Google Is Forcing Me to Dump a Perfectly Good Phone | Hacker News Reader

Google Is Forcing Me to Dump a Perfectly Good Phone

vice.com

I wrote a thread[0] on Pixel 3 (trying to convince Google to extend the support) a few months before it went EoL[3] (Oct '21). Here's the important bits:

- 10M+ Pixel 3 devices that were sold worldwide

- 72% of Pixel 3's estimated lifecycle emissions are from its manufacturing[1]. Using your phone is _not the source of most of the emissions during a phone's lifecycle_.

- It has gotten worse over time, but Google hasn't offered better guaranttes. Pixel 5's emissions-over-lifetime are 30% higher than that of Pixel 3.

The alleged reason Google can't offer support beyond 3 years is because of Google's dependence on Qualcomm for the support[2]. Apparently Qualcomm asks for a ridiculous amount of money to support any chip beyond a measly 2-3 years. Apple gets away with it by building their own chips, and Pixel 6 is guaranteed to be supported for 5 years as a result.

However, the fact that Google - one of the world's richest corporation can't convince or pay Qualcomm to support a perfectly functional device in 2022 is astonishing.

[0]: https://twitter.com/captn3m0/status/1427908406086553601

[1]: https://storage.googleapis.com/mannequin/sustainability/repo...

[2]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/the-fairphone-2-hits...

[3]: https://endoflife.date/pixel

Wasn't Project Treble supposed to reduce Google's dependency on Qualcomm updating their drivers?

https://www.xda-developers.com/list-android-devices-project-...

The OP covers this in the article:

> I’ve bought too many Android phones over the years believing Google when they say they’ve figured out how to be better with updates, whether it was the Google Play Store promise or the Android One promise or “Project Treble.” None of it has mattered. It’s too little, too late from Google.

which links to https://www.theverge.com/22881882/android-12-google-pixel-6-..., which says:

> By its nature, Android is a fragmented ecosystem. There’s no straight line from Android 12 to the Galaxy S21 or OnePlus 9 — every major update sees handoffs between the manufacturer, carriers, and Google, all of which result in delays. Initiatives like Project Treble seem to have helped speed up some parts of the process, but unless Google takes some drastic actions, nobody can completely fix the problem.

Case in point, Treble came out in 2017, one year before Pixel 3. Didn't help.

I haven't heard about Project Treble till your comment. A quick google:

"Project Treble (take a deep breath) is Google's ambitious effort to rearchitect Android in order to establish a modular base in which the lower-level code created by silicon vendors is separated from the main Android operating system"

As in abstracted away hardware code? As in...how operating systems have been built since before TikTokers were even born?

Everything is on a spectrum, they are further siloing off hardware from software and cutting out some spaghetti code between the two. Before hardware manufacturers had to merge in google's code with theirs before they release, with proper segregation google's aim with the project is to make a clean cut between the two so that kernel and up aren't so tightly coupled and they can upgrade their OS without breaking the hardware.

Further than they siloed it before, yes. In comparison to the competition (which sadly withdrew for other reasons), they are extremely far behind: Windows ME worked fine with hardware and drivers from Windows 95. But the whole problem is the consequence of Linux not having a stable driver interface.

There are many adjectives that could be used for Windows ME, but "worked fine" is not one of them. Whether with Win95 drivers or its own.

I've certainly used modem drivers from Win 95 in Win Me

My rule of thumb is that Google products or initiatives with “Project” in the official name never work out. If it was a real thing they would have given it a real name at launch.

Exception that proves the rule: I use Google Fi (formerly Project Fi) as my mobile provider. While they haven't exactly added resources to it, it serves me remarkably well as a cellular provider. And I use an iPhone!

That's a good counterexample! Hopefully they won't realize it's still chugging along and keep it alive. :)

The 5 years for Pixel are for security updates only. OS updates are still 3 years. IMHO it's still too low, but it's a (small) step up.

What "support" does Google need from Qualcomm after three years beyond driver/firmware blobs, which three years into a SoC's lifetime should be pretty stable?

We're talking about a company that maintains its own fork of the Linux kernel with something like 19,000 patches against mainstream. Anything not in a blob should be easily within their abilities to address.

Also, Nexus and Pixel devices have a long history of software and hardware problems, many of which are immediately obvious within a day or two of devices hitting people's mailboxes, and are never fixed over the life of the phone. It's not like google seems to be picking up the phone very often to talk to Qualcomm for support, even during a device's development, much less after?

The Pixel line jumped the shark when Google started permanently carrier-locking phone bootloaders for Verizon.

You need access to the software that runs those SOCs which is owned by Qualcomm. Qualcomm isn't just going to give the sourcecode of those SOCs for Google engineers to tinker around with it. It creates all kinds of crazy legal problems.

It's not just the main Android OS that needs to be patched, the chips have their own proprietary software too.

The problem is that after 3 years, most of those chips have gone EOL and QC wants to put their resources into developing new chips because that's where the revenue comes from (e.g. how they pay their employees). Meanwhile new security flaws keep getting discovered on EOL chips that provide zero new revenue.

So what do you want here? Do you want the break neck pace of innovation to continue which is ultimately very good for everyone? Or should we spend all of our time making sure your Apple IIc still has security patches for 2022? At some point you just have to move on and that's just the trade you make for all technology. You can't simultaneously benefit from this cycle and then bemoan it. If all we ever did was make security patches for your Commodore and AppleIIc you wouldn't have a Pixel3.

Point taken, however: modern apps don't run on 80s hardware, but they do run on a Pixel 3. The line in the sand just needs to align a bit more with the physical capabilities, for e-waste reasons.

> So what do you want here? Do you want the break neck pace of innovation to continue which is ultimately very good for everyone? Or should we spend all of our time making sure your Apple IIc still has security patches for 2022?

I want my perfectly good phone, that I bought 3 years ago, to still get updates. In all honestly, my old Motorola G4 would still be a good phone if it had more storage (and didn't eat SD cards).

Everything about my Pixel 3a (which is EOL in 4 months), works absolutely perfect for all my needs. Great camera, still very good battery life, plenty of storage / power. This is forced obsolescence for a device that is more than capable of handling most everyone's mobile workload. And, as a mobile minimalist, mine especially.

This kinda shit makes me want to go back to a fucking flip phone. I'll probably roll the dice with Lineage or Calyx, but the absurdity of all this is really frustrating.

Ultimately most people don't need the rapid pace of new chips. The pixel 3 level is sufficient for the foreseeable future. There isnt a binary innovation or support. Just as we have LTS branches of software we should have LTS firmware. I would buy a LTS device in a heartbeat. But there are those who want the bleeding edge and they should be catered for too.

> You need access to the software that runs those SOCs which is owned by Qualcomm. Qualcomm isn't just going to give the sourcecode of those SOCs for Google engineers to tinker around with it. It creates all kinds of crazy legal problems

QCOM Mkt cap 188.12B

Alphabet Mkt cap 1.70T

Alphabet cannot buy Qualcomm for the same reason Nvidia could not buy Arm.

If your implication is that someone market cap equals negotiating leverage you would only be right if Alphabet was the only elephant that Qualcomm was in bed with.

> Or should we spend all of our time making sure your Apple IIc still has security patches for 2022

Microsoft's timilene for OS support is easily 10 to 20 years. Windows XP was released in 2001. It's final ecurity support ended in 2019. 18 years later.

I know, it's hard for modern "programmers" to fathom such a level of commitment.

Can you guarantee that no one will hack Qualcomm's "blobs" tho? And if Qualcomm says "that's your problem, we only support it for 3 years", now you have millions of customers calling you a liar when you say "sorry can't fix the security issues, it's in Qualcomm's code that we don't have access to". They won't blame Qualcomm they will blame google. That's why I had real hope for Intel there for a while until they sold off their modem chip business.

Can you guarantee there won't be an unpatchable boot ROM security flaw in three years of devices' "support" span?

> However, the fact that Google - one of the world's richest corporation can't convince or pay Qualcomm to support a perfectly functional device in 2022 is astonishing.

Not really. You need to compensate Qualcomm for a pile of lost sales from people not getting new phones.

[deleted]

Don't see why we are blaming Google for not bowing to Qualcomm rather than Qualcomm's low level of support.

Because Google controls the vast majority of phone manufacturing on the planet: They have to approve every new hardware model. I think if Google said it was dropping support for Qualcomm in new models of phones unless an extended support lifecycle was reasonably offered, that Qualcomm would respond with "okay, bye".

Google likes to hide behind "the OEMs make those kinds of decisions", but it's not reality: The Android MADA still gives them complete control of every Android hardware platform sold with support for Play Services.

And, considering Google is one of the three most valuable companies on the entire planet, sitting on massive piles of cash stashed everywhere they can possibly stash it to avoid paying taxes.... Google can afford to pay for support if it wants to.

If Google wanted to support phones more than three years, it would do that. It doesn't want to, and it's time to stop pretending otherwise.

Google leveraging its control of android to extract better terms from Qualcomm for the Pixel business would be a blatant violation anti-trust statutes and they would get demolished in court

Considering how blatantly Android is already violating antitrust statues (the Android MADA mentioned above which governs the relationship between Google and OEMs is... flagrantly illegal, and has only gotten away with it by being kept very secret), I am quite doubtful that the government will yet do anything any sooner because Google chooses to support users better.

It would not be leveraging for the Pixel business either, it would leveraging Android for Android as a whole: Presumably Google could drop support for hardware that does not provide five years of support from the Android codebase. It would then be on Qualcomm to either meet or fail to meet that requirement, and set their license pricing accordingly.

Having a support lifecycle of at least five years is... bare minimum for the industry. Nobody could argue that it is an antitrust issue to require it.

What kind of market share does the Pixel business have?

Yeah exactly. Both google and qualcomm benefit from this arrangement. They might "blame" qualcomm but they're not going to go out of their way to try to change the behavior and therefore make less money on phones.

Google is the one selling you the phone.

> You need to compensate Qualcomm for a pile of lost sales from people not getting new phones.

Why would people continue to buy phones with Qualcomm chips? The fact that my 4th gen iPad still works and my mom uses it to watch youtube and browse internet is one of the top 3 reasons I would pay a bit extra for Apple devices.

The pixel 3 doesn't stop working after support for it runs out. Same as how that 4th gen iPad hasn't received the last 5 major version releases. (It runs iOS 10, we're on 15 now)

This was due to the transition from 32-bit to 64-bit. The 5th gen iPad has an A9, the first to support iOS 11 (64-bit only).

The last iOS 10 update is 10.3.4, shipped in July 2019, a bit more than 6.5 years after the release of the 4th gen iPad in Nov 2012.

Yup Apple is pretty good here. My daily browser is an iPad Air 2, it's still getting all the iPadOS updates, 7.25 years after its release.

Why does Apple support iPhones for 7+ years? And why does Samsung support phones for 5 years instead of 2-3 like most other manufacturers? They would sell more phones, their suppliers would sell more chips

Apple uses their own chips in their phones. Samsung also has their own silicon, though they do use Qualcomm chips in some models too.

Apple and Samsung are (primarily) hardware companies, whereas Google is an advertiser. If your income depends on hardware sales, longevity/reliability is an important factor for your long-term brand reputation that you can’t afford to sacrifice.

Google-branded phones are essentially just another avenue for them to push Google Play Services, one where they can guarantee the platform experience they envision developing vanilla Android. I think they also serve as reference hardware, but the custom tensor chip on the most recent pixels sorta eschews that… unless they are pushing the idea of putting a TPU on Android phones.

Its similar to why NVIDIA(designer/manufacturer) doesn’t offer as good customer service or warranty on their graphics cards as EVGA (hardware/packager) does.

This isn't a super convincing argument cuz you can spin it the exact opposite way here(hardware manufacturers want to sell more devices, google wants people to be using their services and have as many devices in the wild as possible).

Probably here there's not a great overarching narrative of reasons, but I ... believe Apple controls more of the components in its phones and can do the management itself

So what are the non-Qualcomm phones that have longer support?

Samsung right? So who is going to compensate Qualcomm for their lost sales because they're shit to consumers?

Given Google's track record we will see exactly how well supported it is in years 4 and 5. I expect it will be just the bare minimum.

You're correct. Google is promising 3 years of OS updates and 5 years of security updates.

My honest opinion is that I think the whole Qualcomm thing is a canard. What I think is really going on is that after three years the batteries are at death's door. Too many people will just replace/trash the phone rather than know to replace the battery.

iPhones have the same issue, and users either live with it or get their batteries replaced. We need replaceable batteries to make a comeback. Maybe the right to repair movement can get us there.

The batteries are "replaceable"; your own comment acknowledges that. What you mean is batteries the user can easily replace, which means you have to make compromises in the design of the phone and its structural integrity.

The market has chosen against that. What you're talking about is forcing people to accept your personal preference, by law, because your design preference didn't win in the market.

Personally, I oppose that.

I feel like there's a missing middle ground here. Sure, we don't have to go back to the days of peel off or slide off backs. But why not allow the phone to be opened easier? Perhaps a few tiny screws and a gasket vs...glue?

Replacing a battery is technically possible still, it just requires a ton of patience, a heat gun, maybe a suction cup, maybe a razor knife. And even then you run the risk of breaking the back glass in the process(been there, done that).

I don't think we need to go back to being able to hot swap batteries on the fly, but surely we can come up with something everyday people can realistically do at home.

Modern iphones all require a fancy laser to remove the back glass. [1]. You won't be doing that with a screwdriver at home.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X07j5deVIfU

By remove you mean completely melt and destroy. There's no easy way to remove it without breaking the entire glass back, this is bonkers.

No need to go lie on the internet. You don't need to remove the glass to open the case, it's still two screws and a sealing gasket. Removing the glass is more like an industrial process to replace a broken glass backing but retaining the rest of the back cover.

After you remove the cover you still have to remove a few pieces of the top layer of components, as described in guides like this iPhone 13 Pro battery replacement one: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPhone+13+Pro+Battery+Replaceme...

Now, say you tried a DIY repair and you broke the glass, that'd be a different case of suckage, but that doesn't really mean that suddenly batteries aren't replaceable. There could be a discussion around ease of replacement but there is ease of manufacture and sealing properties to consider as well.

That guide has 36 steps which include melting adhesive, using suction cups and using a pick to detach the display from the case.

On top of that there are a number of peripherals to remove before even getting to the battery. To me that seems extremely difficult.

Rewiring the wire-wrap backplane of a (in comparison) low-power computing system from 60 years ago with just a wire wrapping tool and wire with only 2 steps is 'extremely simple' if we were to use your measurement of tools, steps and material, yet I doubt anyone replacing their phone batteries could do that... It's all relative.

Or simply supporting local repair shops: it might require some special tools or equipment but if the phone store in every mall can have that, it's a lot more accessible than if you need to pay top dollar and/or not have the device for a few days.

like https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkpbgy/apple-will-tell-you-h...?

Exactly - there are good arguments for tightly sealed devices but that should be paired with right to repair laws requiring minimum part & tool availability and capping prices.

The market has chosen against that

Did it though? Or did the manufacturers choose that for us by choosing to market phones based on millimeters of measurement and grams of weight and one piece glass backs that most people cover up with a case anyway.

This seems kind of like the car manufacturers saying that they are only meeting demand when they sell large SUV's and trucks, while running ads showing SUV's on dirt trails touting the freedom that a large SUV/truck gives drivers, even though most high end SUV's and trucks won't go any farther offroad than a gravel parking lot at a winery.

If phone manufacturers started competing on environmental costs of their phones instead of being the smallest/lightest, then maybe replaceable batteries would come back.

We like big, light, thin and waterproof phones.

It's only natural to want something comfortable to use which you can see clearly on and which doesn't break your nose when it falls on your face in bed. A minority (me included) would prefer smaller phones with a massive battery, no matter the thickness - and yet I can't stop marvelling at how cool my new big, light, thin phone is. If my phone didn't break in 3 years I'll think about buying a battery on eBay and replace it (or get it done by someone, if I'm not capable of doing it).

SUVs are appealing because they're big and cost a lot of money. It's often a display of superiority and wealth. Those people would drive a tank if they could.

People are not buying SUVs or phones because of advertising, but because of their intrinsic qualities (whether physical or social).

> SUVs are appealing because they're big and cost a lot of money. It's often a display of superiority and wealth. Those people would drive a tank if they could.

Uh, that and they're useful? The only thing comparable for the combo of carrying capacity, people seating, and towing of your average SUV is a full size van. Which drives like shit, has terrible visibility side and rear, and is often even more of a break-in target. Oh, and it costs the same or more as that SUV that's easy to park, easy to drive, fits all your kids or family or bikes and luggage and can still haul a light trailer.

The modern SUV is the evolution of the station wagon. Some of the early models were just wealth signals, I can kind of agree with that, but generally there's no better option for someone who regularly hauls 4+ people and a bunch of crap everywhere.

> The only thing comparable for the combo of carrying capacity, people seating, and towing of your average SUV is a full size van.

Not really? The most popular non-pickup in the US (The Rav4) only seats 4 and has a 1500 lb towing capacity. Most station wagons can do that (for example the V90 can tow between 1650 and 3700 lb). The Sienna, which is a minivan, can tow 3500 lbs and carry 8 people

The Sienna, which is a minivan, can tow 3500 lbs and carry 8 people

And the Sienna has 50% more cargo capacity than a Ford Expedition unless you take out all the seats, then they have about the same cargo capacity.

https://www.truedelta.com/Toyota-Sienna-vs-Ford-Expedition-s...

The Sienna is available in AWD, and has a hybrid drivetrain.

It's biggest disadvantage over an SUV is ground clearance and towing capacity. As you said, the Sienna can tow 3500 lbs, but the Expedition can tow 6000-9000 lbs depending on drivetrain. Well, I take that back, the biggest disadvantage of a minivan compared to an SUV is that the minivan is a minivan.

The Rav4 is a car shaped like a small SUV. That "Compact SUV" style of car is not what I was talking about at all. Again though, if you want the model that can tow and has all wheel drive, you're looking at 47,000 USD for the Sienna.

I'm sure you can find another outlier here and there, but in general, SUV's get a lot of hate but are generally great choices for safety, ease of use, and capability.

Eh, I don't really mind if the batteries are a pain to replace as long as they only need it every 3-4 years. Especially if the tradeoff is that the battery is bigger and more water resistant thanks to its internal placement.

I recall back in the era of user replaceable batteries they tended to not last very long, and were of incredibly spotty quality.

I mostly just hated dropping my phone to have the battery pop out and loosing any work I was doing on my phone.

Wish my phone could report a bad battery. I installed Accubattery which reported 68% of designed capacity. I went to one of the ubiquitious mobile stores in Indian cities and got a new battery and charging port. The guy said battery doesnt look bulged and port doesnt look work either, so if I still have issues, he will replace a board. He is right, and I have to do that shortly.

My 3a xl battery is at 91% design capacity(1), 3385 mAh, and is still utterly sufficient and far better than any other phone I've had.

Hardly death's door...

(1)As measured by Accubattery just now

2 full days on GrapheneOS sometimes.

That's absolutely not true, as the other comments mention, there's still plenty of battery life after 3 years.

Not everyone watches youtube or plays games on their phone. With light usage, a phone that might only last 2-3 hours of youtube watching, can last all day instead.

Pixel 3A user here. Battery works great 2.5 years in. Should I be worried?

I'm still using a Pixel 2, now 4.5 years after I got it (lack of security is easy: don't put or do anything I care about on the phone, turn off the power when having sensitive conversations nearby). It can go two days between charging.

> However, the fact that Google - one of the world's richest corporation can't convince or pay Qualcomm to support a perfectly functional device in 2022 is astonishing.

This reasoning is... really bad. If I were a "rich corporation" and decided to sale a product at a loss or significant reduction in margin for a feature that obvious(based on sells numbers) was not a factor in deciding to buy the phone or not, I wouldn't be a "rich corporation" for very long.

The "richness" of a company has nothing to do, marginal cost does. It obviously didn't pencil out.

It's not that simple: Google makes money off of other services, a fair fraction of which is from Android users. If an Android user has a phone which is >3 years old, they are still likely to be buying apps through the Android store, using the phone to access Google's paid services, or generating data which Google uses for their ad sales.

The underlying problem with Android is that they're competing with Apple, where all of those sources generate ongoing revenue from older hardware devices, but haven't found an effective way to share revenue between the different parties involved to pay for long-term support. Apple has no problem shipping iOS updates because they don't need you to buy a new phone nearly as much if you're subscribing to iCloud, using Apple Music, and buying from the App Store.

I don't think you have any basis for saying "was not a factor in deciding to buy the phone." Do you really think people buying the Pixel 3 knew it would only be supported for 3 years? Also, Google would not lose money if they supported the phone longer at a few pennies per phone. The Pixel phones (and others) are advertising and data delivery devices. Google makes money every time you use them.

So you don't think I have "any basis" for saying that was not a factor in deciding to buy a phone? Do you know people? Most don't pay much attention things of this nature, the people on this board are not even close to the norm. And the pixel has been a sales success since it's introduction. To me, your argument amounts to "not ah!".

Also, where did you get the "few pennies per phone" number? If that is accurate, what do you attribute google's decision to not spend basically nothing for longer updates from Qualcom?

Thanks for your comment. I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree. From my own (purely anecdotal) experience, if most people had been told that their phone would be unsupported after 3 years they would have considered that strongly in their purchase. Since my experience is anecdotal it proves nothing, but my major disagreement is that you point to sales numbers as evidence that people don't care about support.

>feature that obvious(based on sells numbers) was not a factor in deciding to buy the phone or not,

I don't think those customers were informed of the limited support prior to the sale, so those sales numbers are not meaningful in this context. Also, many companies offer longer support. Google is selling Pixel as a premium phone so (in my opinion) offering only 3 years of support is a major abuse of the customer relationship.

As far as pennies per phone, I was referring to this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30075970

I haven't owned an Android device in a while but I always thought the argument here is if the manufacturer stops supporting the device, you can always get support through the community via custom ROM's.

With so many devices in the wild, I wonder if the Pixel 3 will become our generations HTC HD2 (which got community support for seemly an eternity).

> ...I always thought the argument here is if the manufacturer stops supporting the device, you can always get support through the community via custom ROM's.

That doesn't apply for kernel support. Custom ROMs generally use the last supported kernel from some official ROM. Then they start to accumulate known security vulnerabilities, because they never get updated again.

Obviously YMMV, but last year there was exactly one OEM merging kernel LTS (Sony). While many (dare I say most?) Custom ROMs do.

I've read a few times that Sony is doing good work in terms of their kernels, but details eluded me, and as the result I never owned a Sony Android phone. Are they really good in that regard? Do they upstream? How long do they publish security patches for?

They upstream their changes and have a user-unlockable bootloader, which puts them ahead of approximately all of their competitors. Unfortunately they don't really seem interested in selling their phones in most English-speaking markets.

By upstreaming you mean Android project, not Linux right? E.g. not to mainline?

You can have a look at https://github.com/sonyxperiadev/kernel

Yeah so uh, Sony is super weird. There is the production side of Sony, and the developer side of Sony. They barely coexist, they are two completely different minds. Think I'm exaggerating? They have two bootloaders, one for developers, one for production. (The led changes color). Once you have unlocked your bootloader, you have to download and use a different flash tool to flash Sony's ROM. They are not available on the same page. That being said: - the "production" side is a meh OEM. Usually only one major upgrade, annoying lock-ins - the developer side is amazing. They make contribution to mainline Linux, they provide AOSP build trees, they upgrade major Linux kernel versions, their AOSP build tree is much more open source than Google's, they provide very clean fixes for stupid Qualcomm issues that is not fixed even on Pixels, they provide more android major upgrades

So yeah, weird. I believe their AOSP side is funded by some governments who want the most maintainable and auditable Android on their devices

I wonder how much of Sony Mobile is left in Sweden since the Sony Ericsson days. Maybe that's why they differ so much, they come from different company cultures?

