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Android KitKat reaches its end as Google Play services discontinues support
(www.androidauthority.com)
this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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Sure, with custom ROMs you can carry phones much farther than intended, if you are lucky enough that your phone gets updated custom ROMs.
But I wouldn't equate 3rd-party support with 1st-party support.
Also, custom ROMs that provide newer Android versions than the original 1st-party support often don't upgrade everything, e.g. the kernel is usually not upgraded, which can cause issues in some circumstances.
But yeah, it's pretty great that there are people who spend their spare time to get newer versions of Android on old phones. Should be standard, that phone manufacturers are doing this themselves, sadly it's not.
Less about luck and more about having a popular enough device. Less popular ones are way more unlikely to have them unfortunately.
Sure, but for the not super popular ones it's mostly about whether there's some random dev who owns that phone and wants to keep it alive.
The Droid 3/4 for example where kept alive for much longer than their popularity would suggest.
Oh absolutely.
In my opinion it's not that they were equating 3rd party support to 1st, it's just impressive that we even have 3rd party support that is actually useful.
Should it be the phone manufacturer does this? Yes. But personally I prefer to use community ran (and FOSS) solutions.
You are totally right that it is mightily impressive that basically some randos on the internet are able to better support old phones than manufacturers are willing to do.