fine, but it still has wifi connectivity.

At least, one can hope, that whatever ssl certs it relies on to do the job you bought it for - are under control of Garmin who can pay for non LetsEncrypt certs with Root CA trust chains that will work with their devices. How much non-map based access to Android does it expose? It'd suck if it loses Google Traffic API connectivity, for example.

It doesn't directly expose anything more or less, every app you have access to by default is Garmin controlled (except perhaps iOverlander). There's no play store or services, as far as I can tell. You can sideload whatever you want though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com