Downloading a rom from an internet forum to stay up to date with security patches seems like potentially flawed logic.

Where else would you get the update from?

Yes, now you're grasping what everyone is complaining about.

While adding ROMs to the Pixel line (if unlocked) is pretty easy, however other Android phones is usually a nightmare and only geeks will ever attempt it. I only did it because of EOL android phones. I gave up about 3 years ago and just got an iPhone. I do still have an Pixel 3 with CalyxOS on it tho. I like the hackability of android, but it's just not worth it. I just don't like mobile hacking, I do that with my desktop, pi's, and various embedded boards that are much more open to fun hacking.

Yeah, custom ROMs.

Most devices never get custom ROMs any longer than you would get regular updates anyway (since newer Android versions would not run on this chip).

Custom ROMs are a mess anyway:

- Untrusted sources

- Random annoying bugs (What, you need a camera?? Pff)

- Flaky "Android-Experience" (Yeah, you might be able to install Google Apps... after the 6th try)

- Device is "untrusted" - no Google Wallet or banking apps without yet another hack

- "Security Updates? You can get a full image every 2 weeks if you want that, but no idea what is included and what will break, sorry"

- Performance and stability of the device usually takes a big dive

Most importantly: You cannot build AOSP for a device, if there is no support from the firmware (Qualcomm), which is the main reason why there are no Android updates in the first place - at least that's the problem nowadays.

Custom ROMs are the Pareto principle in practice. Yes, you can relatively easily modify & build out 80% working functionality. As for the final 20%...

Huh? You get more features on custom ROMs, not less. Only very new ROMs or those newly switching to a new major Android version have missing features.

You've never run a ROM with a major bug or missing feature?

Only when using unstable ones or those with edgy names ;)

Google 'blueline' (the codename for Pixel 3) shows "partial" mainline kernel support, and work in progress for more - https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Google_Pixel_3(google-blu... So there is some hope that this might become at least a semi-usable device with reasonably trusted, non-flaky sources. Android app support can then be provided on top of the mainline kernel as a custom "container" via Anbox/Waydroid.

> newer Android versions would not run on this chip

Why would all the Android Java stuff actually require a newer chip?

e.g. OnePlus 3 started with 7.x, was officially updated only to 9.x, but with LineageOS it runs 11.x currently.

> Untrusted sources

As if the vendors are super trustworthy…

> you might be able to install Google Apps... after the 6th try

Google services are "just one more zip to flash" and I've never heard of having to retry multiple times.

> no Google Wallet

Not too hard to carry the actual physical cards, or use a separate device (smartwatch).

> or banking apps

Complain to your bank / switch to a better bank.

> no idea what is included

LineageOS shoves the commit log right in your face, you can have a pretty good idea when it's really important to update.

> Performance and stability of the device usually takes a big dive

Really? Performance and stability are typically the reasons to switch to custom.

CyanogenMod/LineageOS have been, in my experience, the most performant and stable Android experiences by far, since the 4.x days at least.

GP seems to be complaining about random ROMs while ignoring the biggest one.

I used to ROM-hop a lot, but nowadays, I just stay on whatever the official LineageOS build is (for my OnePlus Nord, that’s still Android 10, but I tried stock and couldn’t handle it) and install my weekly updates.

IMO performance is usually better the more random the ROM (so xXx NoLimits > LineageOS > Vendor OS), stability can be very hit or miss with the random ones but is equal for LineageOS and vendor.

Despite Magisk Hide not getting developed anymore, at least on 10 I can pass safety check despite being rooted btw.

Holy wow, a person in the wild using SafetyNet apps on custom ROM?!

Any chance you can name and shame those apps for my further edification?

I currently have none, I just wanted to see if I would pass :D

But Google Pay requires it, so does my Health Insurance app (TK, which I don’t use), and the Banking App for DKB (fun fact, they enabled it in a normal update and left many people suddenly without access).

Pretty sure my banking apps - Monzo, Starling and Curve require SafetyNet. Also, I use Google Pay. And I'm running them on a custom ROM - Arrow OS.

I don't understand what the problem with that should be though.

I have LineageOS installed on an old BQ Aquaris X for more than a year now.

Most of the time it is unusable and slow. It randomly crawls, i.e. opening a browser, an input field, or the GMail App will make the device halt for about 10s. It will never get the new Android. Camera was always crappy with LineageOS. WiFi is broken since a few weeks and will constantly just vanish, needing to connect manually.

I almost only ran Cyanogen or Lineage on my devices, if not stock. I tinkered a lot with my Cyanogen installs back in the days, trying to even the bumps and failings.

Any device that has a decent stock image will run better with stock than any LineageOS or CustomROM in my experience.

I have never heard about that device. I’ve been using HTC Desire Z (T-Mobile G2 in the USA), some Nexus, and then OnePlus One, 5 and now Nord. All of them were faster with Cyanogen/LineageOS. Never had broken anything (cam, wifi, etc.) with official, stable builds. Camera works as well.

As I said, I’m currently still on Android 10, but I don’t really mind that.

> Not too hard to carry the actual physical cards, or use a separate device (smartwatch).

Yeah, because what I want is to buy a watch if I want to pay with my phone. Great solution!

> Complain to your bank / switch to a better bank.

Ah, yes, the "Switch-banks-because-your-phone-is-broken"-Trick, didn't think of that!

> LineageOS shoves the commit log right in your face, you can have a pretty good idea when it's really important to update.

Yeah, but the CVEs and firmware bugs are not and will never be in the commit logs. And even if they are, when I install an update on my phone OTA, I obviously will not pull up the commit log! How much time do you think I have?!

That's what the "Security Level"-indicator in the device settings/info is for.

> Really? Performance and stability are typically the reasons to switch to custom.

Yes, really. My LineageOS was always crappy slow on my BQ Aquaris, for every version. The camera is simply unusable. Every update brings another random bug. Since a few weeks it will lose WiFi, needing manual intervention, sometimes just 3 seconds after connecting.

If you want a working device, and not tinker with it all the time, or risk being stranded without certain functionality, you are safer with a device with a decent stock from a manufacturer that updates it diligently.

Custom ROMS are locked out of every Verizon device sold as well. Locked bootloaders have relegated a huge chunk of Pixel 3s to the landfill prematurely.

- I trust some custom roms more than vendors

- Bugs / perf / stability / qualcomm not providing firmware are device dependant, it's a good idea to check compatibility before buying the phone, same as when you're buying a laptop you're planning to use with linux.

- GApps can be installed easily but they're basically spyware, so maybe think twice about that.

- Magisk et similia fix banks app (no idea about Google Wallet, I don't use it)

That's the argument here, but as a defense of Google, it's a really bizarre argument. If a volunteer-run effort like LineageOS can manage to get recent AOSP Android (including all the hardware-dependent bits) running on a Pixel 3, what's Google's excuse?

LineageOS does not provide real, production support for these devices. If a random binary blob turns out to have an unfixable security issue, this is likely not a showstopper for the typical LineageOS user: they can easily deploy workarounds, reassess their risk etc. Most users would want to rely on rather stricter support than that.

For every reported, exploitable bug in a firmware blob there are generally several in machine-independent core OS components. So, upgrading everything they easily can still has value -- and that's a lot.

See my other answer somewhere below: I still use my HD2 from 2009 today.

I want to answer that Qualcomm-is-the-issue again.

You're pointing out how ridiculous it is, but let me expand:

So, as an order of magnitude, the price asked by Qualcomm for extended support is 1M$. That's 10c/device. The VoLTE license costs more than that. The H264 license costs more than that.

Also Pixel makes Android, so surely, Android can't become incompatible with older hardware because of Android, or if it does, it's Google's own doing!

There is the question of security of binary blobs for which Google doesn't have the source code, ok!

Well let's see: - Billions (ok, maybe just hundreds of millions) of Mediatek devices have their bootrom "open". Should we stop upgrading those, because of physical access issue? - Everyone considers 2G utterly broken, allowing downgrading attacks, thus Google gives Android 12 the possibility to disable 2G. Yet, Google "refuses" devices launched with Android 11 Treble HALs, like devices launched with Snapdragon 888, to have this "disable 2g" [1] - Pixel 6 stayed 45 days on an """obsolete""" security patch

So, maybe we should stop saying that security is the alpha and omega, and all or nothing. It is important. Reducing our e-waste is more important.

[1] This is a weird thing, related to Treble, Google Requirement Freeze, and Vendor System Requirements, I can explain in details if anyone is interested

> So, as an order of magnitude, the price asked by Qualcomm for extended support is 1M$.

Do you have a source for that? That does seem pretty low.

> So, as an order of magnitude, the price asked by Qualcomm for extended support is 1M$.

....and even if that estimate is two orders of magnitude too small, it's still basically pocket change for Google, which (based on about 30 seconds of Googling, so if I've misread I apologize) has been making tens of billions of dollars per quarter the past few years in net income.

[edit] Figured I'd link the source of my figures for clarity: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/net-...

I hate these arguments. It doesn't matter what their overall revenue is, it only matters what the cost is relative to the product at hand and to the value of the thing they're paying for. Nobody is sitting there approving expenses relative to their overall revenue.

Would you pay $50 for a stick of gum? Why not? If you make hundreds of thousands of dollars, surely it shouldn't phase you?

I'd happily pay 10c a year for extended support on my phone that I don't want to replace.

That's a different and fair argument (and so would I as a Pixel 3 owner).

That's a different argument, but this one too works even if “the estimate were two orders of magnitude too small”. Even $10 a year is a bargain when the alternative is throwing the phone away.

For perspective, they could have asked each additional Pixel purchase $.50 from the starting price to support it for an additional 5 years. (also pixel 3 owner)

You're right, the relative expense to the revenue isn't a good argument when you're framing it in the light of efficient business practices.

On the other hand if you consider the real intention of illuminating Google's cashflow it's pretty damning. Do you pay some relative pittance to keep devices supported, adding value to customers, reducing waste, increasing convenience? 'Cause this is a moral argument, not a financial one, and if you're fleecing the public at large (in myriad ways) it's more a question of the lord giving alms to his subject than it is paying $50 for a piece of gum.

Should Lord Google be a beneficent ruler, or a shitpile?

If Google starts subsidizing their physical devices from their infinite money bin of advertising revenue, they'll run afoul of antitrust and anti dumping laws.

And this way, they risk running afoul false advertising and class action lawsuits. Its not mentioned anywhere that the phone becomes dangerous to use after 3 years.

Whaaa? Nope, not how that works.

You can't run afoul of antitrust laws without being a monopoly. It's why Apple can make it so safari is the only browser available on the Iphone whereas microsoft lost a bunch of money (particularly in the EU) for installing IE by default on everyone's computer.

Android phones are nowhere near antitrust territory, specifically from google. Before they'd run any risks they'd need to actually outsell someone like samsung or apple.

Just because you are rich and potentially a monopoly in one market, doesn't mean you are in all markets.

If Google is deemed a monopoly in search (or advertising, or Android app store, etc.), using that position or money to try and gain advantage in another market (in this case, phones) is problematic.

> 'Cause this is a moral argument, not a financial one, and if you're fleecing the public at large (in myriad ways) it's more a question of the lord giving alms to his subject than it is paying $50 for a piece of gum.

The argument still breaks down at bigger numbers. If you have 500 different ideas for ways the lord should spend a negligible 1% of his money, then even if you have a good argument that the lord should do something, that's not enough by itself to show that any particular idea meets the bar.

Personally, I don't care what's "efficient" and what will make Google the most money. What I care about is how they treat a) their users, and b) the planet.

Money is a means to an end. The fact that so much of our society treats it as their score in the game of life—something to be maximized at all costs as an end in itself—is a disease of the mind.

If Google (and, yes, literally every other major corporation) made more decisions based on what was better for their users (not just "their customers", because in certain aspects of their business that's advertisers, not regular users) and for the health of the planet, while simply making sure that they had a reasonably comfortable financial cushion, we would all be better off, and Google's executives and shareholders would barely notice the difference in their high scores.

1 million dollars for million of users sticking around for 2 extra years on Google services is EXTREMELY cheap all things considered.

Problem is those millions will still be using Google Services, just on a new phone paid by themselves.

Not necessarily. Every time you force a user to abandon their current product you risk them looking over the wall at your competitors. In the U.S. at least, iPhones are really attractive, and I say this as an Android user. When my Pixel 3a is EOL'ed in May 2022, I think I may take the plunge and finally switch. If I do that, Google immediately loses my valuable telemetry, they lose my usage of Chrome mobile, and they risk my switching to iCloud - something I can't use on my Android phone.

>Would you pay $50 for a stick of gum?

There are people who do.

https://wakkinews.com/2018/12/18/worlds-most-expensive-chewi...

    The gums were repackaged and auctioned off to fans who would do anything to have something already used by Britney Spears, including an already been chewed, sticky bubble gum. The gums were sold for between $50 to $100.

If Google charges Apple-level prices, surely it's reasonable for customers to expect Apple-level support.

If Apple-level support was a decisive factor for Android customers either they wouldn't be buying Android phones, or Google would have offered it long ago.

It seems reasonable for Google to offer that level of support, certainly. But anyone expecting it isn't paying attention to Google's record.

For somebody that uses Linux privately and professionally, Apple support was one of the major reasons I switched from Android to iOS based devices. Just until recently I had iPhone 6s (I keep my devices until they break or go out of support).

Apple used to look expensive to me, but if I divide initial cost per number of year of device exploitation, it actually gets cheaper then Android devices.

Google's operating income is like $50B. A more proportionate question would be whether I was willing to pay $10 for a reusable shopping bag since it's marginally better for the environment compared to a free plastic bag—and the answer is yes, absolutely, it wouldn't even be a question.

Google has a profit of ~20 billion dollars per quarter. That is, it has a profit of ~80 billion dollars per year.

There's only so much you can do with money. Their yearly profit (once again, not revenue, profit) is larger than the entire state budget revenue of more than 150 countries (not combined) [1].

So yes. The argument is very valid.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governmen...

Almost everything is pocket change for google, so why aren't they buying almost everything every year. Genius!

> So, as an order of magnitude, the price asked by Qualcomm for extended support is 1M$.

I'll second the request for a source for this, $1M seems ridiculously low.

> $1M seems ridiculously low.

If you see the entire picture, it's the most expensive cost any department can ever present.

it is a "revenue-less $1M"! pure Career suicide.

Specially because marketing can't even use it. today only false-equality sells. Eco-thinking is so 90s.

Which is why the solution is to write these blog posts to warn people off of buying any Google phones as they become dangerous after 3 years.

By this logic Google should do away with their QA department and product support staff.

You spend the $1M because it improves customer value by far more than $1M and that works out for everyone in the long run. This thread is a testament to what happens when you pinch pennies.

customer value only exist [in current US corporate culture] when you can use it to extract actual monetary value.

QA exists to keep the sales/avoid returns/refunds. Not for pure customer value.

I know PLENTY of people who bought a Samsung, Pixel, or iPhone because of the software support lifespan being a market leading 3/4-3/5 years, 3/5 years, or 7/7 years respectively compared to the standard 2/3 year support of Android OEMs. The average person now is going north of 4 years with their phone and rising. It's not about wanting to be "eco friendly" it's security, software support, and OS features being supported by some corpo instead of some teenager making a ROM.

This is a huge part of the reason why Androids depreciate so much faster on the used market, if you compare the Galaxy S20 to the even older iPhone 11, the iPhone 11 will likely receive 5 years of OS updates compared to 1 year for Samsung. Other OEMs like OnePlus or Sony will have already had support end. Maybe your average customer doesn't really understand why this stuff matters but they do understand that an old iPhone seems to work better than an old Android that cost the same at release.

Of course this is a great decision because people will be forced to buy a new phone more often right? No! People using your phone are a captive audience for selling high-margin services and accessories. If you don't support the phone they'll still use their old phone anyways but will be annoyed and likely to switch to the competition next purchase cutting off all your profit streams.

> but they do understand that an old iPhone seems to work better than an old Android that cost the same at release.

I suspect that the majority of Android-using techies that notice this are either on a faster new phone cycle than 3 years, or have already priced that difference into their total value calculation.

I also strongly suspect that the average customer does not indeed understand.

> if you compare the Galaxy S20 to the even older iPhone 11, the iPhone 11 will likely receive 5 years of OS updates compared to 1 year for Samsung

My galaxy note 10 (purchased 2 years ago) is still receiving updates.

In fact Samsung is saying they'll support most phones for 4 years while others are supported for 5:

https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/22/22295639/samsung-galaxy-d...

I'm referring to FTA

>Samsung did guarantee support for at least three “generations” of Android OS updates in 2020

The 4/5 year support is for security updates. I will correct that some samsungs are now receiving 5 years of security updates, I didn't realize that.

There is an easy solution to this problem.

Pass a new "right to repair" law, such that any OEM that halts software patches on any network-connected device for more than 6 months will be required to unlock bootloaders and publish technical specs.

Apple and Android will see enormous and wonderful community involvement if that were to happen, and congress could force it, should we motivate them.

I've had some similar ideas: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28247651

> We need a lemon-like law for consumer electronics.

I wonder how this should apply to planned obsolescence of devices like smartphones.

On one hand, it's obscene that manufacturers expect us to routinely spend ~$1k on a device that will in the best case scenario last for three years. There's no inherent reason that a flagship Samsung from 2017 shouldn't be perfectly serviceable today, and likewise for a Pixel 6 or iPhone 13 in 2030. However, the discontinuation of security updates makes it so that for all practical purposes they are not.

On the other hand, we can't exactly compel speech or labor. It would be one thing if there were a kill switch triggered after N years, but in this case the obsolescence isn't caused by an active update, rather a lack thereof.

Here's a possible middle ground:

1. Block device manufacturers from arbitrarily deprecating hardware. We can't compel the release of new software, but we can block the release of new software. Require manufacturers to submit a filing with request for approval before the release of any new mobile OS update, which must include an exhaustive list of all supported devices. In the event that a device is dropped from the list in a subsequent filing, it must be explained to the satisfaction of regulators that a specific hardware limitation makes continued support for the device problematic or impractical. Given approval to drop support for a device from an OS release, there would be no obligation on the manufacturer to backport security updates to prior releases.

2. Block component manufacturers from arbitrarily deprecating hardware. Any hardware included in a publicly available consumer electronic device must have its manufacturer commit to providing up-to-date driver software with support for the latest OS for the lifetime of the device. Failure to provide this within a certain time frame (say, three months) following the request of a device manufacturer would open them up to a lawsuit, wherein they could be compelled to publish the most recent release of the driver as open source / public domain. #1 would provide the incentive for each device manufacturer to proactively enforce this, as their entire product roadmap would be effectively frozen if they allowed component manufacturers to drag their feet.

3. Ban irreversible bootloader locking in new devices. Maybe an initial bootloader lock would be acceptable, but power users should have some way to override the lock and install a custom ROM without relying on vulnerabilities in the software.

Not a fan to drop maintenance on the community.

Pass a law that taxes Google punitively for each app sale on an unmaintained phone, and see how quiclky they'll find a way to support their phones.

This actually sounds like a workable solution, the first one I've seen so far that could really solve the issue

Or magically find a way to stop tracking that metric.

I'm sure that, was such a law allowed to pass, lawmakers and prosecutors would magically find a way to express their dissatisfaction if Google was trying to skirt the law in such a crude way.

My bet would be on Google successfully lobbying to kill the bill in the first place, or to cripple it and make it irrelevant (for instance with a long grace period that always gets extended).

> lawmakers and prosecutors would magically find a way to express their dissatisfaction if Google was trying to skirt the law in such a crude way.

Depends on what the law makers actually want. Enough legislation is passed just do they can tell their voters "look, we did something" without actually hurting their corporate buddies.

Not a fan to drop maintenance on the community.

As long as there is also a minimum support window, say 3+ years, and full specs and source are community released, then why not?

The important part could easily be ensuring that older hardware can be accessed. We need an end to binary blobs, or, to force long term blob support and updates.

I imagine a scenario where you pay $20 per year for support and updates for your old device, to a third party.

Or of course, there could be foundations, compile it yourself, etc too.

But if the environment is the reason, why not share the load?

Manufacturers publishing code, sources, and docs is not trivial in of itself.

I'm not a fan of it, because that basically means that Google asks the community to take up the bill for a service they sell at extraordinarily high price.

I know that's the case for lots of open-source software, but since we're coming to that topic, Google's open-source policy that produces software that is either tightly aligned with their own interest (Chrome) or barely usable without their proprietary ecosystem (Android) is shameful. Quite frankly, I would much rather see open-source communities work on linux phones, no matter how useless that may be.

Another reason I'm not a fan of it is that if Google is allowed to transfer their responsibility to a community, I'm willing to bet that their initial support duration will drop even more, and that any issue will be blamed on open-source maintainers, log4j-style.

> But if the environment is the reason, why not share the load?

Does Google share the profits? Is their Android business barely profitable to justify getting free labour?

I think we are aligned, but, my thought is... we can only push and wish for so much.

Forcing 3+ year support in law, plus forced code release at the end, gives a massive change, and some important bits.

It is part 1.

Also, my 3 years support is after last sale... not release date.

Empower the community is not a bad idea.

> Pass a law that taxes Google punitively for each app sale on an unmaintained phone, and see how quiclky they'll find a way to support their phones.

Wouldn't the result of that, be that phones that get anywhere even close to being unmaintained would stop dead (or close to it), so Google doesn't get exposed to a problem?

To me, that doesn't sound better than the situation you're trying to fix.

Selling apps to the long tail of older phones is probably worth throwing some money in a maintenance team. Especially with phones having a 3 year shelf life.

Depends. Given the number of devices in circulation someone will figure out how to make money if we remove the obstacles for doing so.

They will just prevent the Google app store from working on unmaintained phones, or just ship one last update to remove it from them.

That would cut their market size and attractiveness to new buyers. If they choose to harm themselves, that's fine by me.

> will be required to unlock bootloaders and publish technical specs

is probably sufficient motivation. There's no way Apple would be willing to do that. Google might be, but they might have a lot of resistance from Qualcomm and possibly mobile carriers and other partners.

That is imo a bad fix, because it would be very easy for Google and Apple to make sure the technical specs are unreadable and the bootloaders complicated to use, without much recourse for the lawmaker.

Comparatively, it's much easier to make a law targeting the stores that's hard to avoid.

As has been mentioned in other comments that is also easy to avoid by simply making it impossible to download apps on older phones.

Yes, indeed. But that is a massive footgun to use, and it creates a direct incentive to have longer service durations.

It is likely that Google would stand to make more money by offering longer service duration for their OS, and by demanding phonemakers to maintain their firmware.

I guess the info we need to see whether this would be a good decision or not is how much money Google makes from selling apps to phones 3 year and older.

Disagree. For certain vendors you can already get unlocked bootloaders and kernel sources. That's how various aftermarket android ROMs are built. However, even for a project like lineageos, there's only one or two maintainers per device. Do you think one or two volunteer maintainer (presumably working in their free time), can keep the entire kernel up to date and patched?

Fine. Let's try another law.

Any locked device must brick itself after 6 months of no patches, to ensure the safety of the network.

A few months of that, and we will arrive at the previous law.

