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Comment by rejectfinite | Hacker News Reader

- Extremely slow and fragmented upgrade of OS. This resulted in substantially older features and security patches.

Samsung phones does 4 years of updates now.

- Privacy. iMessage’s encryption (though I stand by that it is gimmicky to only offer for iPhones, and I despise that) has a serious network effect. Apple is also far more transparent in what data they use, how they use it, etc.

iMessage? Everyone here (Scandinavia) uses FB Mewssenger, Whatsapp, Telegram or Discord anyway. The data thing, sure

- Ironically, price. At the time, the iPhone was cheaper than the equivalent Android phone.

Thats fair.

The big thing for me with Android is price (my Asus 5z from 208 still going strong)

Customization, and I don't mean homescreen I mean that webbrowsers are not just Safari re-skins, Firefox has actual addons for excample, there is the Google playstore but I can also use F-Droid

And there aren't really downsides to Android imo

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Samsung phones does 4 years of updates now.

Four whole years?

It should be outrageous that we might consider such a short period acceptable for devices as expensive and otherwise long-lasting as a high-end Samsung phone. That it is not really surprising at all is a sad reflection on how normalised shipping insecure connected devices with inadequate support has become.

Obviously we don't yet know how to build 100% secure devices of this complexity but we are talking about some of the biggest businesses in the world here. There is little excuse not to require (by law if necessary) essential security updates for a much longer period given the reasonable useful life of the hardware and the rest of the software on it.

> Four whole years? It should be outrageous that we might consider such a short period acceptable for devices as expensive and otherwise long-lasting as a high-end Samsung phone.

I mean, yes, but it wasn’t that long ago that Google had to get everyone to agree to at least 18 months. And the market would correct for that, but everyone was doing the same thing - abandoning a device mere months after its release.

And from the manufacturers side it’s not hard to understand why the finance dept doesn’t want you to spend more money on a product that’s already been purchased.

I mean, yes, but it wasn’t that long ago that Google had to get everyone to agree to at least 18 months.

Given that many new phones were bundled with two-year contracts it seems likely that consumer protection laws in many places would have meant a phone that was not properly supported for at least that long after the time of purchase would have fallen foul of fitness-for-purpose rules and potentially entitled customers to partial refunds or updated replacements.

And from the manufacturers side it’s not hard to understand why the finance dept doesn’t want you to spend more money on a product that’s already been purchased.

Sure but again that's why we need consumer protection rules. Any security patch implies that the original product was defective. Buyers are entitled to reasonable corrective action if a defective product was sold to them. It may be unrealistic to release a product with no defects, and the corrective actions are typically intended to compensate for actual loss of value rather than being punitive, but the basic rules still apply.

But we are very very heavily in the diminishing returns area now. 5-7 years ago, next-year’s device might easily have doubled its performance, camera performance, etc, but nowadays a 3 years old high-end phone is perfectly adequate if it’s not deliberately crippled by software

I mean that's twice as long as it was before? It's only 4 years if you buy it on the release date :) . I'm sticking with iphone for now.

> Samsung phones does 4 years of updates now.

That's really, really poor. I mean it's good for the Android ecosystem but their biggest competitor is at six+.

edit: replaced "almost twice that number of years" with "six+".

> Samsung phones does 4 years of updates now.

That's terrible.

Hmm, seeing as even most desktop OSes out there aren't supported for much longer, i'm not sure whether things are terrible in that regard.

Debian's EOL comes to mind, even Ubuntu LTS isn't supported for much longer, CentOS was supposed to be the more stable option but that didn't work out either.

Though for some reason mobile devices are somewhat crippled in regards to upgrading to new OS releases versus their desktop counterparts: not being update from Android X to Android Y is the real terrible bit here.

Not sure why on earth that should be acceptable or why the drivers should be such an insurmountable problem, wherein using anything but flagship phones with third party ROMs is a total mess (i've personally had everything from the touch screen to radio, to even Wi-Fi stop working).

We are talking about the very crippling of devices. So having n years of updates means that the device will effectively die after that, which is a shame and frankly ridiculous at only 4 years.

Yep. There is one reason and one reason only I am on Android: price. A mobile phone does not have enough value to me to pay for Apple's least expensive phone.

The $399 iPhone SE is currently on it's sixth year of OS updates.

Android phones don't break even if they stop getting updates. Big popular apps like Firefox, Kindle, etc. work on old versions of Android like 6.0. $400+ is still a steep upfront cost to a lot of people.

I consider phones that don't have constant security updates as broken as I do a lot of banking and personal communication on my phone. Iphone updates IOS for years and years and I kept my last iphone for 5 years,probably will keep my iphone12 for a similar amount of time barring something catastrophic; it won't be from "desire to get the latest and greatest"

> Android phones don't break even if they stop getting updates.

So when Google issues a kernel patch for an actively exploited zero day you aren't vulnerable?

Don't be ridiculous.

Vulnerable != Broken. An iPhone SE is vulnerable to the same bug used by checkra1n. Is it broken?

Checkra1n relies on a hardware issue that cannot be patched.

Software zero days can be patched and on Android even the vendors with the best support policies only cover half as many years.

Cheap Android phones don't even get that.

The OG iPhone SE is on it's sixth year of OS updates.

The iPhone 5s just got it's eighth year of security updates.

Which means it's permanently broken by your standards right? Or do you have some sort of non-nonsensical exception for hardware vulnerabilities?

By your standards a flaw that will never be patched is perfectly acceptable.

Even if it's a software flaw that can easily be patched, but the vendor prefers to force you to buy another device and toss the first into a landfill.

iPhone SE on the Apple website today is $429.

$250 is about the max I would consider spending on a smartphone.

Exactly. I was recently talking to a guy who had had his iPhone stolen. But it was no big deal - he had replacement insurance and the deductible was only $200. Which is more than I have ever paid for a phone in my life.

Price of phone shouldn’t be used as a barometer. It should be the price you end up paying per month when all is said and done.

I buy unlocked phones without financing them and use Ting for mobile service. I don't buy phones from the cell providers.

I wasn’t critiquing you. Just pointing out what makes sense. I’m positive you come out with less paid in every metric than most. Since I live in the US and my cousin and brother want to be on Verizon. The price of Verizon with 4-5/lines and carriers that piggyback off the big three are not too different, for me, I do end up getting a $1K phone every 3 or so years without paying anything directly. I’m locked to the big 3 carriers at that point for 2 years.

It’s not as flexible but my end cost for the phones is usually $5 more a month in plan cost and being stuck to a big 3 carrier, I haven’t paid much for a phone since I started doing this after Att paid T-Mobile equivalent of $4B in break up fees a decade ago and that pushed for more competition. Though back then I was rocking webOS then Windows Phone before sadly going from iPhone to iPhone. I believe it was iPhone 6 to 8 to 13 Pro. So 3 year and 4 year gaps waiting for deals where I wouldn’t pay anything except a trade in and being tied to the carrier.

I also use a ton of data. Except during the first 1.5 years of the pandemic. During that time period I for sure was wasting money.

I pay £10/3 months plus £200-300 every 4 years for a phone.

Wow the 10 every 3 months is cheap. Even if little data is included. Nice.

I use an iPhone but I was surprised the OP mentioned price as a reason to switch.

I buy unlocked.

I would rather have a 10/month phone bill than a 40-50 one.

I buy unlocked too. But you can get a decent Android phone that does all the major things for far less than an iPhone.

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