Qualcomm has been a big culprit in this for many years now. They refuse to support their chipsets for too long, because they can reduce expenses not having to maintain them, and more importantly they make more money selling more chipsets to manufacturers.
The thing is I can make that choice but for many people the cellphones they can afford are mediatek and Qualcomm. This lack of support doesn’t truly save money it just cost shifts from a wealthy corporation to the global poor.
there ought to be a law where if hardware is bound to software, and the software goes out of support in a way that renders the hardware useless, then it must be open sourced.
notably post qualcomm pixel phones from google have five years of guaranteed updates. (pixel 6 and above)
apple seems to also do a good job of keeping up software updates for many years. (8+ for some iphones iirc)
It is getting better with companies doing this voluntarily (at least the companies that do an ok job with support) but standardized labeling and required promenance would be invaluable.
5 years of security updates. Still only 3 years of guaranteed Android version upgrades: https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/4457705
halted feature updates mean you got what you paid for.
In the past I've seen that argument a lot when it comes to Google's Pixel phones. But nowadays Google uses their own chips, yet a new Pixel 7 that you buy today will still only get guaranteed major Android version upgrades until 2025.