> Fine. Let's try another law.

>Any locked device must brick itself after 6 months of no patches, to ensure the safety of the network.

What does this accomplish? Get people mad? Moreover, what prevents someone from making trivial patches to keep a device "up to date", kind of like how people make trivial changes to their passwords to keep up with password rotation policies?

Yes, aside from finally protecting our networks from hostile traffic, that is the intended purpose.

I was thinking that we could name this law after you.

To be fair if the devices bricked themselves people would start to value update lufetime even more and sales of devices with short support would drop like a rock.

But this suffers from goodhart's law. "support period" becomes the metric to game, so manufacturers would say they "support" for 10 years or whatever, but what that entails is having an inter bump up the version number every 6 months.

If they say security updates for 10 years and there are unpatched security vulnerabilities living in the device before that I think they should have to refund the purchase.

> Do you think one or two volunteer maintainer (presumably working in their free time), can keep the entire kernel up to date and patched?

Maybe I misunderstand it, but I think it’s not that bad?

The kernel gets kept up-to-date by LineageOS, the device builds (official or unofficial) use the base builds, but add device-specific tweaks, and cherry-pick commits from elsewhere. And actually a level above that is AOSP which is maintained by Google.

Would love if someone could correct me.

>And actually a level above that is AOSP which is maintained by Google.

How do you think the CVEs get discovered? What about CVEs in the qualcomm specific code? How do you know that the amateur kernel developers wouldn't fall prey to c footguns and introduce new vulnerabilities?

Don't get me wrong, this is strictly better than the current state of affairs where there's zero patches, but I think people are underestimating how much effort it takes to keep a huge codebase patched.

Or you could hold the seller responsible for any harm caused security flaws for as long as the user chooses to use the phone.

What stops OEMs from publishing dummy updates that satisfy the legal checkboxes?

Dummy updates aren't security updates, so they can't satisfy the checkboxes.

If you're asking how it gets enforced, there could be a government office tasked with enforcement, and the law could let people sue.

Then leave one security patch out of the update and push it to the next one.

So put in the full work to patch things, but do it slightly wrong on purpose? What do companies gain by being so passive-aggressive?

Higher revenues through induced obsolescence?

Delaying patches slightly doesn't really help revenues unless it's widely publicized, in which case they look bad and possibly get sued and it doesn't even save them any effort. Maybe it's a risk, but I'll definitely take that risk over what we have today.

Supporting it for 3 extra years for $1M is only $333k per year, which probably only pays for 2 junior developers.

Would you like to be one of two developers whose responsibility is looking after all security patches and the build and release process for a 100 million line codebase?

Sounds cheap to me.

Or you could hire a team of 5 in Eastern Europe

In eastern europe? 300k would get you 5 developers in the UK for a year, easy.

Getting paid twice my current salary year to cherry-pick commits from one branch to another and click rebuild? Hell yes!

Though Qualcomm get much cheaper engineers than me in India.

Well it clearly shows that their business model is fundamentally flawed and they should probably stop selling phones.

I'm calling BS on this. There is no way you can get years of extra support out of Qualcomm for $1m.

As for e-waste, well unlike other major manufacturers every Google phone can be unlocked and you can install any OS you want. So there is no need to discard the hardware after support ends. You just have to bear the support costs yourself. Too expensive? Well, you're the one saying it's not too expensive, so why not start a company to provide extended support for devices like this? Charge $1 per device, that's a healthy profit over the $0.10 you claim it costs.

> You just have to bear the support costs yourself. Too expensive?

I ported Android 12 on thousands of Android devices. I'm already bearing the support cost myself.

Small proof, Android 12 on 17 of devices I bought with my money to support that cost, 7 days after Android 12 is released https://twitter.com/phhusson/status/1447824974396497924

That's really great! I'm glad that you can do that.

But (and I'm sure this will be an unpopular sentiment) you realize that it doesn't fully address the article's concerns about security. Nor does it provide the experience people expect from tested manufacturer updates (which are far from perfect, but still). This is not the same thing as manufacturer support. You could provide that level of support even as a third party, but it would be a lot more work and it would require the cooperation of Qualcomm and other vendors. You'd need to start a company and charge for your work to make it feasible.

Well, I'd say the existence of phh's ability to do this despite being in an environment that's unsupportive (or even hostile) is proof the model works. It would flourish with a regulatory bump keeping the manufacturers in check and unable to continue this poor support lifecycle.

This is about their profits. It's not about security, environmental responsibility, or the users. Regulatory authority exists to promote the interests of the people when the interests of the corporation's profits conflict with them.

I'm writing this message from a Fairphone 2 released in 2014 with Android 5, now updated to Android 10 thanks to the company still providing support for it 7 years later. And it has a Qualcomm snapdragon. A small company in the netherland is successful doing it. If Google wanted they would have done it. They just don't want. ps the Pixel 3 is also supported by Ubuntu Touch.

TBF, Qualcomm is probably asking a lot more from Google than from a small company in the Netherlands.

IIRC they are probably doing it without Qualcomm. In a similar way to the way LineageOS devs port devices to newer versions.

I decided to take a risk with them and buy FP4 to support them.

Yes, but another conclusion from this is that we will miss PCs when they are gone.

A sane architecture means support is much easier. I've used low power PCs that were more than one decade old, and I could still run the same well supported software as in a newly built machine.

Some regulation is needed to stop this madness. We don't have enough resources to let everyone trash their phones every three years. Rare earths are scarce, not to talk about all the junk going to landfills.

PCs only happened because Compaq managed to screw IBM and with it created the clone market.

Had IBM been able to prevent it (and they did try with PS/2 and MCA when the courts failed), there wouldn't be PCs as we know it, rather like every other 16 bit computer of the time.

There is an important distinction between promised lifetime and actual lifetime.

For example if a CPU instruction-level issue was discovered Fairphone would have no way to fix that without microcode updates. This means that a vendor can't guarantee security updates for longer than Qualcomm will offer low-level support. However the discovery of an explotable instruction 3 years after release is quite unlikely and as far as I am aware hasn't occured so presumably Google *could" continue updates in this case.

Of course there is still consumer expection issues. If phones are usually supported for 5 years even though they only promise 3 you might feel cheated if your particular model has to stop at 3.5 years.

There is also the option of ignoring the CPU vulnerability but continuing other security updates. However trying to explain this to users is incredibly difficult. Even if you can get their attention you have to explain the impact of being able to break out of the app sandbox to them.

Have we put all our computers in a trashcan since rowhammer?

Part of the problem here is that SoC drivers are hacked on top of the kernel (and are not merged in-tree). So SoC vendors have this pile of legacy and hacked-on code they need to cherry-pick every time the Kernel changes an interface they used (which is a lot) [0]. Of course, that costs and fortune and hampers the sales of newer chipsets so it’s not in the SoC vendor’s interest to do so.

I was hopeful with Windows Phone running a build of NT that the platform would still have the same strict ABI compatibility for drivers as the desktop version has. So you get kernel updates and the existing drivers just work.

Now, with Windows getting some emulation support for Linux (one of their Subsystems for Linux effectively translates system calls and execution happens in the NT kernel) I wonder if they could ship a phone running NT with an Android userland.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_binary_interface

Congrats, you just figured out what Microsoft created that translation layer for. ;-)

Windows 11 ships Android userland out of band (as an optional feature).

Also don't discount that most of your APPS themselves will still get security updates (as long as they keep compatibility with your Android OS version - which is likely for awhile) and realistically poor app security often worries me more than the OS itself. Android is (overall) a pretty secure system. Unless some massive exploit is released past my phones final security patch I am not that worried about using my device longer.

While Qualcomm is assuredly partially at fault here for encouraging piles of one off unsupportable devices without backwards compatibility with the previous SoCs they are also largely a victim of things outside of their control (although its good business for them to force everyone to buy a new phone every couple years). Plenty of blame can also be found with:

Arm, who has refused to bundle or assure system IP compliance to the level of their CPUs (aka interconnects, interrupt controllers, iommu's, pcie bridges, etc). Meaning that even very basic things like how one gets an interrupt isn't reliable, and somewhat worse are the buggy implementations of arm system IP that are allowed to reach the market.

Google, for failing to provide platform standard interfaces, similar to what the Arm server vendors enforce via SBSA/SBBR. Meaning that every single phone is doing low level platform mgmt in proprietary ways. That includes its own power mgmt, led blinking, etc, a good part of the time actually in the linux kernel, or via proprietary hooks in the linux kernel. Further despite making more money on the android ecosystem than RH+suse+canonical put together their changes are generally dwarfed by other much smaller players (although they have hired a bunch of maintainers over the past couple years).

Linux itself, for failing to provide a stable/backwards compatible driver API. Meaning a small simple driver either needs to spend months upstreaming (if that is even possible, see GPUs) or man years of maintenance keeping up with the kernel churn over the lifetime of the device. Further the arm/kernel community encourages a "everything in the kernel" (everything from firmware functionality, to the actual machine descriptions in the form of all the DTs) attitude which completely fails to grasp the huge number of bugs and device varieties on these arm devices. Its rumored that QC by itself had a million plus lines of out of tree code a few years ago. Its likely that this attitude could more than double the number of lines of driver code in the linux kernel if just the past few years of Arm Soc's were fully supported.

So, the combination of the three are the perfect storm of massive overhead for supporting the couple hundred phone models in existence. Imagine for a moment if every PC model made in the past 10 years required a few (tens) of thousand lines of kernel changes, how unworkable that would be.

There aren't enough engineers to solve this as a brute force problem, the solution is to look at the PC market and consider that maybe it would be better if there were actually some standardization in the phone space.

The Fairphone doesn’t seem to have a problem with the exact same conditions.

There is a saying about thrust and bricks around here somewhere... one example does not the ecosystem make. That said there are examples of SoC's which get attention and manufactures which do a better job than 3 years, but its the exception rather than the rule, and the updates frequently are quite late.

If your willing to dedicate an engineer or two to keeping it running then so be it. I can assure you that your average 10 year old PC running Linux probably hasn't gotten that much attention since before it was released. But then again, PC's adhear to industry standards and are mostly iterative designs.

It's fascinating that Google, the stewards of Android, have refused to solve any of those problems. The most successful operating system in history is managed by a company who refuses to solve its deficiencies.

Compare with the second most successful platform, and how Microsoft has been solving problems for decades while maintaining their first commandment: Thou shall not break backwards compatibility.

> It's fascinating that Google, the stewards of Android, have refused to solve any of those problems. The most successful operating system in history is managed by a company who refuses to solve its deficiencies.

I wouldn't say that they've refused to solve its deficiencies; Google is not to blame for nor do they have any control over the Linux kernel's development practices. The kernel developers don't want to have stable APIs and the natural result is that out-of-tree drivers are poorly supported.

(pretty sure most people will miss this answer, but anyway)

So, to clarify things considering all the answers:

- Qualcomm's development cost is shared amongst all OEMs (Except Google), because all OEMs share the same development branches Qualcomm-side. So 1M$ isn't 1M$ for Qualcomm but more

- Qualcomm's development cost is shared amongst a lot of SoCs. Qualcomm have like one shared tree per year. So one development tree spans maybe 10 SoCs, including XR, automative, IoT, and smartphones. So yeah, from Qualcomm's PoV, it's not 1M$ additional revenue it's much more.

- "Extended support" is +30% of support time (so just one additional year). My source tells me that the actual content of "Extended support" varies a lot. Sometimes it's just security patches, sometimes it's Android major upgrade

- Qualcomm "standard" support is 3 years,

- My source is currently writing a full-blown article about Android upgrades. Not sure you'll trust them more than me though

Meanwhile the original iPhone SE from 2016 can boot the latest iOS. And you can get a battery replacement from Apple right at the store, same day for... 49$! It just works.

In just 4 months the Pixel 3A is officially getting EoL'd. This phone was released in 2019 (fall), same time as the iPhone 11. It just shows the wide gap between iOS and Android.

> Apparently Qualcomm asks for a ridiculous amount of money to support any chip beyond a measly 2-3 years. Apple gets away with it by building their own chips

I can believe it. Qualcomm makes money per chip sold, Apple makes money by building an ecosystem. Linux support is a cost center for Qualcomm past the initial launch kernel, and we can only imagine there's a difference in caliber between the engineers writing patches and hacks around the kernel at Qualcomm vs building the OS that powers the iPhone.

Not defending Google here at all, but that $49 battery change was a hard-fought victory from Apple.

To me that’s an insane win for everyone, including Apple. Because it completely changes the value proposition of iPhones.

Hand me down iPhones for teenagers became a no brainer since all it costs is 49$ to get a 3-4 years old phone back to brand new. And they get the blue bubbles in iMessage (which, if you ask parents, is THE social differentiator in schools these days). Having a well architected stack and great engineering pays off in surprising ways!

> And they get the blue bubbles in iMessage (which, if you ask parents, is THE social differentiator in schools these days).

I would also add that "if you ask students, it is THE social differentiator" as well.

BUT, how the f_ck is it a good thing to encourage teenagers to get locked in to a company's products so they can stay socially relevant? iMessage's manipulative strategy (because teenagers value social belonging) by Apple is morally corrupt. I'm not saying it's effective (because their strategy absolutely is); I'm saying it's wrong. We shouldn't be encouraging children to get locked into the richest company in the world's walled garden for the rest of their life—what they use as teenagers is what they're going to, chances are, keep using for the rest of their lives.

Teenagers literally do not use Android devices. The iOS market share in American high schools is easily over 90%. If you go to a high school classroom, you would be surprised to find more than one or two Android users in one classroom.

Do you want your future to be one where Apple's locked down operating system has a market share of over 90%? Where Android is irrelevant and neglected, and you do not own your device—because unlike on iOS, some Android phones actually do let you unlock your bootloader and boot different operating systems?

Please do not encourage the spread of iMessage. It lets one company cement their iron grip on the upcoming generations and will result in a net loss of computer freedom.

> iMessage's manipulative strategy (because teenagers value social belonging) by Apple is morally corrupt

Apple decided to build better messaging on their platform. They saw that carriers simply didn’t care or understood messaging and decided to innovate and take care of the experience. Texting on iPhone just works. We should celebrate that. Google could have created a competing product as feature rich but instead decided to spawn and kill 10 different chat apps.

> Where Android is irrelevant and neglected

Honestly, the android handset makers are already neglecting their own OS, looking at the barely three years of support they offer.

> Please do not encourage the spread of iMessage

I already do. Honestly, I support the platform that just works. To me a phone is simply a tool to get things done.

> Texting on iPhone just works.

Downloading Telegram, Signal, Discord, WhatsApp, or the number of third-party messaging applications that is widely used by a number of people, within and outside the blue bubble of the US "just works" as well. And unlike iMessage, these platforms let you chat with other people. What's so wrong with that? Is it too much friction to click to install a (superior with objectively tons more features than iMessage that work on all its platforms) third-party messaging client? Telegram even has games, which are quite popular amongst the teenagers, just like iMessage.

>Is it too much friction to click to install a third-party messaging client?

Yes. This is why defaults matter. In this case, it generated a network effect.

Clearly not in Europe or India or China. First world problems, I guess.

Countries where iPhones are less dominant and the Android SMS app is the default - so we see people using Whatsapp or equivalent.

And it doesn’t apply to anywhere outside the US (Writing this comment on my iPhone SE, which is still on the original battery because it’s much costlier to swap the battery in India).

Why does it costs more?

Ofcourse it just works. Apple makes software and hardware for Apple.

> we can only imagine there's a difference in caliber between the engineers writing patches and hacks around the kernel at Qualcomm vs building the OS that powers the iPhone.

Android has to work everywhere from dodgy tablets running Kitkat to flagships phones that cost an arm and a leg.

Oh woe. What a hard life Apple engineers have. Oh, how brilliant they are. The world would crumble without them. Woe.

The issue are patched drivers that are not ported when new kernel releases are introduced.

Apple, somehow, managed to avoid these problems on their SoCs.

> Oh woe. What a hard life Apple engineers have. Oh, how brilliant they are. The world would crumble without them. Woe.

Honestly, they shipped results. And judging by the difference between offers from Qualcomm and Apple, are in a different league.

The Pixel 3 was a great phone. If https://lineageos.org/ or https://calyxos.org/ had been able to come up with an AI assisted camera which could match the Google Camera app (The lens is trash, Google uses software to make good images) then it would have been great.

Benefit of actual quality camera lenses is these open source OS can still provide good photos using a stock android camera app.

You can get Google Camera on anything: https://www.celsoazevedo.com/files/android/google-camera/

Talk about letting the wolf into the henhouse.

On pixel phones I'm pretty sure you can install the camera from the Play Store with no fuss on LineaseOS.

I say that using a LineaseOS Pixel 4a with Google Camera and don't remember doing anything special to install it.

I have never had an issue with the stock camera on GrapheneOS, and struggle to understand what better quality one could want... AI to fill in colors and details...potentially wrong?

The Pixel phones are well known for having a _ton_ of postprocessing for their photos to look good. Stabilisation, color correcting a known faulty sensor, etc. Not having this is truly visible.

This is one of the things that keeps me with Apple. They're far from perfect in the reliability front, but they will keep supporting the software for much longer than I expect my phone to last. Looks like the oldest phone they still support is the 6s, and typically they support phones for a bit under 7 years after launch, and 5 after discontinuation.

Obviously they get slower and fewer features, but that's better than "Good luck LOL".

Yes, this. The 6s came out in 2015 and is still supported. I used one until just a few months ago. Worked great.

Apple foresaw this and made the appropriate investments because they explicitly value device longevity. Google could easily do the same.

How many emissions are we talking about here?

Google is going to skimp and cut corners wherever they can to save money and trim the fat (e.g. cutting off google apps for business free, less and less ad yt ad revenue, accelerated EOL of devices and services, etc). This is what happens when you've barely innovated in the past few years (compared to early-mid 2000's). Google is essentially the Intel of Web 2.0 companies. They blew their huge lead dicking around with a billion messaging strategies, social media strategies (obsessing over fb), corporate scandals, etc and lost a lot of customer mind share and good graces in the process. It also doesn't help that Microsoft has found their stride again in recent years.

They can only stay rich if we waste and reconsume again and again. That is how ads industries thrive. Apple and Samsung are what are today because we overbought their product. Almost everyone I know at least got 3+ phones (1 current 2 in the drawers). Even got one with 15+ phones (collection he said). As long as we behave to reward companies that do this, we will continuously getting new companies or existing companies adopting this strategy. I don't see "treehuggers" using antiquated Nokia phones and routinely seen many of my environmentally conscious frens having new iphones EVERY 2 years even if their old phones are working fine and they can easily go into a cheap repair shop to change the battery. As for security reasons, yeah, "frens" actually pasting post-it passwords and no idea what is yubi keys and never bother doing 2FA.

I’m not sure if Google wanted… they could support a phone for much more than ~3 years.

Older android phones slow down / get really janky as time goes on. Even when they’re still supporting it.

It’s one of the reasons I left Android. Longer term lives for Android phones is pretty bad, flashing your own ROMs aside (I was done with that long ago).

>ridiculous amount of money

This is a strange red herring because it is ridiculously expensive, but not meaningfully so on a per-handset basis.

Software development teams are ridiculously expensive. Going from two to four years might require a doubling in staff. You need teams dedicated to old architecture, conservatively $1m for 5 people. Your best engineers will want to move on to newer problems.

The problem compounds. These teams could be instead working on newer products with greater potential return, so they're billable at $4m for 5 people per year. 4 additional years of support is $16m. (This is fairly lean, but should be about the right order of magnitude +/- 1).

With 13m sold, that's about $1/handset. Apple/Samsung budget for this. Google chooses not to.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I had a Nexus 6P and after that experience I promised myself that I will never buy a Google hardware device ever again. The company has the wrong mentality regarding its handsets and how to take care of the customers who buy them.

It's hit or miss, I have had a number of Nexus and Pixel devices and haven't had any issues.

Other hardware companies tend to have even worse update policies...

The last time I bought a Google-branded phone, they cut support after only 18 months. I’ll never buy a Google hardware product ever again.

I bought an LG G7 from Google Fi, and it was exactly 18 months from the phone's release to when they stopped updating it. I didn't buy it on day one either, so I got even less. I vowed that was the last e-waste phone I'm buying and moved to an iPhone last year.

There are still a lot of things I like better on Android, but it's not worth it.

This is in large part due to poor luck and changing phones a lot, but I managed to use Android for around 4 years without ever receiving an over the air system update.

I jumped off when the third Nexus 5X replacement Google gave me also bootlooped. Total junk and probably the most frustrating product experience I've ever had.

The writing's on the wall when it comes to Android SOCs now anyway, Apple phones from 4 years ago perform better and still get updates. They have their own issues, but they're not existential level problems.

This is sort of what I wonder about the Tensor in the new Pixels... but after Pixel 3 I'm not willing to gamble that much money on what looks like yet-another of Google's attempts to shift blame about why they can't support their phones. If Pixel "6a" has Tensor and is priced like a phone that will only be supported for 3 years, I'll consider it.

But frankly it's really hard to justify not getting an iPhone anymore. I have three kids and they all want iPhones and all their social life is on iMessage. Not to mention that all the apps I have to use for work are better supported in iPhone and have issues on Android but IT doesn't really care. It's becoming really difficult to justify not just getting my wife and I iPhones in the next cycle and planning to hand them down.

Apple makes some really nice devices, but there's a lot of people (myself included) that have a strong aversion to their "you don't want this, you want this other thing that we decided" mentality. Their software commonly does something totally different than what you tell it to do, because they decided it's better. Because of that, I will never own an iphone.

Its frustrating that all the big companies act like "we're big, so we'll do what we want, no matter how annoying it is to the end user" ... and the small companies really can't compete/disrupt the market because they're not big enough.

I guess I'm at the point where I just don't care to futz with the device much anymore and try to limit my use of the phone. In the early days you'd load custom ROMs and tweak things and that was a lot of fun. Nowadays I just want something that is secure and works. Nexus and Pixel devices have always been very good at that for me. But now that I don't care so much about that it means the focus is on device lifetime, security and long-term cost. Apple wins those.

But also so many of the people around me use iOS devices now that I end up having to learn how to use them anyway. Yikes I sound like an Apple shill... but the opposite is true. lol

As a more mundane example...

My wife went into iTunes and moved a bunch of songs onto her phone. Then she went out and tried to play those songs... and it tried to download them off the cloud (using data, which is a limited resource). Apparently, copying to the phone didn't _actually_ copy them, just put sort of "shortcut" there pointing at it on the cloud. That was definitely _not_ what she wanted, but the software decided otherwise.

Similar pet peeve: how you can have a tab open on iOS Safari, even for a static page, leave it for 20 seconds, and come back, and then it has to re-download the entire page. It somehow won’t even cache what you had to local storage.

I mean.. that's not a feature. That's a bug (likely due to RAM being full). I rarely if ever have this issue, but I do remember it happening at some point, but that's definitely not a feature that iOS thinks is better.

Really? I mean, I've seen it over ten years of usage, and it's never been any other way, so that sounds like a deliberate decision. At the very least, not using internal storage -- when RAM is needed for something else -- is a decision.

Mobile device OS's do not swap to storage because the typical mobile storage is bottom-of-the-barrel eMMC and the wear-and-tear of swapping on the flash would be a killer.

It would only need to do it in the few occasions when the tabs have filled up the available RAM and they're large enough to be worth dumping. iPhones use bottom of the barrel storage?

I see that sporadically but it's uncommon enough to be noteworthy on an iPhone 11. Do you have an extension installed or are switching to a very RAM-hungry application? I typically only see that if I switched over to do something like edit a video.

