this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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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 😄.