this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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Not sure why this is downvoted so much. These are very valid points.
Well the claim that Android doesn't receive security updates is plainly false.
Won’t be hard to find two dozen android devices that received 1 or 2 updates and that’s it.
There are nowadays android devices that receive reliable and guaranteed updates for a number of years, but unless you know what you are looking for it’s luck.
My iPhone 6 from 2015 still got updates in 2022 when I lost it.
Comparing iPhone to "Android" isn't fair, because people conveniently compare it to the lowest end. Compare the iPhone 14 Pro Max to the S23 Ultra for example, a phone from a respected company at the same price range. And it isn't "luck". Just a quick Google search will give you the high-end Android devices currently.
The iPhone SE is as low end as Apple gets and it also gets reliably updates. It’s in the brand.
Also if you know what to google for you are already in the know. Plenty of people get their cheap phone from Aldi.
The similarly priced Pixels get similar update levels to the iPhone SE
That's not up to Android, that's up the OEM. Android is constantly updated with the latest security patches. These are the companies who independently decide how long their devices receive updates.
I agree that many OEMs don't offer long enough support for their android devices. Luckily, virtually all android devices are supported by an open source fork of Android thanks to the AOSP (which Apple would never offer) and most android phones are designed to work with alternate bootloaders/OSes without the need to jailbreak. So when an iPhone hits its end of life, it's a brick; when an android hits end of life, it's still perfectly usable.
I speak my own experience. I owned 3 mid priced android phones over the span of 6 years. The second one got one planned and promised upgrade to the next major android version. This made the phone so slow it was unusable. Each felt not very well built, I didn’t miss them when I abandoned them. None received updates after 2 years.
I now have my third iPhone. The first lasted 4 years before I wanted a bigger one, it was then used up by my son. I carried around the bigger one for 3 years before I decided it’s too large. Now I own a Mini and that’s the best phone I ever had.
Each of the iPhones got major upgrades for years, but instead of slowing it down they added features feeling like I got a new phone.
None of that I experienced in android land. Unless apple makes some major mistakes going forward I don’t see me changing platforms again.
Didn't apple literally get sued for intentionally degrading the quality of their older phones with updates over time?
They say so, and at some point it was even shown in the battery settings. I can’t remember that it affected me much.
If I understood it correctly it mostly affected loading times. Yes, it took much longer to load clash Royale than on the other devices. But it ran astonishingly well. Much better than you would expect from a 6yo device.
What they got sued for was when they detected that the battery was too weak (old, worn-out) to support peak CPU performance, they throttled the CPU. If they hadn't throttled the CPU, then the phone would have just crashed and rebooted. An Android phone with a similarly weak battery will just randomly reboot.
The lawsuit was that they should have told the user the battery was bad and to just (cheaply) replace the battery, instead of people thinking the phone was old and needing a complete replacement. Which is what they do now.
I agree that there are a lot of bad Android experiences available, but having chosen the devices I've used very carefully over the years, tbh your experience with an iPhone matches my experience with Android.
I've never had a phone last me less than 4 years, with the exception of I think my razr maxx which had overheating problems and lasted me 2. Since then I've had a Nexus 5, OnePlus 6, and now have a Pixel 6 Pro running Graphene OS. Each has been a great experience.
My old phones are in the closet, but otherwise perfectly functional. My main reason for upgrading is usually for hardware features (camera/screen quality, etc). But I feel like my eyes are getting older faster than screen tech is getting better, so this might be my last phone 😄.
I don't see how that point is relevant as that claim was never made.
The claim was that Android phones usually barely get updates which maps to my experience. Updates more than one or two years after the release of a device is the exception, not the norm.
Which is also not true, most android deviced i have used got updates every 3-5 months with some small security patches between them.
For the first year or two, that's common. Getting feature updates for anything even approaching >5 years is near unthinkable for Android devices however. You only get that with custom ROMs and even there it's only half of the story as they can't provide security updates for vendor blobs which is kind of a big yikes.
The iPhone 8 will get cut off the newest feature updates in the upcoming iOS 17; 6 years after launch. Security updates will likely be available for years to come. For comparison, my OnePlus 5 from 2017 (1 year younger) received its last update (any update whatsoever) in 2020 (3 years ago).