No, nothing RAM hungry. Only extensions are adblockers. And it's an iPhone 8, which, yes, I know, is from the Dark Ages where no one could ever expect any amount of data to be stored ever, but this has happened with every iPhone I've had back to 2012, including ones that were bought close to release.

I get this, but honestly it's more important for me to have a phone that works... I can deal with inexplicable software changes, I make some of my own. At one point I had the same iPhone for 4 years.

When I tried Android I couldn't get the same device to stick around for more than a year. After my 5X bootloop fiasco I tried another manufacturer and found out I couldn't even upgrade my software to patch a security issue because I had to wait on the vendor to add their crapware before releasing the update. I waited 6 months after Google released their update and then gave up... I don't know how Android users deal with the update nonsense.

> I get this, but honestly it's more important for me to have a phone that works

This right here is what sums this topic up for me.

Different experiences for different people.

I had my last Android phone for 5 years, and never had a problem until the last month; when it was just too slow and would reboot every now and again. It had security updates for the first 4 years.

My wife just switched off her iphone to an android because there were just too many places where it would ... just do it's own thing instead of what she told it to (like I noted in another response; placing songs on the cloud instead of on her phone like she told it to). It didn't "just work" in a lot of cases, for any sane definition of that phrase.

> It didn't "just work" in a lot of cases, for any sane definition of that phrase.

I was thinking about this the other day, and how Apple's departure from skeuomorphism made a lot of "just works" analogies a lot more dilute. I've never been particularly fond of Apple's design chops, be it from 2008 or 2018, but there's something to be said about how digital Corinthian leather and wood textures makes a person perceive a device. It also made their design philosophy fairly straightforward: if you're designing a digital bookshelf, it should work similarly to a physical one. There was no ambiguous frosted-glass layer of UI, nor "lickable" candy buttons littering your experience. It was just... functional. Modern Apple seems pretty disinterested in that stuff though. Relative to the rest of the tech industry, they're the same clowns in a different circus.

> Apple makes some really nice devices, but there's a lot of people (myself included) that have a strong aversion to their "you don't want this, you want this other thing that we decided" mentality. Their software commonly does something totally different than what you tell it to do, because they decided it's better. Because of that, I will never own an iphone.

I feel like this gets talked about a lot in the abstract but it's rare that I actually run into a limitation in normal usage, and when it is I usually agree with the decision behind it (e.g. limiting cross-application data access for security reasons or moving away from kernel extensions). I think the best example is not supporting different browser engines but I have very mixed emotions there because I'd love to be able to use Firefox but iOS is basically the main thing keeping “the web” from meaning “what the Chrome team chooses to support”.

The update period on iphones is mind boggling good if you are coming from Chinese android phones for example. I've seen android phones ship a version behind and never get an update.

Apple were releasing updates to the 6s in 2021 still. That's a 7 year old device. Security updates only pretty much - but still its crazy. My wife will not upgrade her old phone as a result (I get one every year through work and just sell my old one).

I fixed the screen on an old iPhone 7 Plus. After rebooting it, it updated to iOS 15. As an Android user that's always made me jealous.

I know - it's just crazy and a totally different world.

It also really helps with resale value. I can't believe what I was getting for my old iphones.

Apple released another security update for the 2013 iPhone 5s last September.

I think I got an update to my 6splus last night, it’s still supported on iOS 15. same with the original SEs, the kids have them and still supported.

The 6S (and the SE, which also uses the A9) is still receiving all the latest OS updates, not just security updates, in 2022.

I for one won't "upgrade" to a bigger phone with no fingerprint sensor and no headphone jack. I don't agree with many things Apple does, but their iPhone support is pretty damn good.

The difference is Apple OS updates on older devices don't always have all the features the new OS gets on newer hardware (which makes sense in many cases) while older Android phones can run most of the latest updates to Android (e.g., Jetpack Compose)

A SwiftUI app vs Compose app right now is night and day, bugs from iOS 13.5 to 13.6 are catastrophic meanwhile Android devices with extremely old operating systems run the latest UI toolkit with very few issues.

My 5X died in my pocket before a year of usage. Just died and wouldn't turn on. I called support and they said to ship it out, and I would have a new one in about a week. Never mind 1) phones shouldn't just randomly die, and 2) a week without a phone??? Switched to iPhone and never looked back.

>2) a week without a phone???

Does Apple give you a replacement before sending in your existing phone?

Maybe in the US, on Apple's homeland, but I doubt they do this in the EU. Would be cool if they did though.

Whenever I upgrade phones, I still keep my previous device around so that when I had to send my last gen to the service, I can always quickly switch to the previous one for a couple of weeks until it's back

I'm pretty sure you can just go to an Apple store and be taken care of. No physical stores, or real people at deal with at Google, is a problem.

Normally you’d go to an Apple store and there’s a good chance they’ll just give you a new phone.

You can walk into an Apple store and walk out with a replacement.

If you had backups running to your Mac or PC (which can happen over WiFi automatically when both the phone and mac are on line power), you've got a whole-device backup that will have you up and running as fast as it takes the backup to restore.

If you backup to iCloud, you can even walk out with the phone showing a progress bar while it is restoring to the exact state you left the older.

In situations like this I've usually had the manufacturer provide an option to immediately ship a replacement and charge the full cost of the replacement if the device isn't received within 30 days.

That's what google did for my nexus 5x when it broke - and that was over 2 years after I purchased it and out of warranty. I did get it from the play store though, and so may change depending on where you purchased it from.

Still annoying, and phones shouldn't die like that, but it was probably the best thing they could have done by that point.

I can't speak to the EU, but living in the non-California US, yes. I've gotten next-day replacements accompanied by a box for returning the bricked phone. This is accompanied by the caveat that if they don't receive the bricked phone in something like 30 days, you're on the hook for the full purchase price of the replacement they sent you.

In the EU too.

Hey, my 5X did the exact same thing. I couldn't find anything on the web about it happening to anyone else. I thought it was just me.

The thing died on my desk at work, wouldn't even turn on, just a few days before I was going on a long trip so after a few hours of looking for fixes and talking to support I just went to an Apple store and got an iPhone. Now I at least feel comfortable that if I have an issue I can go to a physical store and get help in a pinch.

I had the 5 as well that constantly boot loaded. A couple years later I really wanted the photos off it that hadn’t been synced and so I took it apart and found the issue to be a design flaw in the power button. I made a custom power button replacement and it booted right up. I have no idea who’s idea it was to have the entire phone’s functionality dependent on a thin, flimsy piece of plastic, but it made me never buy a google product again. I had a google pixel 2 at the time and it’s the last google phone I’ve had.

I've considered a cheap backup phone just in case I ever have to have a repair on my phone that will either require leaving it at an Apple Store or Best Buy longer than I can wait in store or will require sending it away.

There are unlocked 4G phones such as the Nokia 225 for under $50 and the Nokia 6300 for under $70.

I could then either use the SIM from my iPhone, or if I didn't mind using a temporary number instead of my regular number while the iPhone is being repaired Mint Mobile has a "try before you buy" kit for $2 that includes a SIM and new number that is good for one week of service. It is meant to let people test out Mint Mobile before switching to make sure coverage and service are satisfactory, but seems like it would also work for someone who just wanted temporary service.

What happens to somebody who doesn't have a computer whose phone dies spontaneously like this? I assume that an iPhone user would be able to show up at a store and buy a new phone/replacement, but if you're a Google user and you don't have a good way to 2FA to log into your email... what do you do?

Personally, I support ecosystems where the people in power don't apply pressure on social media networks to ban any remotely sexually explicit content, or discussion of depression and PTSD.

https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/29/tumblr-ios-tags-ban-apple/

I escaped from such a world as a child. Apple's sanitization of the internet is fundamentally unethical.

Let me know when you find such an ecosystem. Google bans it too, they only get a pass because you can enable sideloading.

Tumblr didn't have to censor its Android app last month.

From what I remember, the Nexuses 5x had a manufacturing error, which caused them to spontaneously desolder some components from the board, resulting in the bootloop. This was a problem in a lot (maybe even most) phones. Mine was in a bootloop too. There was a class action about it too, see if you may still be able to claim cash: https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/1/31/16957332/l...

I strongly doubt Google's narrative about a manufacturing defect as the root cause. Several different devices with varying manufacturers were affected. In my case, the bootloop began immediately after the upgrade to Android Oreo.

Google told me, a US customer, to send my device to Huawei's nearest service center in mainland China at my own cost for diagnosis and repair. That is unacceptable for a Google-branded product designed by Google, unveiled by Google, marketed by Google, sold directly by Google, warrantied by Google, and bricked by Google.

Imagine, if you will, Audi sending you to Bosch in Germany (at your own cost!) after an Audi dealership in Indiana bricks your ECU during a recall service.

> I jumped off when the third Nexus 5X replacement Google gave me also bootlooped

Shame, because my Nexus 5 and Nexus 4 still run great. I don't use them as phones, but they're still solid devices I use for other projects.

Have things changed in the Android space, though?

My impression is Google's are still the most updated. I've had a Nexus S, 4, 5 and currently have Pixel 3. I've never really had any problems with the Google-managed devices. Motorola and Samsung... let's just say I will never, ever buy a phone from them ever again. The choice is between Pixel and iPhone. But after the Pixel 3 I will not pay for the "premium" class Pixels.

When is a hardware maker going to figure out that selling something that works like a PC in terms of third party system updates will immediately become the thing that techs buy and recommend?

People are willingly paying iPhone prices for Purism and Pinephone hardware with low specs and old chips. Does Samsung not want this money?

It used to be that people talked to their local techies before making technology purchases.

Now people look at the ads and the product placement. If you want to sell millions of a device, that's how you do it.

People still regularly ask me what kind of phone to get.

I start by excluding the ones with literal malware and after that the primary determinant is price, because if it's going to be rapidly disposable anyway then there's no point in making a large investment.

"Let's force them to buy a new phone more often" is the kind of first year on the job MBA move that sounds profitable on paper as long as you fail to notice that the average Android phone now sells for less than a third of the price of the average iPhone. And that's revenue; the difference in margins is even bigger.

Not a single one of my friends or family (n=50) has asked me for phone recommendations in the past 4 years (and I can only recall two recommendation requests ever).

It's certainly not common enough that you see mentions about it on HN or Reddit - and yet, you see mentions of adjacent things like requests for tech support. So, it's clearly not very common.

People vent about getting asked to do free tech support because it's time consuming unpaid labor.

The premise of asking for a recommendation is that the tech has already done the research (e.g. for themselves) and can provide a two word answer off the top of their head. There is little reason to complain about this on a message board or even bother to remember when it happens. But it does.

You even admit to doing it yourself. How many swings of a $400 purchase from one vendor to another does it take per capita to be enough to care about?

I'd say it's very common. I get requests on a nearly weekly basis. From both friends and family. Some have asked me several times.

It's probably such a small amount of money that it's just not worth bothering with.

> People are willingly paying iPhone prices for Purism and Pinephone hardware with low specs and old chips.

...for almost certainly tiny numbers of sales in both cases, and nowhere near "iPhone prices" for Pinephones. Samsung cares about money, and their current strategy is far more lucrative than selling very small amounts of Librem devices at modest profit margins.

> nowhere near "iPhone prices" for Pinephones

iPhone SE is $399. PinePhone Pro is $399. Samsung is averaging ~$250.

> ...for almost certainly tiny numbers of sales in both cases

They're doing preorders and are regularly sold out and backordered, despite having high prices and old hardware and weird bugs. That is what high demand looks like.

Meanwhile no change to the hardware is required and Samsung could carry on selling to everyone they currently do, plus all of those people.

This whole comments section is full of people complaining about this. If you give them a choice between two otherwise fungible phones, one that has open source drivers etc. and can therefore run an up to date vanilla kernel indefinitely, why wouldn't they all choose that one?

> They're doing preorders and are regularly sold out and backordered, despite having high prices and old hardware and weird bugs. That is what high demand looks like.

The custom Linux phone I make is also sold out! I've made zero units and there are zero available. That is what high demand looks like.

Is it sarcasm because you can't point to anyone who isn't selling out?

There is clearly more demand than there is supply.

This is the weirdest position to stake out. That nobody wants this because everybody who makes one has a line of customers around the block and mainstream media outlets are writing stories about how much people want this, which go to the front page of tech news aggregators because of all the people who feel the same way.

What evidence of demand are you looking for? A larger production run which is also commercially successful? You can't expect that as a precondition for doing one.

The thing that changed is that Google started pitching, and pricing, the Pixel phones as premium phones. At least with the Nexus line they were more modestly priced. So the lack of long term updates was still an issue, but more people were willing to swallow it given the price differential vs. the iPhone.

Exactly. Google played the "pay Apple prices for an Apple experience" tactic and already reneged. They're in a tough spot because I won't trust them again with anything not priced to be replaced in three years. So when you get to the question of wanting a device that lasts longer, the answer seems to be Apple.

>the answer seems to be Apple

Until Apple bricks your phone with a stealth update because you haven't upgraded quickly enough.

https://www.reuters.com/article/apple-iphones-settlement-idU...

Honestly I think this is the real issue: batteries barely last three years and when they start to go things go strange and people blame the phone rather than replace the battery. I expect somewhere inside Google they grok that supporting a phone beyond three years becomes the root cause problem being dying batteries.

>people blame the phone rather than replace the battery.

If their phone doesn't have a replaceable battery then blaming the phone is correct.

No, it's simply not. Not when the battery can actually be replaced for $49. The battery is replaceable.

The opportunity cost of having to look up a vendor store, go there, and wait an hour+ for them to replace my battery may as well be infinite.

Which is about the same thing for an iPhone? Apple stores don't magically replace batteries in seconds. On my iPhone 6s, I had both a bad battery, and a defective display - took 7 hours to get my phone back after scheduling an appointment at the Apple Store.

iPhone batteries should be user-replaceable too. Maybe with a pair of screws instead of a clip.

That’s bullshit. I guess overturning cost for repairing a car is also infinite by that logic.

It is. I hate getting my car repaired. Now that I work from home, if I didn't already own a car, I very well might not buy one.

Once per 3 years?!

I wonder how much of this could be extended by phones just auto-limiting charging to 90% (current phones already time charging so when left on overnight it only reaches 100% when you wake up) most of the time, since that seems to increase battery longevity by a lot.

I had one of the affected phones and concur that it was shitty of them to try and sneak that by people, but "throttled the peak CPU boost" is a long way from "bricked"

Upside of the settlement was I got a battery replacement for $30 (performed same day in store) and coming up on 6 years since release the original iPhone SE is still running the latest version of iOS.

Also a happy OG SE user who got one of the cheap battery replacements. Replaced again a couple years later with an iFixit battery for ~$30, still using it to this day. Holding out for a worthy upgrade path...

Samsung (but not career model) should be better for security updates.

> My impression is Google's are still the most updated

OnePlus phones are/were also quite good (at least when I bought my OnePlus 6, I have heard it went… downhill from there). But I did two years of updates, plus one more through LineageOS. And I'll probably update again when LineageOS has their Android 12 release.

OnePlus phones are good because they are (still) easily bootloader-unlockable, and are thus good (excellent) for custom ROMs. They do update fairly often on stock, but I think the stock ROM is getting worse and worse. Still, they're up there.

Do yourself a favor and let Android 12 settle down for a bit before you upgrade. I've heard nothing but bugs, bugs, and more bugs. Though I guess we can assume that they won't pump out a LineageOS release if they find a bunch of bugs, since unlike Google the LineageOS devs actually have pride in the software they produce.

> I've heard nothing but bugs, bugs, and more bugs.

I "upgraded" to a Pixel 6 and Android 12 has been completely fine for me, so it might be certain people. I am aware some of my friends had bugs with Android 12, though.

If you pick and choose your hardware correctly (waiting for reviews and news of major defects to come out), you can do fairly well -- my SO has the 4a, and it works admirably for her. Had a 3a before that and she only upgraded because the screen broke and it would cost more than the phone to replace it.

But I'm inclined to agree. Just look at the 6 and 6 Pro. They rolled out an upgrade, ruined cellular connectivity for a good chunk of users, and then all of the engineers peaced out for the holidays, with no way to downgrade to a usable release for effected users other than wiping their entire phone and starting from scratch. For their flagship phones.

With word that the 6a is ditching the headphone jack and rear fingerprint sensor, and also inching up in size to gargantuan phablet dimensions, it'll be easy to switch away in the future.

I've still got a pixel 2 and it works swimmingly. Sometimes the 4k video stops recording and sometimes there's a bit of slow down but it hasn't convince me to change devices just yet.

Does it still get security updates, or don’t you do anything sensitive on the phone?

Also rocking a Pixel 2 (XL) 128GB here, even recently swapped the battery and its like new again. Replacing it with an equivalent or better phone would cost a good bit of money.

What security issues should I be concerned about? It's difficult to spend the time going through the CVE database to figure this out, I see a lot of privilege escalation issues but I don't install apps that I don't trust anyway. I still get browser updates. I care less about the bugs and more about the attack vectors.

What does trusted app mean? A priv esc means you're now worried that any other app has a vulnerability. You might trust your default weather app to not be malicious but do you trust it and hundred other standard apps to be secure?

I'd rather have a secure sandbox with untrusted apps then have insecure sandbox with a ton of attack surfaces in trusted apps.

This just in: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/01/andro...

Quote from the article: "The malware spread primarily through Google Play but also through third-party marketplaces, push notifications on compromised websites, sponsored links on Google, and messages delivered by WhatsApp or SMS. At the time, Brata targeted people with accounts from Brazil-based banks."

With browser updates, limited browsing, restricting app downloads, you might be in the clear. But looks like malware makers also use WhatsApp or SMS.

I respectfully disagree. I had a 3a until very recently and was happy with it.

Then it downloaded the update for Android 12 (I think), and got corrupted, and essentially became unstable and unusable - things like bluetooth headsets would crash the device.

This was a phone that was working great, until it wasn't. I wasn't able to find others with the same issue. Their customer service is non-existent. End of the line.

This is what pushed me to get an iPhone recently - at least I can walk into an apple store if the thing crashes completely. I've bought multiple android devices over the years, and its always been underwhelming and disappointing. The only upside has been that its been cheap. Now that I can afford one, I think an iPhone is the only viable choice (for me).

I know there are people who own Google devices and this has never happened with them, but this has been my experience of being a life-long android user.

I'm having exactly the same issues with bluetooth on my Pixel. You are not alone. I can't connect to my car or any wireless device, it just crashes the phone.

This is a fantastic point, thanks for bringing it up. I mentioned in my original post that my S.O. uses a 4a these days -- I'm still using an iPhone from 2016, the SE. Which is still receiving current iOS updates. Things aren't all rosy on the iPhone side of things (some iOS updates, particularly iOS 12, iirc, were full of bugs, and battery estimation has occasionally fallen apart after system updates)... but overall it's nice that I've been able to use the same phone for 6 years now. And it only cost me $400, so... the same as the 3a.

It's very, very nice that you can go into an Apple store for iPhone support. Mailing in your phone to another manufacturer to deal with an issue is a miserable experience, and Google's uBreakifix relationship is not perfect for regular customer service and manufacturer defects.

If there is an Apple store nearby, being able to walk in with a broken phone and walk out a half hour later with a new/replacement phone is more valuable than people realize.

I was an Android user back in the Nexus days, and had something similar happen to my Nexus 7 tablet. It worked fine, updated Android, became unusable. I read they finally addressed it later, but I had already moved on.

> If there is an Apple store nearby, being able to walk in with a broken phone and walk out a half hour later with a new/replacement phone is more valuable than people realize.

And if not, my single experience with Best Buy is that I can get my iPhone replacement the next day.

Like many others in this discussion, I switched to Apple after Google screwed me with one of their phones.

Yeah, they pushed an update that made the device completely unusable. I'm not sure if that was related to the issue with the storage on it also degrading. I still have it and I managed to load a custom rom on it but it's still remarkably slow. It's too bad, too. The device itself was (and still is, IMO) something that I'd love a modern version of without all the issues. I also had a nexus 5 phone which was great (and aesthetically it's still my favorite phone ever)... until it got stuck in a bootloop 2 weeks after warranty... which they helped me out with and sent me another one out of warranty, but that replacement also almost immediately started bootlooping.

After that I just can't trust Google at all with hardware and since then my opinion of Google as a whole has largely soured. The Galaxy S6 I got to replace it worked quite well but after several years went back to the iPhone .

Chiming in to say I had the same bluetooth issue that resulted in the phone telling me that my storage was corrupt shortly after pairing a new device. Managed to resolve it by updating the Google app and all other Google Play Services related apps that I could.

>Now that I can afford one, I think an iPhone is the only viable choice

On a low budget used iPhones are pretty good choice. I've a couple of 2016 SEs bought for ~$100 each. Work well, usual Apple plus points. Easy to get fixed when you break screens, batteries etc. too - go to any phone fixers.

I had one of those defective google Nexus 7 tablets which suffered from bad hardware and software rendering the device unusable. It died after a year. Well not completely dead, it booted but was so slow as to be totally unusable. Google did nothing to compensate save for some bullshit discount on a new nexus device. Like I'm going to give them more money after telling me to go fuck myself.

I also bought a Nexus/Pixel 5 phone or whatever around the same time and that too had issues after 2 years. I forget the issues but it had to be rebooted frequently, at least once a day due to slowdowns. Replaced with an HTC that ran much better for 4 years until I accidentally killed it.

After those two turds I will NEVER buy google garbage ever again.

Yeah, I jumped ship earlier. I had the Nexus One, Nexus S, and Galaxy Nexus (which was a horrible phone) and then jumped to an iPhone 5. It's hard to find hardware as consistently good as the iPhone and after the redesign from 12 onward it's been really great (I wish they'd keep the mini around).

I would have thought Google finally bringing the hardware design in house with the pixel phones would let them create a real competitor, but they seem to be just okay?

Lack of focus maybe? Might just be a case of commoditize your complement, in this case the complement for Google is the hardware.

I've had an Android phone since the TMobile 3G (second ever Android phone) and I'm starting to seriously consider an iPhone.

I'm not an Apple fan. I don't use any Apple products right now. However, it's impossible to deny that Android phones are always 2-3 years behind Apple in terms of hardware and software.

I also never spend more than $500 on a phone, which has iPhones out of reach.

I think the iphone SE is under $500. I used an apple iphone 8 up until this Christmas. The iphone SE is basically a slightly upgraded iphone 8 which i think has 1 more gb of ram or something.

I will sometimes just buy a model or 2 back used or refurbished since they last for quite a while. You could probably get the 11 for under $500 as well.

iPhone SE is $400 (64GB) and $450 (128GB):

https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-iphone/iphone-se

>I also never spend more than $500 on a phone, which has iPhones out of reach.

I migrated to Android back in the IPhone 8 and IPhone 10 Max Plus++ whatever era. I just couldn't deal with a $1000 phone.

But now Apple has the IPhone SE which goes for as low as $399.

You can get a lot of used iPhone for $500. I bought my XS maybe 3 years ago for a little less than 500€. I’m still using it. The battery starts to age but not enough for a replacement (it generally finishes the day but I have no more extra buffer). Other than that, I can’t imagine what could make me buy anything else.

I would totally love an iPhone mini because i find the Xs too big but i don’t feel like it’s worth spending money. I would also totally buy a non-googled Android (because I don’t like nowadays Apple mentality) that I could keep updated for years but it just doesn’t exists.

