>Apple is miles ahead of Android
And Mussolini wasn't nearly as bad as Hitler. A relative measure like this sets an artificially low bar. If these devices had replaceable screens and batteries, they would be good until the mobile standards stopped being supported.
>Godwin's law
I'm not calling anyone Hitler, though, just pointing out the flaws that can come with relative comparisons. A known, extreme example here is useful as it's well known and illustrative.
Anyhow, Apple & Android should just support old hardware for longer.
> Anyhow, Apple & Android should just support old hardware for longer.
Apple already does. The iPhone 6s, released 2015, got a security update just a few months ago [1]. That's ten years worth of security updates, I'm amazed that people are still using such old phones.
If we go by the metric of "app developers can still publish app updates", the minimum target version is iOS 18 [2], which means you can still target the iPhone XS from 2018, that's a 7 year old phone.
The true catastrophe is Android, and that's actually not Android's fault. That's the fault of Qualcomm, MTK, Samsung and other more obscure SoC vendors - only in 2023, with the Pixel 8 [3], came the first SoC with seven years of support. As said: most BSPs are utter dogshit, and so are the firmwares for all the tiny chips and IP cores. The Linux kernel is a very fast moving target and it's (by intent) a gargantuan effort to keep forked kernels up to date. And it's made even worse by the embedded industry's trend of continuously "improving" their chips/IP cores without changing model numbers, making it sometimes outright impossible for a kernel module to deal with two different steppings and respective quirks on its own.
Apple in contrast insists on writing everything themselves - that's why they fell out of love with NVIDIA a decade ago, NVIDIA refused to give Apple that level of access. That allows Apple to keep even very outdated stuff supplied at least with critical security fixes.
Google could do something here, say by adding a requirement to the Play Store license that BSPs must be actually accessible open source and vendors have to commit reasonable effort in upstreaming their kernel level drivers, but I guess Google is too afraid of getting hit by anti-trust issues.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone
[2] https://developer.apple.com/news/upcoming-requirements/?id=0...
[3] https://blog.cortado.com/en/7-years-of-software-updates-for-...
> And Mussolini wasn't nearly as bad as Hitler.
Damn, I haven't seen an instance of Godwin's law outside of political threads for years in the wild.
> If these devices had replaceable screens and batteries, they would be good until the mobile standards stopped being supported.
The problem is, even replaceable components don't matter when the OS support drops and the device becomes a bad netizen as a result. And no, there is no viable FOSS competition to Android and iOS, many including giants such as Mozilla learned that lesson the hard way.
And that's before getting into the whole issue with BSPs, horrible code quality (good luck trying to get any SoC BSP upstreamed to u-boot or god forbid the Linux kernel), or the rapid evolution in mobile SoC performance.