Hacker News Reader

Comment by seanwilson | Hacker News Reader

What budget phones right now have a decent number of years for security updates and run stock Android?

I tried to get this info a couple of years ago and it took some serious digging to find when each phone was released and how long updates are meant to last as there's no central place to find this. Maybe there's a good resource for this now?

Nokia phones are meant to be nearly stock Android I think with 3 years of updates but longer would be nice.

View on HN

For anyone looking at budget android phones, probably the most important thing is to look at the CPU on gsmarena (or elsewhere) and make sure it has at least 2 a7N cores (the higher the N, the better, eg. a72<a78<a720), because android OEMs are still selling phones with 8 a53 (or a55) cores which are unusably slow (8x a53 cpus were terrible a decade ago, and they're even worse now). For qualcomm cpus you might have to check the wikipedia article [1] to figure out what the kryo cores actually correspond to.

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

I have a hard time figuring this out too. I have resorted to looking at benchmark scores for comparing mobile CPUs.

I know this isn't exactly the answer to your question, but it's sorta adjacent and might be useful.

Pixel devices can run a number of Roms that go much longer than Google's support period (DivestOS, PostMarketOS, Lineage, etc). Older models can probably be found on sale from Google for ~$200 occasionally or even cheaper used, and with Lineage offer a really long support period on an OS that resembles AOSP with or without G Services.

fairphone? The last one will have 8y + it's repairable. In terms of performance/camera quality it's far from apple/top snapdragon but still

Reply on news.ycombinator.com