So here I am, with my Xs, which honestly, feels like, to me, an exceptional phone for 2022: beautiful, fast, updated, nice picture quality, reliable, and totally cheap. It would be a total dream if the App Store wasn’t a dictature or if side loading was possible.

Ah, same here. I really like the positives the iphone seems to have, but can't justify buying a phone that's as expensive as they are to myself, and then still be bogged down with consciously user-hostile design choices like no headphone jacks, sd card slots or app-sideloading. Sucks, because everything else about iOS is super cool and well thought-out IMO.

Galaxy Nexus was a great phone at the time for the price. I had just gotten the galaxy 2 then realized that sprint had no coverage in Portland so I cancelled my contract (didn’t have to pay because I proved they mislead there coverage area). Moved to a GN on T-Mobile and loved it until I replaced it with a nexus 5x. GN was a good little phone to learn android dev on as well.

I really disliked the hardware, battery life was awful for me even after replacing it with their extended size OEM battery.

It felt like cheap plastic crap too (imo).

The iPhone 5 was the first iOS phone with turn by turn nav and LTE which were the reasons I stuck with the Nexus phones as each one got worse. The 5's battery life was also ridiculously good in comparison and the hardware design holds up even now ten years later.

The HTC Nexus One was the best of the first three, I'm not sure why Samsung gets so much love for hardware. The Nexus S and Galaxy Nexus builds were both ugly and poor. The Nokia N9 was beautiful and I was bummed when Microsoft turned them into windows only devices, they would have been great android phones.

Nokia phones were really beautiful up until their bitter end.

I like them now. I'm using some $300 Nokia and its nice. Big clear screen, surfs the web just fine. Can make calls and texts. That's all I use my phone for.

The GN was meant to be a budget phone for developers to jump into Android. It wasn’t meant to be the best phone. Samsung offered the Galaxy 2 at that time that was much better. The GN cost $350 no contract which was unheard of at the time.

The Nexus phones were the only ones that shipped pure android without a lot of OEM crapware installed you couldn't remove (Samsung's "Touchwiz").

That was another thing at the time which pushed me away from android, they didn't have control over their OS because of this lack of control over hardware.

It was a little like Windows and all the crap that came installed on it, except worse because you couldn't even reset it.

Well, they also have the wrong mentality on virtually everything else that Google does. They've shut down many more half-baked projects, far more than their successes. Google at least to me was/is solely successful at search, and ads. Even those are quickly turning to junk and the bane of the entire internet. Google should be busted up, sooner than later. But that's just me!

Same here, except it was the Galaxy Nexus that pissed me off so much to switch to Apple.

My Pixel XL bricked itself one morning due to a software update that triggered some kind of hardware bug. Great phone until that point, then poof, and it wouldn't even connect with a debug connection to my PC to replace the firmware or recover itself.

I've put it on a shelf until I can get time/money to recover the data from the flash, but lesson learned.

I bought a Samsung.

Regret to inform you that it almost certainly isn't a bug - the flash died. It's unrecoverable.

Large numbers of pixel 3/3xl's have started dying in the last year and it looks like it's the flash wearing out on all the early adopter/heavy user devices. This happened to me too.

> Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I had a Nexus 6P and after that experience I promised myself that I will never buy a Google hardware device ever again. The company has the wrong mentality regarding its handsets and how to take care of the customers who buy them.

Regardless, as of 2020 the only non absolute shit Android phones are Pixels. Essential, which was another non-shit Android, is dead because rather than re-iterating its boneheaded founder decided the market was in the TV remote control like device.

Samsung's flagship phones push ads as a part of the operating system. Let that sink in. On a $1,200 phone!

OnePlus can't make its interface not crash. Neither can it convince the carriers to whitelist its profiles in the United States for 5G and Wifi calling.

I believe Samsung cancelled ads last year. Source: https://www.engadget.com/samsung-removes-ads-pay-health-weat...

My neighbor has a Galaxy S21 Ultra. It had ads last week.

Out of all sucky Android devices and due to my work I probably touched at least 3/4 of models sold via non-grey market channel in the US the only phones that are functional are Pixels, which sucks.

My wife has an iPhone 12. Pixel 6 today is either in the same class or beats it. Of course it is highly unlikely that it will beat it in 2024 given Google track record of refusing to reiterate.

Samsung flagship phones are excellent, their customer service is attentive, and the devices aren't assembled in China.

I admit that Bixby is a ridiculous barnacle whose eradication would improve the product.

Their hardware is excellent. The stock S21 Ultra and A32, A42 and A52 software is garbage.

Problem is, I've been fooled by Apple, Samsung and Google. I'm running out of people to buy phones from.

I had the exact same experience! Had a Nexus 6p, it boot looped and I sweared off Android forever. Ever since then I've been iPhone only and I have no complaints --- went from the 8 plus to a 13 Pro Max recently, but honestly it was a vanity upgrade and was not necessary at all.

Honestly, Google needs really needs to do better. Samsung has raised the bar by supporting its devices with 4 years of patches: https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/22/22295639/samsung-galaxy-d.... And frankly, how hard/expensive would it be to support these devices for far longer? Google is a massive company, and I see little reason why that can't employ a team of devs backporting patches to older phones. Current versions of Windows and Linux run happily on decades-old hardware, so a phone should at least be able to get patches for known security issues for a decade. Dev resources would be far better spent on this than yet another hamfisted attempt to build a messenger app that they'll kill in a couple years anyway.

The problem is usually complexity and opportunity cost.

Once you have a team that can keep Android patched, someone at Google is going to use them to speed up another product or create a new one.

Why not add another team more? First, the situation will repeat itself, other needs would be prioritized higher. And there is a limit on the number of teams an organization can manage without non-linear manager cost increase.

Linux runs on old hardware because big corporations own old hardware and are willing to pay to not have to replace it. Replacing a phone is a cost for the individual owner. And my experience with company phones is that they are seen as a retention perk. So newer flashier phones are worth the cost, it could be different in other industries, thou.

One common solution to these problems is regulation. The government forces phone makers to patch the software for X years. Now there is a strong incentive to do so if the phone makers want to continue operating in that market.

A lot of those costs go down with good interface design and interoperability.

> The problem is usually complexity and opportunity cost.

> Once you have a team that can keep Android patched, someone at Google is going to use them to speed up another product or create a new one.

Apple is still supporting phones made in 2016. Given Google size and profit margin, it is a business choice.

To be fair, part of it is due to supporting the SoC, and that means dealing with Qualcomm. Samsung has the advantage of being able to develop their own SoC's and so can support them for far longer with updates and such

This excuse doesn't hold much water anymore since the Pixel 6 is based on Google's own SoC, yet it also only offers 3 years of Android version updates.

Why can't Google do like Apple and offer many years of version updates? The iPhone 6s is still running the latest version of iOS.

Samsung definitely makes Qualcomm devices. So that argument is bullshit.

I really hope there would be some regulations enforcing a decade of software support, not just for the operating system but also to provide drivers for hardware. After that, having to continue providing support or provide the source code with a permissive license and documentation.

I’m pretty free-market oriented but I think this might be the right answer. If you sell a network-connected device you should be on the hook for at least security updates for 10 years.

Good free-market solution is to price-in the cost of manufacturing emissions and eventual disposal of the hardware into the sticker price of the device by e.g. a pollution tax assessed by a regulatory agency on a per-item basis.

Manufacturers will then be incentivized to make and support lasting hardware as consumers get averse to paying the pollution tax repeatedly. (And, they will try to make more sustainable hardware that gets assessed less tax in the first place).

I don't think this kind of solution works to be honest. This creates a right to pollute or generate waste more than focusing on solving the original problem.

So you would rather make pollution free and tax labor? (existing status quo)

No, where did I say that?

Having clear regulation and forbid this kind of practice that apply to everybody, not just the poor.

A tax would not solve anything, it would just give a free pass to the wealthier part of the world to pollute and generate waste. The wealthy parts of the world are the biggest source of waste and polution in the first place.

It would also allow powerful companies to bargain between countries and continue playing the dog and cat game they've been doing. Trying to force companies like Apple or Gooogle to pay existing taxes is already a lost cause. Those companies don't care about it and would rather invest in avoidance schemes.

On the contrary, if you hit where things are sold, like closing a whole market like the EU until you abide to a regulation, like the one mentionned in my comment, is much likely to have a real impact, and would be much faster to.

Pixel 6 gets at least 5 years of security updates and 3 years of Android updates.

This is not really an improvement. 3 years of OS updates is pathetic and unacceptable.

Not even one U.S. presidential term.

To me, security updates are imperative. The first security update that I don't receive is when I look for a new phone. OS updates are practically window dressing- I can go without.

Based on Android 12, I'd rather zero years of OS updates and more years of security updates.

Sick of each Android update requiring relearning where all the stuff I've been doing for the last year (or longer) has been moved to.

Android 12 made one of my major workflows start failing - leaving browser tabs open and coming back to them later. Something about how Android 12 works (I'm guess to do with how it swaps out background apps) means now most of the time when I go back to my browser, it forces a page reload, meaning I lose context of whatever I was doing before.

Bunch of other small irritating changes. I guess it doesn't matter now that it's out of support - I'm too scared to keep using it. Just gives me the shits.

Nowadays OS upgrade gives us near zero feature, especially since Google distributes some updates as Play Services and other mechanism. Only security update is fine, maybe they don't need Qualcomm's update for latest kernel.

> Samsung has raised the bar by supporting its devices with 4 years of patches

For all its warts, Apple set the bar and Android as a whole has never really reached it. The 6S is still supported right now, right? And we're on the 13?

Yep. Though, the 6s was sold for quite a long time, and I think it’s the guts of the original SE, so we’re probably still in the 5 years from last sale time frame.

My 6splus is still in the “not a bad phone” range for what I need it for today, and I haven’t managed to destroy it in 4 years.

The original 2016 iPhone SE is still arguably the highest performance small smartphone ever released as well. Good thing it's still supported because there's nothing to replace it in the same or smaller dimensions.[1]

[1] Here's everything since 2015 that fits in the size criteria: https://www.gsmarena.com/results.php3?nYearMin=2015&nHeightM...

It was really good value too. But I had to stop using it because some critical apps I need stopped supporting the smaller screen size and would be disfunctional.

I'm still using mine. I want a small phone and there's literally nothing to upgrade to, even on Android. The iPhone 13 Mini looks okay, but is still a bit larger.

I’m writing this comment from my SE 2016. Since 2016 I had to replace the battery (~30€) and the screen (my fault, ~40€) once each. I don’t plan to replace it before a while!

The 5s still gets security updates 8 years on. The 6S still gets the latest OS (iOS15). My old landline phones still work ~30 years on. The idea that electronics has to be chucked and replaced every 2 or 3 years is rather wasteful.

Google has actually started extending its security update policy for its hardware to 5 years. I don't know what "enough" is, but as someone who has to do these updates (ironically, for Fitbit devices, yes we are owned by Google now) I will say that continuing to ship updates for products you shipped 5 years ago is far from trivial. It forces you to develop in ways that are not natural for people that work with hardware (the natural thing is to branch per product, but good luck managing that if you need to land a security fix on the 15 or so products we shipped in the last 5 years). This is manageable now that we're owned by Google, but prior to the acquisition it was a serious drain on my team. And folks on my team would tell you that they don't love it even today -- having to support 5-yr old MCUs when you're trying to keep your BOM down can be very challenging, especially managing available memory.

Google has generally supported Chromebooks for about 6 years and just recently seem to have started extending that duration to about 8 years. Some recent Chromebook launches have support through 2029.

https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6220366?hl=en

If Google can do this for Chromebooks, most of which aren't even designed by Google (although usually based off reference designs), clearly they can also do this for the actual phones they make and sell under the Pixel brand. And Chromebooks span quite a wide variety of hardware capabilities, from school-targeted low cost models with eMMC and <4GB RAM all the way up to devices with NVMe and gobs of RAM on cutting edge CPUs from a variety of manufacturers, both ARM and x86.

Chrome OS is proprietary (Chromium OS is not) and it also cannot be modified by any manufacturer. Every chromebook manufactured also is developed with Google being aware so that the chipset and underlying hardware can be supported. It's quite a different licensing model than Android and that's most likely why giving eight years of updates was much easier.

Sure, but Google has all the source code and all the design files for their Pixel phones. I'm not saying Google needs to support ALL Android devices, just Pixel devices. It is definitely possible for them to support Pixel phones for more than 5 years if they wanted to. It's just an economics question of if it's worth it to Google to do so and clearly it hasn't been.

Even 5 year support for Pixel phones is new with the Pixel 6 line. Previously it had been 3 years max.

But they really don't have all the sources. Up until Pixel 6, they've all used Qualcomm chipsets.

Qualcomm is such a ridiculously horrible company to deal with. They're in the business of selling new SoC designs every 6 months and trying to support a device for more than a few years is considered a massive opportunity cost for them.

It's the same concept as Apple mulching old MacBooks so they don't enter the used market except killing them by lack of software support instead.

They have an absolute stranglehold over the SoC market in the US. Samsung made a stupid deal back in the 90's to license CDMA patents in exchange for not selling SoCs (eventually Exynos) in the US or to any other manufacturer for that matter. At the time it probably made sense because Qualcomm agreed to use Samsung to manufacture their chips, but the deal is so hilarious lopsided these days. 30 years on and Qualcomm still won't renegotiate. It might've drawn regulatory ire if Samsung wasn't a foreign company.

Wow I've never heard the deal. Is there any sources? Pixel chips (delivered from Exynos) not included?

A couple of links:

https://wccftech.com/qualcomm-prevented-samsung-selling-exyn...

https://www.androidcentral.com/qualcomm-licensing-blocked-sa...

For some reason this doesn't apply to snapdragon Chromebooks.

Something tells me there's something wrong, either with Android or with Google itself.

I imagine there's a major attitude difference in the support model for SoCs made for Chromebooks and laptops compared to the ones for smartphones. Smartphones on average are kept for barely over two years in the US, whereas people hang onto a laptop for nearly 5 years.

People are used to desktops and laptops chugging along until they get tired of them being slow, rather than their device or OS vendor cutting them off.

Been there with 30-year support-life (HC11 FTW!).

Do you see any prospects in terms of Fuscia making long-term support perhaps a matter of just keeping legacy drivers within the available mix?

I don't know much about Fuschia. I'd be surprised, though, if updatability wasn't a major concern. Part of why I don't know much about it, though, is that AFAIK it's 64-bit only, and the MCUs we run are 32-bit affairs.

Okay, so NEST is 64-bit, apparently -- 64-bit IOT. I can see 32-bit at Fitbit.

Google's big argument to say they aren't upgrade pixels, is that they can't guarantee security of binary blobs. Fuchsia does nothing to help this.

Thanks for contributing first-hand experience. Your story highlights how dysfunctional historical hardware dev practices are for the connected age. Forking for each product absolutely does not scale in an era of continual updates, and manufacturers that don't figure this out are not gonna make it. People don't forget having to discard working hardware because of some stupid software EOL.

The memory limits of old devices is a real problem, and I don't know the solution besides doing the hard work to fight the the bloat, and produce a modular solution. Apple pretends to support the Apple Watch 3, but you can not upgrade the os without a hard-reset every time because the local flash can't hold the update and user config at the same time. But I can't help wonder if they _really_ need multiple GB for the core OS in a watch.

Heh. Not going to comment on Apple Watch for obvious reasons, but I will say that we measure free memory in 10s or 100s of bytes on most of our older products. Even a single GB would be amazing, but also amazingly expensive.

The lower end might be considered semi-disposable, like anything with a non-replaceable battery. I was thinking of things large enough for a full CPU.

The tooling and modular design to support back to an original Fitbit Tracker might be beyond our current skills.

Not your responsibility I know but given that Google can't seem to be able to notify everyone who is impacted by their GSuite changes I do worry about the path they seem to be going down. To me it seems that very simple things are falling by the wayside more and more these days which doesn't bode well for the future.

> It forces you to develop in ways that are not natural for people that work with hardware

My employer still upgrades 10yrs old TV boxes just fine. (Rocking Linux 5.4 LTS, launched on 2.6)

It is not natural for companies whose business model is selling hardware. Or course their business incentive is not to make long-term support!

But my employer's business model isn't about selling hardware, but a service, hence the incentive to upgrade perfectly working hardware.

Yeah, a pure service model would be lovely in many ways. If I ever start a company that makes HW (fat chance) my experience at Fitbit means it will certainly be service-based.

That's pretty funny considering the amount of tech consumers that hate having subscriptions attached to their hardware. There's no happy ending :^)

> It forces you to develop in ways that are not natural for people that work with hardware (the natural thing is to branch per product...)

The problem rather seems to be that close-to-hardware developers are unwilling to adapt to modern software development practices: modularity (i.e. drivers and sane HAL), automated (regression) testing and, at least for some cases, even using version control.

Since the market hasn't managed to achieve that, the government needs to step in and mandate stuff like repairability, longevity and update support - then there won't be any other choice than to drag the industry by its ears into the 21st century.

> having to support 5-yr old MCUs when you're trying to keep your BOM down can be very challenging, especially managing available memory.

And again, the answer is government regulation: when the tradeoff between extra cost on the BOM vs ability to update shifts towards extra cost for an actual Linux-capable CPU, you won't have that problem any more.

You seem to saying a lot of things here rather declaratively. I will speak to my experience only, but we have used version control, drivers, various HALs, and automated testing (plus some manual, this is HW after all and some end to end tests are simply not worth automating) throughout my time here. So those things have not been holding us back.

With respect to government regulation, every dollar on the BOM is $2-3 to the customer. Many of our competitors are not based in the US. When buying memory you’re probably competing for supply against large car companies who have longer contracts with more committed volume. These are just facts, but they affect what the solution space here looks like.

Sorry to go off topic, but do you have an insight on what is going on with the Versa Light issues?

Unfortunately not with such a broad statement. Our CS team is usually abreast of issues with products that are in market and keeps me and others in the loop when there’s something we need to fix from an engineering side.

Within the last couple of weeks, people have been having issues with syncing, time being accurate, and sleep tracking. Seems like it is tied to a forced update of some sort.

I haven’t heard about that. I’ll reach out to CS and see what’s up. We haven’t made any forced updates that I know of (and I should know). That said phone updates do sometimes break or lower the reliability of our Bluetooth connection, and radio updates are sadly forced on people’s phones all the time.

Thanks! I appreciate it!

It's bizarre that a company like Google doesn't realize that supporting older devices actually helps them in the long term. Apple has the most dedicated customer base in the world who will gladly upgrade all their devices every year or two, yet even 6-8 year old iPhones and iPads regularly get software updates. This increases the value of Apple devices across the board and sustains a very large resale marketplace. This means more people are coming into the Apple ecosystem at the low end and eventually working their way up.

If I know that my $900 purchase is going to be worthless in 2-3 years, why will I even bother?

I dropped my iPhone 11 and the screen got destroyed send it out for repair and picked up my old iPhone SE from 2016. Updated it to iOS 15.2 and it trucked along without problems until the replacement was here. Amazing. (I have to admit I got the battery changed when they had the free battery exchange program running).

Heh iPhone SE from 2016 is what I still use. Not sure why is it considered as something old.

Screen? Camera? Speed? Battery? I get that it is enough for you, and that's great, but let's not try to fool anyone that 6yo phone is a little bit old for most users in 2022.

Edit: Apple is dropping support for 2016 SE this year, so let's just not recommend it to anyone right now ;)

If the screen, camera, and speed were good enough in 2016, what's changed to make them not good enough now?

(rhetorical question)

As for battery, it's a lot cheaper & less wasteful to replace the battery than to get a whole new phone.

>* If the screen, camera, and speed were good enough in 2016*

You say it's a rhetorical question but I'm not clear on why or why this sentiment is so persistent. After all, the screen, camera, and speed absolutely WEREN'T good enough in 2016, any more than regular computers were good enough in 1986, 1996, 2006 or 2016. They were simply what could be managed at the time with technology at the time. The only aspect of electronics that is "done" for typical audiences [0] is audio, where we have microphones, recording and reproduction that can (easily) exceed the biological limits of human hearing. In contrast exceeding human visual acuity in capture, storage and reproduction remains a work in progress (though it's conceivable we'll hit it in the next decade or so which will be a very interesting change for our industry). That in turn itself drives some demand for computation, storage and processing, though more fundamentally it's hard to say if there is any real limit on how much computation might be put to use. Storage has been on a fast enough upward curve that I think it might be said it's approaching the point where regular people always have enough merely in the course of normal upgrades, but to handle an entire lifetime.

So yeah, come back in 2032 maybe.

----

0: Scientific applications of course are frequently interested in sounds that well exceed human limits, though even there we have the tech for it albeit not in non-specialized devices.

The big difference I see comparing computers from 1986 to today is that our demands for computers today are vastly different. The way we use computers today might have some similarities to 1986 for some, but for the average person its massively different.

However, comparing a computer from 2016 to today, its not nearly as far. A desktop at home I use pretty consistently is running a Core i5 from _2012_ and otherwise works fine. Other than VR gaming there's rarely a task I have that the old computer can't otherwise do, other than run Windows 11 I guess. Everything I do today on a phone, I did the same on a phone in 2016. Messaging, phone calls, email, calendars, apps that are largely interacting with web services to render images and text on a screen, streaming video, etc. All things I do today, all things I did in 2016.

Honestly my phone use cases haven't evolved much since 2010, maybe even several years before then. Things maybe look a little fancier, the cameras are for sure fancier, but the fundamental use of the device _for me_ hasn't changed.

> what's changed to make them not good enough now?

Modern websites' greater processing requirements.

Modern apps' greater CPU, GPU, memory and pixel density "needs".

We need all that performance to render 4K ads.

Also need vertical pixels to show sticky banner ads!

Another 2016 SE user chiming in. Other than a Battery Swap, everything still works great. I can get on the internet, send texts, make calls, do facetime.

Screen is still in perfect condition, but I'm not hard on screens. Camera is fine, sure others are better, but for snapshots the camera still works great. Speed is a non issue for me, as don't play games on the thing. All the apps I use putt around just fine. Battery... I would love for it to have been easier to replace.

I did recently replace my partners SE with a 13 mini because of the battery. It had been through 4 of them, 3 apple replacements and 1 I did. I believe that it was a hardware issue that was killing the batteries. I'll keep using this phone until the current battery dies or I can no longer use my banking apps due to lack of updates.

Personally I like the size of the device the most, followed the fact apple has kept it up to date for so long.

The claim isn't that the phone is competitive on a feature or spec level to new phones, but that those happy with the old feature set can continue to use them.

Of course the battery is a consumable part and you can't expect that to continue functioning well indefinitely.

I'm still using a first gen SE as well, specifically because every phone available today doesn't have the one feature I'm looking for that the SE has--size. I'm considering keeping it in service, and just removing anything that might be a security risk--like my bank's app.

(Yes I know there are tiny Android phones, but pretty much all of them are from iffy sources where I'm unlikely to get a year of updates, let alone 6 years. Most have aweful screens, or other reasons not to buy. I have come close to trying them, but always found too many potential issues. The closes I came to trying is the Palm phone.)

Yet another SE 2016 happy user!

Size is perfect!

SE 2020 is still on box

> every phone available today doesn't have the one feature I'm looking for that the SE has--size.

Thats a lie, iPhone mini is as small as SE 2016 and even smaller than SE 2020

Google's business is selling ads, Apple's business is selling hardware.

Too many customers don't know the difference between buying an appliance and something to watch ads from Google.

I mean, considering all most people use their phones for is a web browser and their collection of social media apps I think the ad coverage on both is pretty darn similar.