With an Android device, you'd be lucky to get security patches in any regularity at all, much less >3 years after release. That only happens with a couple few vendors who actually care such as Nokia and maybe Google (to a degree).
For my custom rom i get vendor updates and theres about 1 update per month, open source devs are really
The vendor blobs in custom ROMs come from the stock vendor ROM. When the vendor stops publishing their stock ROM, the custom ROM's will also stop coming. In some cases some BLOBs can be taken from similar devices that might be supported a bit longer but I believe this is quite rare.
The ROM itself still gets updates through the AOSP but vendor BLOBs stay where they are and open source devs can do little to nothing about that.
Couldn't find anything about that online, could you please give me the source of that information?
I homebrew the ROM on my personal phone and I can tell you from first hand experience that you need the vendor dirs extracted from the OEM ROM. You can read up on that on the wiki pages for building any device ROM.
You can also come to that conclusion the other way around: How else would you (or LOS maintainers) get your hands on proprietary blobs full of secret sauce that vendors sometimes even try to actively block access to?
Yeah this is a good point. Tbh I wish there was right to repair legislation around this. If you're not going to maintain it, you should be required to open source it, and you're not allowed to brick people's devices as a workaround.
Nothing is keeping apple from dropping support in the same way, I'm kinda surprised how long they maintain support.
My second paragraph explains in detail why the first is relevant.
I am not sure which second paragraph you're referencing as your original comment only contains one.
Ah sorry, still getting used to this UI, thought that was in reply to a different level comment.
Through the AOSP, many android phones are maintained indefinitely by the community. But I agree that proprietary firmware blobs don't get maintained for nearly as long as they should.
Custom ROMs are a thing of course. I use them too. Custom ROMs are, again, the exception rather than the norm however; most people use the stock ROMs and that's what I was referencing.
Well for one thing Apple rather famously slows down its old phones and lost a lawsuit over it. Apple has plenty of merits but longevity is definitely not one of them.
This keeps getting repeated and it gets further from the truth every time. Apple was throttling phones whose batteries were so bad the phone would shut off when trying to draw peak power. They should have had a message saying, “Replace your Fuckin battery dude”, rather than just throttling the phones, and that’s exactly what the lawsuit made them do. It’s not the case that apple went, “oh this phone is old, slow it down.” At all.
What’s more, they then gave discounted battery replacements to phones of the most-effected generations. As in, for like $50 or something the phone went back to working essentially like new (and had better battery life again to boot).
If their goal with the battery health throttling was to make money by forcing people to buy new phones, they sure went about it in a weird way. 😆
They only offered that cheap battery replacement after the lawsuit was filed.
Thats not an act of kindness, thats ass covering. They then settled the class action about the secret throttling for $300+ millon.
Not exactly just an "opps, we forget to mention what we were doing for your phones health for years, really guys" situation. In every possible way, they were silently hobbling the performance of old phones, which directly helped their sales of new phones.
The right thing to do was very simple : alert people and offer inexpensive battery replacements. We know it was very simple because they did it immediately when their duplicity was revealed in a court of law. Now ask youself why they didnt do it for years.
Iirc they offered battery replacement as part of a settlement, and had an os update out that gave detailed battery health information before that went down and outside of it.
This is so false, and has been debunked so many times that anyone still repeating it is simply a liar.
Batteries are consumable items. A great analogy anyone can relate to is car batteries. Anyone with a car knows the battery goes bad. Batteries wear out. A car battery that works fine in the summer may have a lot of trouble cranking over in the winter under the conditions and extra load of a cold engine full of sludgy oil.
The phone battery is no different. Overtime it starts to go bad. What Apple did, was determine through software when a phone battery could no longer support a phone running at full blast. They INCREASED LONGEVITY of the device, by throttling the speed. By making it run slower, it was less demanding and still would work - where it otherwise would have been prone to random shutdowns and crashes because of the degraded battery. This was a much better user experience. They could have skipped this altogether, and people would have just bought a new device. Instead this software throttling made the device last even longer. In fact, laptops have been doing this for decades. Should Apple have told folks? Sure. But anyone presenting this as a profit motive or forced obsolescence is deluded.