I switched from an iPhone to Android because I won't carry a phone I can't deploy my own software to, and I stopped buying Macs, so I can't build for iOS anymore now that the last one died.

I don't really see any more or less ads because they're served through whatever app or website you're using.

Interesting. One of the two triggers to investigate iOS in my household (the other was deprecating Hangouts) was noticing that pihole was showing about a third of the DNS requests were blocked, and those were overwhelmingly from mobile devices.

Moving to iOS dropped that to 3%. This is a few years ago, so I'm sure that the adware companies have got harder-to-block mechanisms for their surveillance capitalism. But certainly at that point, it was a very significant difference.

Apple's requirement to be clear about how customer data is being used by third parties has only reinforced the value of that change for me.

This is a very important point. Xiaomi is selling premium phones with unreal amount of ads (like im their Calculator app...), but these phones have amazing support from the communities, both from Lineage and upcoming alternatives like Ubuntu Touch. So for cost-conscious, privacy-oriented people, Xiaomi is a good option. And so are the Pixels, because they also recieve similar community support, and unlocking the bootloader is a single command.

In the end of the day, every company have their own incentives (Google, Xiaomi or Apple), but the users still have power over Android, while that is so not the case for Apple and iOS.

Edit: fixed typo

That’s interesting. Amazon offers the choice between regular price for their tablet and an ad-supported price.

LineageOS supports the Google Pixel 3 with LineageOS 18.1 (aka Android 11). It's definitely worth giving this a shot and you can revert to the standard Google release if you'd like. Word of warning on Verizon devices, though. If you bought from Verizon, they generally place an OEM lock on it. So, the device is "unlocked" in terms of carrier, but locked in terms of OS. Don't buy Pixels from Verizon.

How To: https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/blueline/install

Download: https://download.lineageos.org/blueline

grapheneOS (https://grapheneos.org) also still supports the Pixel 3, albeit in legacy/sunset phase now

I did this on my Pixel 2, but unless I’m mistaken you have to unlock the boot loader to do it, leaving your device completely unsecured if someone has physical access to it.

I gave up and got a phone from a manufacturer who provides true 6+ year security support. I was surprised to find that iPhone was essentially the only option.

Try out https://calyxos.org/, their support is exclusive to Pixels, but without compromising security.

In what sense is it completely unsecured? As far as I can tell the data partition at least is protected and installing another OS should require wiping this partition.

I mean given unfettered physical access someone could conceivably install malicious hard/software in it which might spy on you in other ways, but it takes some very strict security requirements for that to be an issue.

and how is your phone any safer if someone has physical access to it? your data are still encrypted even with unlocked bootloader

Hm.. i wonder if i can roll back to before Google completely changed all the UI a few months ago. That alone almost made me throw it out and buy an iPhone

LineageOS is cool and can prolong the device usability but some apps may not work (Google Pay, banking apps) if they detect an unofficial system (via SafetyNet). And you likely won't get future vendor blob upgrades (from Qualcomm), not improving the security risk problem.

I recently switched to an iPhone 12 for this reason. It's been almost a year and I still hate iOS. It's significantly dumber than Android and has some truly baffling UX choices. However, the phone is undeniably better than any Android phone I've ever used so I can't convince myself to switch back.

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. I used nothing but Nexus and Pixel and finally switched to an iPhone 11 Pro from my Pixel 2 in 2020 and I have the same opinion.

The phone itself is so much better, but the UX is so bizarre and full of what seems like "its this way because its always been this way" stuff. Almost every day I go to change a setting, and have to choose between the "Settings" app, or the app itself. It still irritates me that I can't assign a specific sound to an app. So now when I get a generic notification sound I have to check my phone to see if its urgent (food delivery) or trivial (twitter), because Apple forces both of those apps to sound the same.

Why do you even have "trivial" notifications like Twitter making a sound? You can allow only truly "urgent" apps to make sounds, so there's no confusion.

I have a friend who sometimes likes to contact me via twitter rather than SMS. Those messages are not urgent, but I do want to know about them.

The other annoying issue is multiple urgent apps, but one is sending spammy notifications regarding promos. So if they all have the same sound, I don't know if that's my instacart melting on my porch, or grubhub annoying me with a promo. (which I just disabled).

> So now when I get a generic notification sound I have to check my phone to see if its urgent (food delivery) or trivial (twitter), because Apple forces both of those apps to sound the same.

It's not ideal, but I've disabled sounds + banner and lockscreen notifications for almost all of my apps, allowing them to only display notifications in the notification centre. It lets me check trivial notifications when I want instead of being interrupted by them.

The one that really gets me is not having a separate slider for alarm and notification volume. Slept through my alarm the first night, now phone stays in silent all the time.

As a current Pixel 3 user, I think this article is slightly hyperbolic. The phone still works great other than a worse battery, definitely not "garbage". The author is making it sound like the phone stops working. But then again I still use Windows 7 which also doesn't have security updates.

It's not hyperbolic, your security profile and risk aversion is just different from the author's.

> forcing me

That's a bit hyperbolic. Your point stands, otherwise.

Its not hyperbolic. I wrote the policy for my company's phone policy. If an employee wants to access any company resources from their personal phone (optional) they must submit to a phone audit. The audit is a checklist of security best practices including verifying that the phone is receiving security updates for the OS. So if they need a phone for work, they either upgrade to a newer phone or carry a second phone with security updates for work purposes. Either way they have to get a new phone. What else would a company do? You can't just have employees storing credentials for company accounts on a device that is likely to get pwned.

Personally I don't see how anyone could justify having an out-of-date phone. Assuming you have it configured to read your email, it becomes a gateway to every account you own, which can have its password reset over email. MFA might help as long as that MFA isn't an app on your phone. But most websites don't support hardware security keys. If you care enough to have a dedicated TOTP device, then why would you want a phone with no security updates?

This use of "forcing" does not require bricking the phone. Creating a situation where the only reasonable choice is to upgrade the hardware qualifies as "forcing" in my opinion. The phone is no longer capable of performing the job for which it was designed in a safe way.

Google isn't holding a gun to anyone's head or intentionally bricking devices, but if you use your phone for work (or it's a work-issued phone) and your employer requires you update to the latest security patches (enforced via MDM), the Pixel 3 is now useless.

And you're probably thinking "oh but this is an old device, just get a newer one for work." True, but consider that Pixel 6/6 Pro users got screwed over when the December update was yanked [0] and the January update got delayed for them [1] - while it was good for most users not to take the buggy update, anyone whose device had those security requirements ended up getting work-related functionality disabled.

Of course, the companies that set these policies are generally ones who will not make exceptions, so even though you had the latest and greatest from Google, you couldn't use it for work for several weeks until they finally pushed out the January security update.

"People who have MDM-enforced security requirements" might not be a large part of the smartphone market these days, but every little bit counts when it comes to reducing the volume of e-waste that usually ends up being dumped in third-world countries.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/rxiv5r/enterpr...

[1] https://support.google.com/pixelphone/thread/143968432/googl...

Did we read the same article? Without security updates, you really shouldn't rely on a phone for banking/payments/secure messaging. Google has effectively killed the Pixel 3 for real usage.

You should be able to throw LineageOS on there as long as you don't have a locked Verizon bootloader. But there are a lot of caveats to that, in terms of which apps will work when rooted, which won't etc. etc.

There's also the fact that LineageOS will fix only Android-related bugs, you're still stuck with the unpatched vendor firmware (which includes the kernel, unless I'm mistaken).

LineageOS backports security patches when possible, including kernel-related ones since they ship their own kernel.

Firmware doesn't include kernels, generally speaking.

So just to clear up my understanding: using LineageOS up-to-date means you should be safe from kernel and Android bugs, but you're still vulnerable to firmware issues, which would just be... hardware level, like your WiFi chip, CPU, USB-C port, camera, microphone, etc?

Potentially. Google also stills updates AOSP too, so you're not 100% reliant on LineageOS et al for these updates.

There's nothing stopping you from grabbing those blobs out of Google's AOSP images and updating them, but there's no way to ensure the abstraction layers work correctly with them unless you test it.

As always, it depends.

> Without security updates, you really shouldn't rely on a phone for banking/payments/secure messaging. Google has effectively killed the Pixel 3 for real usage.

There is a lot of real usage which is not "banking/payments/secure messaging". Besides, stopping security updates does not mean the phone suddenly becomes open to the whole world. Many vulnerabilities might be exploitable only when running code natively on the device, or only when within radio range, or only when plugged directly to the USB port.

> There is a lot of real usage which is not "banking/payments/secure messaging".

In fact, I don't do any of those on my phone. Unless maybe you count email as secure messaging in some way.

> Unless maybe you count email as secure messaging in some way

I would say yes, considering email is often used as a primary means to reset account passwords. Most services support MFA (which could be somewhat of a mitigating security control), but a LOT of services still don't.

I have bank accounts I can only access via my phone. I'm not going to buy a new phone just for them while maintaining an old phone.

How important are these security updates to your average user? If they're meant to prevent hypothetical targeted attacks, I honestly wouldn't be too worried about them. Plenty of people continue to use their Android phone despite not receiving security updates, yet I haven't heard anyone having a issue with this.

Losing control of your email/google/social media accounts and reputation (eg scams made in your name, blackmail, etc) is a comparable risk to most people. Banks are experienced at handling fraud and you're also legally shielded from bank fraud in many jurisdictions.

(though banks are also clueless in other respects, outlawing devices with lineageos but allowing devices with out of date vendor OS)

Frankly I don't get why you still use Windows 7. For the Pixel I understand that you make a choice between throwing perfectly good hardware and security but for 7, I'm not aware of any PC that can run 7 that can't run 10.

Yeah - and it's worth noting that you still get updates for your browser and messaging apps (because the android version isn't too old). Just don't install risky apps. If you're a minimalist, you're fine with a phone that stopped getting base system updates in the last year or two. I still use a Galaxy S8 that got its last security update 10 months ago.

If there's a vulnerability like stagefright in the base system that could make many up-to-date apps vulnerable, you'll hear about it on the news.

It's really dangerous to suggest that it's okay to continue to use anything Internet-connected that doesn't get security updates.

What drove me off of Android was my bank stopped supporting my device because of security updates. When I bought the phone it was a just released LG flagship, I got a full 18 months worth of sporadic at best updates, followed by nothing.

My bank disabled the app on my phone some 4 months later, when some major vulnerability was still unpatched on my phone. They told me to get a new phone, so I picked up an 2016 iPhone SE and went on my way.

> “We find that three years of security and OS updates still provides users with a great experience for their device.”

What about the 4th year?

It's ludicrous to throw a perfectly functioning thing to buy a new one just because the gazillion dollar company behind it needs to make even more money without regard to the environment (oh but rest assured the next version will be 5% greener ... yeah right).

My Pixel 4 XL will be EOLed at the end of the year (bought it in January 2020) and I'm torn between security and wastefulness.

There are several aftermarket OSs that work on the Pixel 4. LineageOS is one of those. You might consider going that route if you want to sustain your hardware.

This makes me wonder if there's a market for "save my phone", where you send your cellphone in and have a new OS installed...

But are they secure though? AFAIK Google doesn't support the Pixels longer because Qualcom doesn't offer security updates for its chips.

Does that happen at the firmware level or the driver level? It seems Qualcomm devices are pretty actively developed in the Linux kernel?

I found Linaro, which claims to be doing work on Qualcomm devices: https://www.linaro.org/blog/highlights-from-linaro-connect-o...

Funny how LineageOS can afford to support the Pixel 3, while Google can not.

https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/#google

Yeah supposedly, but I wasn't able to buy a used Pixel 3 that wasn't boot locked. I tried 4 of them, all were locked by the carrier.

Should be illegal imo to stop supporting a phone that's also locked. All it does is generate waste.

I do use Lineage base OSes and I'm really thanksfull to its contributors allowing me to extend the life of my devices for years, but there is still a tradeoff in term of security, the firmware blobs which are closed source cannot be updated so those do not receive any security update. Unfortunately, there's not much that can be done about that without forcing manufacturer to open source those blobs or maintain their hardware for longer periods of time.

iPhone 5S

First released September 20, 2013; 8 years ago

Operating system iOS 12.5.5, released September 23, 2021

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_5S

Where is the f'ing legislation forcing these companies to provide software updates for a number of years? The e-waste this kind of abandonment creates is unimaginable. I'm so frustrated that my government continues to do jack shit about issues like this that really matter and instead tries to ban encryption every six months.

filibustered

Honestly I doubt congresspeople worry too much about the price of buying a new phone.

European union is working on legislation that manufacturers must declare lifespan of product for consumer to make a informed choice. Plus there is talk about 5 to 7 years of security updates being required to sell in Europe.

https://www.macrumors.com/2021/09/06/germany-eu-require-7-ye...

the government should not legislate software updates. no one is forcing you to buy a google phone

agreed, though they could put on phones some stickers like energy stickers depending on how many years the phone will be suitable to warn you to not buy red phone and rather go with green phone receiving updates for longer

My 3a XL has been completely and totally bug-ridden since upgrading to Android 12. I have used Android for the last 12+ years across inumerable phones, and this is the worst Android experience I have ever had.

- Sometimes I'll unlock my phone and the stupid new fade in effect gets stuck half way and my phone screen will just be dark until I sleep/unsleep.

- Sometimes the buttons in my top menu decided to just not render, like yesterday when I was under my car trying to activate the flashlight. Requires a full restart.

- The Google Assistant crashes every single time I try to use it, and I'm a big fan/user of Google Assistant. I just can't use Google Assistant. She goes to reply and it just dies mid reply. Every. Single. Time.

- So much more little crap. My phone has become completely unreliable.

When I got the OTA upgrade 6-ish months ago I was certain "oh, Google will fix these problems in no time." My phone is very quickly reaching EOL and I suspect Google is not going to fix any of this.

I am, for the first time, contemplating switching to iOS.

The UI changes still piss me off.

Example: You can no longer flip WiFi on/off with a swipe (to expose tray) and tap. There's an extra tap and they removed the automatic re-enable, which I got used to.. so I find myself turning WiFi off when I'm out somewhere to avoid connecting randomly, and then I go home and blow through several GB of data accidentally.

Also getting lots of google assistant crashes.

And sometimes it just starts glitching out, virtually tapping all around the screen on it's own. A month ago it dialed 911 when I was trying to restart, and I had to apologize to the operator.

I'm probably going to switch to iOS after 10 happy years on Android.

> A month ago it dialed 911 when I was trying to restart, and I had to apologize to the operator.

Yup, I had mine do that too. The UI was frozen so I couldn’t hang up. I had to hold the power button and power cycle. They called back, and I apologized profusely.

My god, I'd heard that Android support over time was not great, but 3 years? That's really, really short.

I'm a gadget nut, so for a long time I got a new phone every 18-24 months -- and for most of that time, the year over year gains on phones were sufficient to justify the upgrade, at least for some users.

But we're in a more mature market now. YoY updates on phones are pretty incremental. I kept my iPhone 8 for about 3 years before handing it off to my wife (who, lest you think me a jerk, absolutely DID NOT WANT to spend the money on a new phone for her), who then used it for almost 2 more years.

The phone I replaced it with is an 11Pro. I expect to get AT LEAST 3 years out of it. (What finally tempted me out of the 8 was the camera, which I assume is a common story no matter which kind of phone you like -- they got a LOT better between 2016 and 2019.)

Pixels are high-end Android handsets, right? I would have assumed that they'd have similar useful lives; I don't blame Android folks for being up in arms, because sunsetting a 3 year old handset is just BANANAS.

no, Pixels are not high end Android phones, upper midrangers at best usually, nowhere close to Samsung/Xiaomi high end, heck they even use years old cameras without upgrade

I guess given Google's position within the Android world I expected their phones to be upper-end. Thanks for the correction.

Does Samsung provide a longer support life?

4 years software, 5 years security, but I think it was definitely less at least for software, they just improved it

https://www.sammobile.com/news/samsung-galaxy-4-year-softwar...

Everyone always talks about how, with Google's free web services, "you get what you pay for" - however, Google's hardware division seems to be aspiring to reach that same quality standard as the rest of the company:

> In response to an email asking Google why it stopped supporting the Pixel 3, a Googles spokesperson said, “We find that three years of security and OS updates still provides users with a great experience for their device.”

How long should they provide software updates for? 3-years? 5-years? 10-years? What would be an acceptable cut off date for providing updates? I wouldn't expect companies to provide updates for their old hardware forever, but what would be an acceptable date that will benefit both consumers and the company itself.

What I want is for them to commit to supporting a device for some number of years after it's introduced so I know what to expect when I buy one. It should be one of the things manufacturers compete on.

https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/4457705?hl=en#z...

Google commited to five years of security updates for the Pixel 6. It was one of their big selling points for the device.

https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/4457705?hl=en-G...

Right, that's the calculation any consumer good producing company has to do. When we buy industrial equipment we pay a huge markup for vendor promises that they'll support for 10+ years. It's painful at the time but we have automated manufacturing equipment that's been running 20+ years. When I purchase controllers, sensors, motors, etc. it cost me double or triple what I could have paid but now I'm happy I did.

But I also know that our products (PCs and printers) can't have that same support model, we'd be out of business and we don't have a lucrative ad business that could buy us customer loyalty via loss leaders. I think 5-8 years is reasonable.

Apple now is managing to give 7 years of support for iPhones, so that’s a good number to aim for.

As this article aptly demonstrates every time a phone is bought it is an opportunity to leave an ecosystem.

The manufacturer cannot guarantee that that the phone sold to a consumer will be replaced with a phone from the same company. So it's definitely within the interest of the company to support the phones for longer to keep consumers in the ecosystem.

Pretty sure that's the whole point of pixel 6.

At least as long as their main competitor, which currently has a phone that has been supported for 6.5 and will probably remain supported up until 8 years from its release date (iPhone 6S).

What if vendors released the source code for the hardware drivers after the devices fall out of official support? Even if nobody at the company has time to support the hardware there is always a chance that the community can take over.

This is how Linux maintains driver support for hardware long past the point where it doesn't work on modern Windows or MacOS. I've noticed several occasions where the support stops because the kernel was updated and nobody wants to make the effort to port the drivers forward, especially since those drivers were delivered as a binary blob.

How about improving software standards so it can last longer?

Why must software always need to be updated? Software can be stable.

This industry makes throwaway software just so it can keep pumping hardware forever.

Or improving updates. Why can my Linux distro not care what model I whatever I have but every bit of android is specifically tailored to that exact phone model

5 years minimum - 7 years would be competitive with apple.

The thing is - apple has the history / reputation here. Google has promised updates forever with various initiatives, rarely delivers.

Apple doesn't actually promise much here that I know of, but seems to deliver and deliver.

They offer five years of security updates on the Pixel 6 and eight years of security updates for any chromebook from 2020. Nest and Chromecast devices also all get five plus years of updates. The minimum should be this across all android/chrome OS manufacturers though.

If I buy a pixel 6 today, I'll get updates for 2 years.

On apple, iOS 15.2 is available for a phone that is 8 years old?

Based on past experience, I expect if I bought an iOS device today - I'd have updated for at least 5 years.

Apple was releasing updates for iOS 12 as recently as 2021. That's for phone back from 2013 (!).

If you buy a Pixel 6 today you get OS updates until October 2024 and security updates until October 2026 which is shown on Google support pages. Similar to if you were to buy an iOS device except you'd only have past experience to go off because they won't actually promise you anything.

It's easy you know from testing when your silicon or other parts of the phone are going to degrade beyond the point of it being useable. If you sell hardware that is not obsolete for your customers but you make it obsolete because of software you pulled the trigger to early.

Forever, until they release the firmware source. It's a "shit or get off the pot"-type situation.

> then you’re vulnerable to every security flaw discovered since your last patch.

You do continue to get security updates to Chrome and Google Play Services for many years. The App Store and other external systems may protect you from some other vulnerabilities.

An iPhone gets updates for longer, but the cheapest iPhone costs 3x the price of the Nokia phone I have, so only comparing support period is nonsense. I buy a cheap phone so they are cheap to replace (broken/stolen/lost, often when travelling).

> For millions of years, these metals formed underground

Also geological and biological processes on the surface: some ores are formed underground but some are not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ore_genesis

Am I taking crazy pills? Everyone here is saying "Yeah, but how long should we ask them to produce updates? Let's not be unreasonable."

People, the mobile hardware ecosystem is fundamentally broken. On my desktop PC, I can keep upgrading Windows versions until the hardware craps out. I can move to Linux if Windows doesn't run well or has some functionality that's not compatible with my machine. There's an already existing model, but we don't apply it to mobile and we suffer through these locked-down ecosystems where Qualcomm and other hardware providers have the final say in when your hardware becomes unsupportable.

The answer to the question of "how long should we expect Google to provide updates for a device?" is to reject the question and say "why can't Google just release the software that I then install on my device?"

If the answer to that question is "well, because the devices are locked down and a software company can't actually make platform-agnostic software in this environment," that's a problem.

I'm really surprised at the lack of support for recent pixel models... especially considering how terrible the pixel 6 release has been.

For the first week I couldn't get it to charge because they didn't include a power brick and my existing power bricks, my PC's USB ports, etc. would charge slower than the battery discharged by sitting idle talking to 5G towers. Like literally plugged in with screen off it would drain the battery.

Then the second week there were 2 days where my phone calls would fail to complete on my end but continue to ring on the other end. Really annoyingly frustrating failure mode.

To top it all off, they removed the toggle for turning off the cell modem.. You have to open up a menu every time you want to change internet types.

I've loved the pixel 2 so much it lasted until now... but google seems to be turning into the bloated carrier they tried to displace by launching fi.

Two thoughts:

1. Just get a new phone every two years. Sell or donate the old one. It's not being "dumped". Or keep as your backup phone.

2. As the owner of a 2004 Volvo who will soon be looking for a new car, should I be concerned that the same issues will soon plague cars? Have they already?

for 2. Yes to some degree, at least in terms of degraded functionality It's happened in the past with built in navigation systems where the manufacturer stops releasing updated dvds with new maps, and recently with the retiring of the 2G/edge cellular network - https://www.thedrive.com/tech/43187/how-the-3g-shutdown-in-2...

All too common. I've had several devices (iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch) killed because Apple stopped providing any sort of software support until practically everything I used them for bitrotted away. The only old Apple device I have that still works fine is my iPod Nano, since it's too dumb to have this problem.

I also have had to replace two otherwise pristine phones as 2G (Motorola Razr) and 3G (iPhone 5) services were discontinued, so there's that too.

My Pixel 2 will be the last Google phone I own. I really shouldn't continue using it but since I take excellent care of my electronics it works just as well as the day I bought it so I'm reluctant to ditch it until it actually develops problems.

It's going to be far more cost effective for me to move to an iPhone and I never thought I'd ever say something like that non-ironically.

I use a pixel 2 as well, what sort of iPhone are you thinking? I'd like something as small as the pixel 2.

I just switched from my pixel 2 to a hand-me-down iPhone 11 Pro for exactly this reason. Initially I installed LineageOS on my Pixel 2 but then you can't relock the bootloader, leaving the device completely exposed in the case of a physical attack.

I was skeptical of the iOS transition but it was pretty easy and I will probably never go back.

As much as I dislike the Apple walled garden, everything I actually care about has a native iOS application. I can use one of the cheap Android tablets I have lying around for anything else.

My Pixel 2 screen (5" diagonal) is actually a bit small for me and a slight step down from the Nexus 5X I had previously. Given that, I'd probably go for an iPhone model has a slightly larger screen.

I'm using Samsung galaxy s8. I'm 3rd owner of it. Immediately when I got it almost 2 years ago I rooted it disabling my self to obtain latest updates for this phone. And I'm not whining about it loud.... I just don't get it why someone had to write about losing updates whole article? There are more important problems (real one)

This is why I buy iPhones.

My mother has my old 2015 iPhone 6s. It runs latest iOS 15. Got a new battery at an apple store in under an hour mid last year. Looks like it just came out of the box.

It’s over 6 years old now.

Doesn't Google publish the images for their phone, making it easier to load custom ROMs?

https://www.androidauthority.com/unlock-pixel-3-bootloader-9...

Then

https://lineageosroms.com/blueline/

Done, now your phone will be supported damn near forever.

----

I get that Google themselves should be supporting their phones for longer. I completely agree. I just can at least say that they've given you the tools to still use the phone after the updates stop.

That's a damn sight better than other manufacturers... e.g. Nokia 6, the bootloader is locked, and I had to pay some kid in some random country to unlock it for me with his reverse engineered tool.

So no, I give Google a lot of shit about their behaviour, but phone updates? Could be longer but I won't hold them to it.

> lineageosroms[.]com

While that site links to official LineageOS builds, that's not the official LineageOS website.

- https://lineageos.org/

- https://download.lineageos.org/blueline

Thanks, I just quickly googled on my phone. Appreciate the correction as I can no longer edit the comment.

By the way, I really like your Google Camera ports! Keep up the good work.

I bought 4 used Pixel 3 devices and all were bootloader locked by the carrier.

Verizon refuses to unlock Pixel 3 devices if you don't have an account with them.

> The planned obsolescence is frustrating enough, and I’m certainly annoyed that I have to spend hundreds of dollars on a new phone when I really shouldn’t have to.

You don't have to spend hundreds of dollars on a new phone. That's the problem. We don't need these things. We want these things.

Did you miss the part where using an unpatched, always internet connected device is a huge liability? That's the point, he can't not get a new phone because they're cutting off security patches for the one he is using.

You can purchase <$100 smartphones at any Walmart, Target, Kroger, Dollar General, cell phone shop, online, and so on. +$100 smartphones are rarely a need. They are mostly a want.

Edit: And least we forget...

https://www.softstech.net/list-of-best-custom-roms-for-googl...

Your $100 smartphone is often insecure when you purchase it, and often gets no security updates.

I have bought Nokia for the last few years because they were cheap, reliable, had zero crapware, and got updates quickly. The Android One program (no vendor crapware) seems to be winding down, and I value security more highly now, so next phone will be an iPhone. Currently I use an iPad for anything where security matters to me (I haven’t trusted Windows for a decade, and Linux relies on too few eyeballs).

That might have been true in 2010, but it certainly isn't anymore. I need a QR code on my phone to prove that I am vaccinated. My banking, insurance and bills all are on my phone because no company will send paper anymore. It's also the device I use to take pictures, although I suppose you could classify that as a "want" more than a "need".

Bottom line is: I have a Pixel 3 and it works flawlessly. It takes better pictures than my friends newer phones and just plain does everything I need it to. I bought it in 2019 so that's more like 2 years of update as the end consumer. I don't care about Android 13, but I want security updates and honestly feels like I gave them enough money to pay for it.

What's wrong with a $50 smartphone?

If security updates were truly that critical, Google would push a play services update that would immediately kill all Google service connectivity to underscore that a no-longer-supported device is forbidden to use and force everyone in poorer countries to go forth and purchase a new one.

I think it's time someone ask if Google's vaunted claims about being carbon neutral count all of the Android and Chromebook hardware that Google forces consumers to discard due to their poor support lifecycle. I think they hide the sheer environmental waste tsunami behind third party manufacturing.

(tbh, this might be a good area to kill two birds with one law/stone: Force companies to account in their environmental impact for decisions which drop product support. Dropping updates from a hardware model then is weighted by the carbon cost of all of them in use. As governments turn the screws on environmental regulations, this may also help product support lifecycles and more long-lived products.)

First part there I was suggesting two years ago. Very glad to see this as almost common sentiment in the thread today.

Still hoping that Fuscia will have some advantages in legacy support, but personally not buying any Android phone.

Reading only the title, I thought "I am having this problem exactly now!". However, it is not about lack of security updates (it's an old Motorola phone). It is a smartphone that belonged to my late father who passed away in 2020. He had a google account with password and the phone has a pattern to draw in the lock screen.

I know Google and the phone manufacturers are concerned with the stealing of phones, so they make it as hard as they can to use a phone without authorization, even if you try to reset the phone and erase all user data. Does anyone know if there is a process to remove a google account from a phone even if I have to prove to Google that he died of natural causes?

Perhaps for an end user, but from a developer POV, the Pixels are some of the most developer friendly Android devices -- very easily rooted, little unnecessary bloatware by default compared to the likes of Samsung, Huawei etc.

It's always funny to me that companies pay developers to make worse versions of Android instead of just not doing that. Although obviously it's to force in some unremoveable shovelware.

Until last month I was still happily running a Google Nexus 6. For the past 5 years, I have been getting regular updates for it via Lineage OS (running Android 11 now). The only reason I had to stop using it is because the cell networks in the US are dropping support for its radio hardware.

Still using my Nexus 7 tablet from 2013 (running Android 11 via Lineage OS). Huge shout-out to the awesome folks at Lineage who are keeping these devices viable for years!

Honestly, when I went to buy a new phone, one of the biggest factors I considered was if it was popular enough with the custom-ROM crowed to be supported long-term...

My Windows machine is something like 5 years old. Microsoft will keep supporting it until 2025 and even by then I will probably have switched it to Windows 11.

Smartphones go unsupported after a few years? Why do we put up with this?

I kept my OG Pixel for 5 years and had the battery replaced twice (2.5 years and ~4 years in). It worked fine until the last moment when it just died on me (like, absolutely bricked).

I stopped getting software updates after 3 years but the hardware continued to be very capable until the very end. The battery was expected to degrade after some time, and the phone didn't feel as snappy with modern apps, but it was perfectly fine as a phone.

I'm now on a Pixel 5 and expect to go through something similar. It is absurd to me that people switch phones every 2-3 years (or even annually).

The main problem is SoC lock-ins. You can find aftermarket AOSP for Android devices.

Sadly it's inferior of the days where you can run a mainline OS on 20 year old device (eg. it is possible to run 32bit Windows 10 on first Intel MacBook from 2006).

Another thing is apps, usually us developers drop "legacy" OSes as it's hard to support them (or worse a mobile store enforces dropping such support). So someone with old phone can't even use it anymore.

There are some "open-source" SoC or more environmental/reusable approaches but it's just a drop in the ocean.

If you want to run a phone effectively forever, I am afraid that you need to turn to the free software community, and give up a lot in terms of app compatibility and the many other benefits of living within a mainstream ecosystem. Going the Free Software route is not easy in my experience.

The good news is, one of the great benefits of Pixel phones has always been that the boot loader is unlocked. So, realistically, you can run your phone as long as you want. There are many Free options to keep that going, if that is truly what you value.

Guys, we're all frequent readers of HN here and it's pretty clear Google is not a company that we can trust. Data privacy, product stoppage, advertisement collusion, their search engine becoming an ad engine, obsolescence, monopoly, we're talking about a company that collects huge fines every 6 months. There is nothing good in Google World, so please, let's all change the world together and stop using the services of inhuman companies.

Viable, better alternatives need to be built before that is possible

There are many alternatives available for Google products but you gotta to look for them and take time to switch, it sure ain't easy but we gotta do it.

I currently have a Pixel 5a. I got it via the Google Fi "Subscribe and Save" option, which works out to a pretty decent discount from the retail price on top of paying it in installments over 2 years.

I don't know how many of these subscriptions Google is selling, but it will be interesting to see what happens in when a bunch of Google Fi customers start becoming eligible for their upgrade to a new phone subscription around November 2023.

Will customers upgrade immediately to the then presumably extant 'Pixel 7a', or wait?

If customers wait for the next (hypothetically, a 'Pixel 8a') model to come out, will that actually be offered as an upgrade, or will the upgrade offer stick to the older model for a while?

Because of these unknowns, the calculation the customers have to make is interesting: On the one hand, the 5a should still have almost another year of updates, so not upgrading immediately is viable and saves money, and if you wait your upgrade may be to a newer phone.

But, if the '7a' remains the upgrade offer for a while even after the '8a' comes out, what is gained from maxing out the life of the 5a phone at the tail end is lost from shortening the life of the '8a' upgrade from the head end.

I just bought a new phone because OnePlus just stopped supporting my 6T which was released in November 2018, so for all intents and purposes 3 years ago as well.

It was (well, is, I'm still using it while I await its replacement) a perfectly good phone aside from some wear on the USB-C port which I would have had serviced had this not happened.

Frankly, if manufacturers aren't willing to continue to offer support for these devices they should just stop making phones.

It says a lot about corporate brainwashing and propaganda when the comment here asking "Is it really a security risk?" is flagged dead and downvoted to hell. They really found the perfect excuse to squeeze users into increasingly authoritarian "upgrades" and gradual loss of control.

The only security is really for their profits, not for you.

Once you realise, the truth will set you free. No wonder they're scared.

I think about phone updates as layers in a stack.

At the lowest level of the stack we have software written in literal ROM. As such, it can't be updated without switching out the hardware. For an example of a vulnerability here search for "iPhone Checkm8". No doubt there are examples in the Android ecosystem too.

Next layer up there are operating system updates. Unfortunately these are hard to compare across ecosystems as the scope of what an operating system is is poorly defined. Things like the web browser, HTLM rendering engine and SMS app are part of the iOS operating system. But on Android they're just apps and are updated the same as any other app.

At the top of the stack we have app updates.

Knowing what might contain known unpatched vulnerabilities helps me determine my risk and behaviours to combat it. For example I may not be comfortable running disreputable apps on an unpatched operating system. But on the same phone I may not worry about visiting websites as the browser is up to date.

Personally I use web apps as much as possible and native apps as little as possible, so most of the security issues that affect old phones don't concern me.

The entire mobile ecosystem is an insecure exploitative dumpster fire. People are way too willing to trust it, because companies spend billions of dollars on advertising to push it. But ultimately you should do the least amount of computing possible with it, and favor traditional user-representing PC operating systems that have been developed over decades.

> Installing security updates is the one basic thing everyone needs to do for their own digital security

This is only true to the extent that you trust a device. My phone is way down on my trust DAG. When I setup services for it to access (eg rsync or CalDAV), I basically consider it an attacker. It is a herolte that stopped receiving microG/Lineage updates, but continues working alright for my purposes. Would it bother me if a drive by attacker got ad hoc access to my occasional usage? Of course. But they're nowhere near positioned to exploit my information as much as the Advanced Persistent Threats that the phone shipped with would have!

Furthermore most exploits are going to require interaction, so if you aren't browsing websites on the phone then staying patched matters even less. Of course you have to avoid giving in to the massive temptation of the surveillance industry pushing you to do all these things in your phone. They do this precisely because it is one of the least secure environments and thus they can better exploit you - you're not particularly thinking about opsec when you're relaxing on the couch.

But alas the upgrade treadmill still marches on and it looks like I will have to upgrade that phone if I keep wanting native voice, due to the looming AT&T 4G deprecation. Although I'm tempted to just keep on using it with VOIP-over-data because the less money going to that fetid ecosystem the better.

Still using Pixel 3XL, perfectly good phone with a processor that is faster at multicore than that in Pixel 5. I'm with the author here, sad to see this perfectly good phone getting obsoleted artificially.

https://browser.geekbench.com/android_devices/google-pixel-3...

I still use a Pixel 2 as my phone and I had no idea it was EoL. I've been using this thing for more a year after it is apparently not getting security updates. That's extremely fucked up that this isn't communicated to users. Many people I know are using androids that are totally out of date. This is a giant security concern I now have for our society.

For all the talk about replacing these every 3-4 years, I think I'd be a lot less upset if every 3 years actually felt like an upgrade. A slightly bigger screen, a 10% better camera, less buttons? Why do I need a new one? Apple may be getting a lot of positive credit in this department, but, by and large, what's the difference between an 11 and a 13? The incremental hardware differences are so small it's easy for them to build on the same OS over time. Google used to be my go to, and the google devices especially because they were more "vanilla" android at the time. I left a few years ago because google branded devices were so similar to Samsung (Samsung even manufacturing many of the "Nexus" devices at the time) that the vanilla feeling was fading away.

Is there even a "stock" android option anymore? I honestly can't say as I've just bought into Apple's stuff for overall device compatibility with my other stuff.

Perhaps the most angering part is that both Google and Apple will greenwash the issue away as during product launches (which is where all attention is) where they will emphasize how very sustainable they are.

That's the tactic to get away with piss poor aftercare. It's time for regulation and I mean harsh regulation. A product should be supported for as long as the reasonable duration of its hardware life cycle.

I have 7 year old smartphones that still work just fine. So you're going to be delivering support for a long time, even up to a decade.

Unwilling to do it or technical excuses? No problem. Refund the phone. I have a working paid device, you broke it. It's not my problem that your security model is like Swiss cheese. It's your defect, not mine.

Battery replacements are to be made dead simple as it always was before. This is actually a key reason why people needlessly buy a new phone.

All reasonable repairs should be possible to be carried out anywhere, including by the customer themself. You're going to document the process and supply the components.

You may think of this as an angry extreme rant, but I'm serious. The point is that the pain should be put where it belongs. When you make a crappy product, the producer should feel it, not the consumer. This creates the incentive for the producer to create a product that doesn't break down so easily. Likewise, producers are a much larger factor in sustainability compared to a consumer, so they should drive it.

Speaking of security, it's laughable that in a digital society, we accept that everything requires forever frequent updates otherwise its insecure. What does that tell you about the foundation of our computing? It's garbage. Yes, I know, "programmers produce bugs", "hackers are creative", but that's an explanation, not an excuse.

How long though? This is the painful economics of technology.

I think a more pointed argument is the relationship the software, hardware, and consumer has in this.

As consumers we really can only vote with our purchasing and much of it is mired in learning by induction what we do/don't want.

The walled garden and immense control of iOS is great until it isn't. The open landscape and diversity of Android is great until it isn't.

The hardware manufacture and telecoms are an added pain in the mobile ecosystem. They want a hook into getting advertising in front of you so some of this hardware is subsidized through bloatware and system level apps that can't be removed. I have an Amazon Prime app that I cannot uninstall (only hide) because it is a system app!?! Hardware manufacturing is a loss at the start of the sale and supporting it is an added cost.

The economics of the system are problematic and going to iOS will only work long enough until it doesn't. Point I'm making is the problem is upstream.

I am still using my HTC HD2 from 2009 (running Windows Mobile 6.5) - meanwhile, since 2020, I do have two sim cards, because banking apps do not work on the HD2 and I have a spare Pixel 3a (always on wifi).

The HD2 SSL certificates stopped working about 7 years ago, but I set up an internal nginx proxy that downgrades SSL certificates for me, when at home. I find the RSS-Reader particularly good, because it does not show images, which often disctract from content. Also, the Garmin app works with offline maps, doesn't expire and requires no subscription, and the HD2 is small - therefore quite good as a hiking companyon. It is on its 5th battery so far - this one lasts about a week on daily use, which is often more than new phones today. On the other hand, the Pixel 3a was the smallest phone I could get in 2020, and it is still too big to fit in my pockets.

What? The Google Pixel line is one of the few smartphone lines continuously supported by every major open source mobile operating system.

CalyxOS: https://calyxos.org/docs/guide/device-support/#supported-dev...

GrapheneOS: https://grapheneos.org/faq#supported-devices

LineageOS: https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/

All three are still delivering essential security updates for the Pixel 3. The author could have made a stronger argument by picking a different smartphone to complain about.

None of these can fix security issues in the binary blobs provided by the chipset manufacturer. And since this includes display drivers a security issue in the binary blobs is open season for every App on your phone.

If an App or website has access to an API backed by a binary blob supplied by the hardware vendor then keeping Android itself up to date will not protect you.

(Has anyone tried to exploit an old Android phone via WebGL? I’d presume that it’s feasible to exploit display driver bugs that way, which makes browsing the web on a phone without current security support problematic.)

You could buy Fairphone. What I do for now is to buy used phones with broken screen and replace it myself. I did it with Pixel 1 and now with Pixel 4a. It helps to keep costs down and I feel better about myself. Other than that I would go with Fairphone for their software support.

Call me an idiot, but for corporate work stuff I am still using my 2XL that hasn't received updates in a long time.

As this is company provided hardware I actually just don't care to switch to a Samsung (as the company only offers these if I do not want to pay additional money - and why would I for a company provided phone)

The phone still lasts longer than a day, I can use it to read my mails, see appointments, use slack, ms teams and use it as a 2nd factor to access corporate stuff.

It just works.

I don't see me throwing it out if I am not forced by It because of security reasons (but I actually doubt they care as long as they can install corporate spyware on these devices).

Why would I trash the ressources that went into making of this thing, as long as it does what it should?

this is a long article about a weird flex. The device is still very much usable for majority daily usage and until hardware starts to go shouldn't be tossed out or even feelings of pressure to ditch it. Weird. Have had old Nexuses, Moto Gs etc lying around in case something goes wrong with current device and they're all still very usable even if the OS is a few versions back. Any regular apps still work and have their own security built in via SSL, passwords, 2FA, whatever, which is enough for the average user. Overreacting.

And as mentioned numerous times they've been slowly improving the commitment to longer device updates etc! The technology is more suited to it/not as fast-moving as previous years.

The author is dumping his Pixel 3 and seems to be very concerned about wasting hardware.

If only he knew about CalyxOS:

> If you have a Pixel 3 or newer, you can install CalyxOS on your own device.

https://calyxos.org

Plus countless other options which all work for Pixel devices. It's why I bought Google hardware, to install a custom ROM.

CalyxOS won't update the multiple binary blobs (drivers, firmwares) on your phone, so no that wouldn't change much to the article.

Knowing about ROM flashing and being able to do it or wanting to spend the time on it are very different things.

The author specifically says they want their phone to be a reliable appliance. I do not think they have the appetite for reflashing the ROM, nor should a consumer be required to do so.

-----

This is from the website, this is not something an average person should attempt:

Open a terminal on your host computer, change to the directory where you saved device-flasher, and then run:

shasum -a 256 device-flasher.darwin

And ensure the result says 04b4cf9912d853e0f108b42a756fd74db7a11cc6c951e05820e96d28ce56e543.

Furthermore - should the user succeed in flashing CalyxOS, they will inevitably be faced at one point with something about their device that doesn't work quite right. Maybe it's tied to Google Play Services (and the g-apps shim that Calyx supports) or a banking app that won't pass the security checks and thusly, won't open.

I've not run Calyx myself, but those are issues I've personally experienced with other ROMs. If the author just wants a phone that works, this isn't the best option. I find the "is forcing me to.." a bit hyperbolic, but their point stands.

And you also void the warranty...

Funny how third-parties offer updates for free, where Google will not. I guess it's part of how Google makes money.

Say what you will about Microsoft, but Windows support is designed to last a long time.

windows phone?

Of course google, and everybody else, wants us to throw away the phones and other products after 3 years, I don't know if anyone noticed but USD 100K cars start to break a lot after 3 years (the usual warranty) so you have to buy extremely expensive replacement parts (10x price of the new one) and get dragged into a "subscription" or buy a new car. The planned obsolescence is real and everywhere, from cars to light bulbs, software, hardware, and now is even easier for them with internet connected devices, even if the device works they just pull the plug of the service and render it useless.

- LineageOS images are usually released for years after a phone's official Android support is dropped. Just ditch your official Android image for LineageOS, and most people won't even notice the difference.

- If you're more brave and Linux-inclined, you may also opt for PostmarketOS.

- Next time, avoid buying hardware released by Google. Those guys are religiously following the Apple book when it comes to hardware: premium stuff with high profit margins, that gets deprecated within 3 years so they can just reiterate. If you buy Google products, you are funding planned obsolescence.

Nothing will change until a large scale/large target hack or until ecology activists can successfully get photos of huge piles of e-waste in front of people.

Needing to trash your phone every 5 years is still ridiculously wasteful. Just stop making so many new phones. Regulate it so it's so illegal/expensive that they can't keep doing this. I can't even stop using smartphones if I wanted to, because the people who came up with 2FA decided to make the Authenticator App a mandatory part of modern life, instead of physical security keys like they should have.

If you didn't already know, the standard OTP schemes used in many systems have desktop and hardware security token implementations. Doesn't help with systems that use non-standard schemes unfortunately.

I think the culture the issue... I could be wrong but it seems like a lot of companies ask new employees to use their Authenticator phone app for Google login, VPNs, SSO etc and if you want to use your hardware key you have to seek out a dev-ops person to configure it special for you. The majority of the 2FA settings I've seen for popular platforms (e.g. Twitch) don't let you use keys or you have to dig for it.

It's too bad ubuntu's and firefox's UIs for phones died.

Maybe it is time for linux to stop obsessing over PCs and move to mobile.

But given how badly they continue to screw up desktop Linux with balkanization and failed support of settings and other things... well, maybe it's an opportunity to do it right, but I doubt it.

But the need is there. You'd thing there would be a company to do this. Maybe now that hardware in phones is somewhat stabilized, a competing long term support OS company will appear.

It probably is a lot of grunt work and labor, so it won't scale and SV won't fund it.

In the spirit of recycling, let me repeat the remark I made on the thread about the problem of software subscriptions: this is what you get for not supporting FOSS, especially its R&D.

If Android is what I get for $800, I'd hate to see what I get for free.

I am saying exactly that free (as in speech) software is not free (as in beer), and the $800 never went to the support of a FOSS alternative. If your quip was an attempt at humor, it was bad. If it was an attempt at dismissing free/libre software, it was even worse.

Until something fundamental changes about human nature, people will continue to find me unfunny, and gratis and libre will remain theoretically distinct but practically equivalent.

>Unless you routinely destroy your phone within two or three years, there’s no justification from a sustainability perspective to keep using Android phones. Of course, Apple is only good by comparison, as it also manufactures devices that are difficult to repair with an artificially short shelf life. It just happens to have a longer shelf life than Google.

Most of the iPhone users I see are using a phone they purchased within the past three years. Does the average iPhone get used for longer than the average Pixel?

Yes, because that old iphone is handed down to a kid or sold to someone else. The android resale market was trash last I looked. I still have family using iPhone 7 pluses but the battery is showing wear (but thats pretty cheap to replace).

I think iPhones get 6-7 years of support. I believe the new Pixel 6's are up to 5 years.

Note that that 6-7 year "support" includes updates that will make you hate your phone.

> Note that that 6-7 year "support" includes updates that will make you hate your phone

My kid is still using an iPhone 6s and loves it. It works perfectly.

Sure, back in the iPhone 4/4S days iOS 7 trashed older phones. Unusably bad. Should never have rolled out those UI updates if they couldn't perform well on older hardware.

These days? I'm using a 2016 SE with iOS 15. Works great. I do not hate my phone. In fact, the small size, fingerprint sensor, and headphone jack make it a better buy than any modern smartphone. I can live without AI text recognition on my photos, which seems to be limited to newer phones. The app switcher, settings, browser, and everything else are still as snappy as the day I bought this thing. Only thing that doesn't run well? Spotify, which apparently doesn't bother to test their UI on small hardware (constantly clips links and text off the bottom of my screen), nor older CPUs (the app takes forever to start up, regularly freezes up when searching for songs, and can take anywhere from 1 second to 30 seconds to load even already downloaded albums).

So uh... good on Apple. Shame on Spotify.

> Most of the iPhone users I see…

Instead of making knee-jerk anti-Apple assumptions, you might try to check some facts.

edit: apparently the statistics I linked are behind a paywall, but the stats from the app I'm working on show me that approx 10% of users are on iPhones that are 7 years or older.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/626631/smartphone-market...

Just speaking from my own experience and asking if my view is not representative. That link just goes to a paywall for me.

We can't tell because Apple is a little opaque with the devices that are in the wild, and Pixels are such a small slice of the entire Android population. What we have are only third party accounts of the iPhone population, e.g. https://deviceatlas.com/blog/most-popular-iphones

According to that (maybe selection-biased) source, it looks like the most popular iPhone is the one released the same year the first Pixel was released. We can't conclude anything about which is used longer, but Android app updates are required to target API level 30 I think for Android, which is no longer supported on the first Pixel, so there's probably a pressure that urges users off of that phone. I'd be surprised if percentage-wise, a larger share of Pixel users are on the original Pixel than iPhone users on iPhone 7.

My iPhone 6 held up fine for 6 years and was still getting security updates last fall.

People love to bash apple for their “expensive” products but I see it as I’m paying for support as well. My 3(?) years old iPhone XR works like new, receive regular updates and the battery still hold fine (never changed it).

Whereas my android phone before that never saw an update besides a couple odd security patches after a lot of delay.

I intend to use this iPhone until apple drop support for it. Maybe in a year or two I will replace the battery. But so far it’s the best phone purchase I ever made.

I'm surprised no mentioned what an absolute shitshow Android 12 is. Getting "stuck" on Android 11 is a blessing. I regret updgrading from my Pixel 5 to the 6.

At first I thought that a good way out of this is to install Calyx OS or similar AOSP onto the Pixel, but then checked the Calyx support website [0] and, because they source the proprietary bits from Google, it's the same problem as the post elaborates...

[0] https://calyxos.org/news/2021/05/14/security-updates/

I am waiting for delivery of my new iPhone. I am switching from Pixel 2 XL which looks brand new and is fully functional and does everything I need. There is literally not a single thing that I miss in this phone other than newer OS and updates.

I have been delaying this decision for a year, but as a professional I can not continue using a phone that is not regularly updated. And so I will switch to a platform that will allow me to keep the device alive for much longer.

For all the crap that Apple gets, I gave a friend my old iPhone XS Max purchased in December of 2018 that still gets updates, and doesn't seem to have any EOL warnings. Since the hardware doesn't appear to be showing any wear, I think there's a reasonable chance my friend will get two more years out of this phone.

I think 5-6 years is a fairly reasonable amount of time for nearly any computer, let alone something that lives in my pocket.

I've dealt with this my whole life, I'm just on my second smarthpone ever since I try ro use it for as long as possible. I know not having security updates is bad on paper but what is the real risk? I guess I can study what vulns each update patches but I can't imagine it's stuff I have to worry about when I'm just making basic use of it, not sideloading app or rooting my phone or anything.

I have also the same issue now with my Samsung Galaxy note 10 plus. This device has insane specs (12 GB of RAM, really good camera and display, the battery still last over 1,5 days, and could still be usable in the next 3 years. I would though need to replace it next year, only because of the lack of security patches.

This is really crazy, when i think that i am still getting updates on a 7 years old laptop (both windows and linux).

If it has software, it's not your property, and since software is everywhere, your right to private property is gone.

You can't eacape this, now even batteries refuse to work without a software update.

https://twitter.com/internetofshit/status/148496134391649485...

> You can't escape this

You can. Use a "dumb"phone.

Funny how "dumb"phones are better at reliability. No need for updates, and battery lasts for more than a week.

Funny how they still offer replaceable batteries, even though they cost a fraction of "smart"phones.

To avoid financing the software-planned-obsolescence empire, you can use a combination of cheap second-hand "smart"phones for maps and chat apps that are important for you, and a dumb phone for reliable stuff like alarms, calls, and SMS.

Now when dumb phones also have internet connectivity, is this really sound advice? Having no updates only means that vulnerabilities are not getting fixed. Since 4G connectivity and WhatsApp have become the minimum requirement for the bulk of the market, dumb phones have become Linux pcs with always-on internet, too.

Oh, you mean the ones that come with spyware preinstalled?

https://www.zdnet.com/article/unremovable-malware-found-prei...

It is irrelevant if they have a touchscreen or are 'cheap second hand', it has a processor and it runs software.

You want dumb phones, use analogue ones that plug into a socket with a rotary dial and use a paper map for navigation.

I doubt the restyled Nokia 3310 comes with spyware https://www.nokia.com/phones/en_gb/nokia-3310

I've been curious about the KaiOS phones for a few years now... the OS is derived from the old Firefox mobile OS, but most KaiOS devices seem to be candybar/flip-phones; the OS is "smart"ish, but the hardware looks "dumb".

It's kind of hard to find information about them, but if I could get a basic flip-phone that has a maps app, I'd be reasonably happy. I used to get by with a dumb phone and just write down directions before I left the house, but now that I'm married, plans tend to change more often.

I have the Nokia 8110 4G bananaphone, it has what's app and maps, and syncs with your google account, thr battery lasts about 2x as long as thay of a smartphone. It imagined using it on trips or hikes, but its just collecting dust in the drawer

Unfortunately, it seems that modern "dumb" (or feature) phones now are being required (or only) to support LTE and their stand-by battery life has declined quite dramatically. Many now seem to advertise battery life of quite a bit less than a week.

It's unclear to me why LTE appears to consume much more power to "do nothing." But I recall easily getting a week or so of actual battery life being completely normal a decade ago.

This is basically why I treat my phone as an untrusted device. The rest of the world wants me to use my phone as an extension of myself, but I treat it only as a portal to the public world. Security updates are almost irrelevant if there is nothing too sensitive on the phone. In particular, I don't have my gmail account on my phone, and I don't have access to monetary information on my phone.

> In 2021, an estimated of 57.4 Mt of E-waste was generated globally [1]

This is an increase over 2019 and before. The way things are designed and companies drive for profits on electronic things leads to more and more e-waste.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_waste#E-waste_data_...

There should be a federal law of a tax for non-user-serviceable batteries and a requirement to support devices with security updates for 20 years.

20 years is very extreme. It's not realistic for anyone to support 20 year old hardware.

For most devices, supporting a device indefinitely is just a matter of letting the user flash their own firmware or replace the existing one using an SD card.

Using your devices for a long time is not possible not due to the difficulty of the community maintaining the software, but because the original company put user-hostile signature checks on the firmware.

It’s not realistic because tech companies have conditioned us into that expectation. My dad has a 40 year old high end sound system which works flawlessly. Why can’t Google maintain some servers and push some fixes for 20 years?

I was eventually forced to upgrade my iPad because the YouTube app stopped working due to a required update that was unavailable for my device. Several others such as banking apps stopped working before that.

Before that I had to ditch my otherwise perfectly fine OnePlus phone for similar reasons. I went with a Nokia because they promised several years of Android updates, so we'll see how that pans out.

Quite annoying.

You know, I am so bummed Microsoft gave up on a mobile OS. I feel by this time they would've been be a real refreshing alternative to the <expletive>show we have right now.

At this point the only safe bet is S-series Samsung which are part of their enterprise program.

Nokia wad okay-ish for a while but I don't think I would buy one today.

> I was eventually forced to upgrade my iPad because the YouTube app stopped working due to a required update that was unavailable for my device

Which iPad is this? I’m running YouTube Premium on an iPad Air from 2013 - soon 9 years old.

iPad 4 I think (model MD514LL/A)

Someone stops the guy from installing unofficial ROM especially in Pixel phone with easily unlockable bootloader?

Let's ignore the fact the phone is perfectly fine even without latest security patch even without unofficial ROM. How exactly would someone exploit his phone if he is using newest versions of secured apps? The odds of attack on his phone are next to zero.

I'm amazed that Lineage OS still supports Pixel 1 while Google can't provide support and updates for Pixel 3. Google just doesn't care about long term support which makes business sense since most people want to upgrade phones in 2-3 years. However it is completely antithetical to themselves calling an environmentally responsible company.

I get that I'm not the target market here, but the headline is quite amusing.

I bought a Pixel 3 specifically _because_ it had support in Lineage and I could whack microG on it.

I have some >8 year old tablets running Lineage and variants.

I do wish though that Google would just IBM PC the ecosystem though. It'd make 1% less money or whatever, so it ain't ever happening.

I would agree also as 3a user. The phone has been my favorite for a long time and its usage is pretty sweet for the price point. But the overall lack of support that google is showing for its old devices is saddening and has kinda put the nail in the coffin for getting a iphone and rolling with it at such a high price point.

Not that having another big player would solve the problem, but I do wish we at least had Microsoft still in the game as a foil against Google and Apple.

In lieu of that, it's still on my very long to-do list to figure out how to flash my Android phone to finish extricating myself from the Google ecosystem. One of these days...

People are ditching their smart phones it seems https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-60067032

Havent had a phone for years now, too much hacking and surveillance for my liking, glad to not be drinking the Kool-Aid.

For Linux based devices (including Android devices), a lot of the problem is lack of support for the device in Linux mainline. Devices that are supported in Linux mainline generally get updates pretty much forever (think your laptop). Of course, getting mainline support is a lot of work that is costly.

A related post I read recently:

"Musings on long-term software support and economic incentives" https://veronneau.org/musings-on-long-term-software-support-...

Just because a device stops receiving security updates does not automatically mean its instantly unsafe to use. Unless you are a high profile target or a serious exploit comes out you can probably safely still use that device for quite awhile. If you want to be confident in your security then that might require some extra steps on your part monitoring what exploits are being released but with a hugely popular device like the Pixel I doubt that is very difficult. Tons of people are going to be using them regardless without any thought to security.

That being said this whole 3 years of security updates is of course totally stupid and we deserve more. And manufacturers look to be realizing this. But if the rest of the phone hardware wise is also on a similar obsolescence cycle then is software updates the real problem here?

Our devices are becoming more and more disposable in many ways and we need to target the root of the problem - if you can easily replace your battery and your 5 year old phone still does everything you need then there will be much more consumer demand in turn for longer software update support.

Apple are bastards because they lock out users from modifying hardware. Google are bastards for not supporting older hardware. Microsoft were bastards for not having apps. There was the opportunity for a triopoly but snapchat was, depressingly, more important at the time.

I keep my old phones as backup for either myself, or that poor soul you come across whom just smashed their screen and do not have money for a new one.

Or sometimes I just keep it in my car as a an emergency phone / for pandora / for maps. It almost never goes to waste that way.

Unrelated, but I think the latest Android update is ghastly and I have no way of changing back to how it looked before. I'm all for progressive design but some of the new UI changes (for example the clock app which I use every day) make it way less usable for me.

I buy cheap (but not bottom-tier) Android phones. I've been happy with Motorola phones. If they stop getting updates after a few years, I can replace them without feeling like I'm scrapping a phone that I paid a lot of money for.

Pixel phones are way out of my price range.

Not to mention that if you root them or install a custom firmware to keep using your device, most banking apps, Netflix and any games will simply refuse to run or weirdly crash (e.g. the Nintendo Switch companion app - which is a voicechat ffs).

One could load Cyanogenmod or a Linux based phone. Old electronics is a reason we must by law requiere manufacturers to have open devices. A phone should function like a personal computer. Open boot loader, standard boot process, standard chassi.

> I think of phones in much the same way I think of refrigerators or stoves.

Is that so?

I've never heard anyone complain about their fridge not receiving security updates any more, making it dangerous to use.

(Though the Internet of Idiotic Things wants to change that, of course.)

How about expecting at least 1 year of service for every $150 in the price of the phone.

I'm still using my Google Nexus 6P that I purchased five and a half years ago. Yes, it hasn't been updated for years but I almost never download new apps to it and I haven't been compromised so far (as far as I am aware).

I was a Pixel 3 phone owner and switched to an iPhone after using Android since I bought my first smartphone over 10 years ago. The author nailed it: Google's lack of ongoing software support for their hardware is a problem.

https://calyxos.org/news/2022/01/19/android-12-changelog/

On thing where google / android / pixel really shine is for google workspace integration and work profile. I do BYOD, and I ve got a work profile, with segregated apps and content. You have no equivalent with iphone.

Truly we have built our house on sand when devices depend on a steady stream of security updates to remain safe. We are in the bleak dark ages of computing where the idea of shipping bug-free code is laughed off as a fantasy.

Mega corps marketing themselves as carbon neutral, but in reality they don't give two fck about the environment. If they did, they will try to support these devices avoiding people to dump them to jump on a new one.

Perhaps one of the strongest arguments for owning Apple tech is that they support their devices for long after everyone else would stop doing so.

Android has classically been a dumpster fire compared to Apple on this front.

The really odd thing is that my daughters 3XL just died - it was under guarantee so I returned it and they gave me a new one. It's got a years guarantee to go! Can I return it because there are no updates?

Wait so the actual google flagship only gets three years of support?

It's not an ideal solution, but when I have to get a new phone the old one becomes my tv remote. I'm not too worried about security updates on a device that just has netflix and kodi on it.

If your device is no longer able to get updates, and there is no viable alternative OS that you can run, it is no longer perfectly good. Perfectly good for electronics recycling perhaps.

Thanks to this article I learned that my perfectly functioning OnePlus 6T received its last update in November, 2021. I think enough is enough and I will switch to Apple as soon as I can

It's a good point. If you work at Google, just know that I'll be doing the same. If Google refuses updates for perfectly good hardware, then I'll move to the iPhone.

Are there any rumblings of Google making its own chips? I figured it wouldn't be that big of an organizational leap considering they already produce their own TPU's.

I have had a 2XL, 4XL, and now a 5a... and the 5a looks nice but is actually a piece of crap. I can't recall EVER having a phone with this many network hiccups.

Just install an alternative android OS on the phone and it will last you longer. Pretty sure Graphene supports the pixel 3. Probably Calyx. Probably /e/OS.

You don't have to switch to iPhone, why not switch to the Fairphone instead, which principles and ethics are exactly the one the author is looking for?

One possible solution is to flash a custom ROM.

That's probably a good option for someone who writes for Vice or you and I, but for the average user that's pretty unfeasible. I think even with this knowledge, the point of the article still stands.

> One possible solution is to flash a custom ROM.

Honestly, that's way too much trouble to actually be a solution. Custom ROMs should be a hobbyist thing for people who want to spend their time tinkering with their phone, not a way to support a not-very-old device.

That sounds like what someone could say about Linux:

~ Linux should be a hobbyist thing for people who want to spend their time tinkering with their computer, not a way to support a not-very-old device. ~

Whether it comes to phones or computers, I disagree respectively when it comes to custom ROMs or Linux.

> That sounds like what someone could say about Linux:

So? The problem is both Linux and a Custom ROM take a few orders of magnitude more technical skill and effort to install and maintain, which is completely unreasonable to expect from a typical non-hobbyist retail technology user. Such users should be able to click "update" on their system, get up-to-date with patches, so they can go on to do what really want to do (which probably isn't "maintain their technology"). I'm even someone who's capable of doing that, but I don't want to because I've got much better and more important things do with my time now.

Installing Linux is often far easier than installing Windows nowadays, and multiple distributions offer long-time support. It's an excellent way of getting more life out of semi-old systems.

> Installing Linux is often far easier than installing Windows nowadays, and multiple distributions offer long-time support.

Even if that's true, most computer users don't install Windows. It comes preinstalled.

> It's an excellent way of getting more life out of semi-old systems.

Maybe so, but it's not nearly as good of an option as getting continued support for your preinstalled OS.

Both are valid points, but you did write that Linux is harder to install and maintain. I disagree on those two points.

Pre-installed with a decent support plan is hard to beat regardless if it's Windows, MacOS or something like Linux Mint.

> One possible solution is to flash a custom ROM.

Been there, done that, got the tshirt (a nice CyanogenMod one). Then I switched to iPhone years ago, and my regret is that I should have done that WAY earlier.

I had a: Nexus S, Galaxy S3, Sony XPeria Ultra, Nexus 6, Moto S. All those were bought with custom ROM support in mind. My experience was love and hate:

- Clean minimal Android is really NICE.

- Not having (insert Facebook bloatware here) on your phone is NICE!

- Custom ROMs break often, the moment you move away from a big project like CyanogenMOD (later LineageOS), you are pretty much depending on one or two people. If those people change phones, you are sol. Hell, it happens with big projects as well.

- Some apps don't work unless you install Magisk to bypass Google's Safetynet.

- One slight mistake flashing a device and you risk in having a nice paperweight.

- Flashing/modding your phone takes a LOT of time.

- Bootloader unlock might void warranties (might not be legal) but as an individual I can't fathom to sue a megacorp.

I realized that my time was way more precious than fiddling often with a phone, so I just went over to the iOS camp, never looked back. My mom is now using my old iPhone 6S Plus with latest and greatest version of iOS.

This will get you updates for Android itself, but still not for any of the vendor blobs like drivers.

Isn't the Pixel fairly well supported in terms of custom ROMs which in turn unlock access to more recent security updates?

> So here I am, with another piece of premature junk, made by the company that pledges to “maximize the reuse of finite resources” and “enable others to do the same.”

Some pledges are cheaper than others. Bottom-feeding pledges (whether well-intended or malicious) do not detail the steps that will be taken to implement them. As such they live in the misty realms of wishitude, along with campaign promises, and depend on trusting customers to imagine a positive outcome.

No no! If you can't control the software your device runs, you can't consider it "perfectly good".

“Forcing” is melodramatic, they dropped support. They aren’t directly advising you to stop using your device or else.

After all, it's just business for them. This is why I also transferred to iPhones because of this one.

even worse, verizon won't unlock the bootloaders on the now unsupported phones so you can't even install a third party supported rom.

also, i don't care how much fawning comes out of the press... the pixel 6 is an enormous impractical behemoth that barely fits in half my pockets.

Is the Pixel 3 outside the standard window for EOL, or is a 3-year lifecycle par for the course?

Regulation to require jailbreaking any device that reaches EOL or support would be welcome.

Google's phones aren't locked - they're already 'jailbroken' when they're new. What would that regulation accomplish here?

I tried to read the article but it does not have a perfectly good cookie reject button.

What else is new? AT&T recently forced me to dump my perfectly good OnePlus 6.

surprised to see no mention of CalyxOS [0], which is still pushing security updates to their oldest supported phone, the Pixel 2.

[0] https://calyxos.org/

I own a pixel 3 in good working condition.....do I really need to get a new one?

Yeah but Apple is the bad guy. Yet, my iPhone from 2016 runs the latest iOS.

Well I used to have nest smoke detectors. My recent call to ask why all of my nests have stopped working came with a “oh well, your on firmware v1 and we aren’t releasing for that device anymore.” So I have a thousand bucks worth of smoke detectors going in the trash. The box said 7 years, but the firmware updates ended after 6, so recycling here we go. But the thing HN needs to understand is that the way google enforced expiring was to make the smoke detectors, one after the other, start chirping at high volume, often in the middle of the night, and with no warning in the app. So even if a corporation deciding that I have to replace all my smoke detectors after 7 years is reasonable, understand that the devices are worse than bricked — they are literally beeping to be replaced and there is no way to stop the behavior. We ended up with a stack of them on a counter trying to figure out what was going on, as one after the other hit their manufacturing date and expired in the same way. It was strangely dystopian. Like the company has spoken and you peons must upgrade.

My favorite call was after I put in the next thermostat and had a $1500 bill. Apparently if your kids come home from school and it’s hot, they crank the AC down but being young they just turn the dial all the way. We learned of it after a particularly hot period (the kids would apparently always adjust it up again before we got home from work). This the system “learned” to make it arctic cold at 3:25 every day and stop doing so before 6. A well time vacation later, and our utility company was sending us quickly to the bill (it was regularly less than 300). Google support said, “yea, we hear about problems like that all the time,” and told us, “my suggestion would be to turn off the learning feature of your thermostat and just use it as a regular thermostat.” Ok. Will do. But wow, to find out it wasn’t an unusual use case was mind blowing.

I stopped using Google for devices some time back because of firmware issues with support on phones. I realized after we have a series of iPhones hit 5 years or even six years old that I found them, batteries barely holding a charge but still working, charging for use above a drawer filled with my old android devices which were collecting dust, but were years younger, that the value isn’t there. Our form of response to the current fast fashion electronics industry to to use our devices as long as possible. Apple is a better value in that respect, despite their outright hostility to independent repair — which definitely dents their reputation in our house — so we ended up standardizing on their technology. Common sense environmentalism is making sure you minimize how much you buy.

It’s interesting how much the longevity of devices (and privacy concerns) are becoming the major criteria for which devices we allow into our lives these days. Google has failed us repeatedly and lost our trust and we probably won’t ever buy another device from them. There was a time when I loved and adored them. Their growth seems to have lost what made them special in their DNA (transforming towns with savior Internet service, connecting the Worlds information > explaining yet another ocean of ad fraud, sunsetting every product we liked, afore mentioned firmware bugs) and we kind of look at them as the company we used to love. Honestly makes me sad. It was at one point one of the best hacker groups on the planet, insanely innovative, and run like one.

I hope durability and reliability becomes a major tech trend.

ahem, this is the main reason i ditch android for iphone a few years ago... Apple devices keep on running years after they supossed to

is design flaw from the industry, top brands should do better

Its not just Google. All the network providers in America are pushing forced consumption down consumer throats by giving a deadline for upgrading their phones - beyond which it would stop working.

I have two perfectly working (though a little older) phones - OnePlus 3 and a Galaxy S6 Edge. From February both these phones will not work with my phone carrier. I am aware that these are older phones and don't receive security patches etc, however I was perfectly fine using them and didn't have any issues with it. Too concerned about the consumerist lifestyle that is forced by this capitalist economy instead of providing updates/upgrades to their user till the phone's full life.

Same for Google/Android and Samsung. My perfectly fine working and unblemished like-new Galaxy S8 is now off of regular updates, and behind a couple versions of the OS.

So, it and I are basically running on borrowed time until a vulnerability strikes.

It should definitely be mandatory to provide support any device over a certain level of cost and total sales for at least 7 years. Sure, people hate regulations and mandates, but otherwise we're stuck because a herd of sociopathic managers would rather pad their bonus pool then do the right thing, which is entirely within every company's budget, from Qualcom right through Smasung and Google.

A new Moto G Pure is $140. You’re gonna be fine.

Apple does the same thing with phones and macs.

iPhone 6 still get security updates sometimes, just can’t be used with latest iOS

ok boomer. maybe ask your kid to install a custom rom for you since you can't figure it out

This is what happens when you don't buy an iPhone.

Here you vice crybabys:

https://download.lineageos.org/blueline

It was always a security risk because google has always been spying on you…nobody is forcing you to buy android phones.

This is not a helpful attitude.

I have plenty of issues with Google's posture on privacy, but I don't expect them to steal credentials for other services, drain my bank account, blackmail me based on personal information, or any such thing. Conflating the two removes a lot of much needed nuance from the discussion.

I believe that a bad actor within google could do those things.

"A bad actor within the manufacturer" and "the manufacturer itself" are entirely different threats. There's no particular reason why Google would be more exposed to that sort of bad apple than Apple, or any other provider.

You say this like there's an alternative. Closed source iOS that scans all your messages for CSAM?

Ironically I hated financially supporting Google but felt I had no choice but to get a Pixel to use GrapheneOS and have 5 years of security updates

Reply on news.ycombinator.com