That's probably a good option for someone who writes for Vice or you and I, but for the average user that's pretty unfeasible. I think even with this knowledge, the point of the article still stands.
Honestly, that's way too much trouble to actually be a solution. Custom ROMs should be a hobbyist thing for people who want to spend their time tinkering with their phone, not a way to support a not-very-old device.
That sounds like what someone could say about Linux:
~ Linux should be a hobbyist thing for people who want to spend their time tinkering with their computer, not a way to support a not-very-old device. ~
Whether it comes to phones or computers, I disagree respectively when it comes to custom ROMs or Linux.
> That sounds like what someone could say about Linux:
So? The problem is both Linux and a Custom ROM take a few orders of magnitude more technical skill and effort to install and maintain, which is completely unreasonable to expect from a typical non-hobbyist retail technology user. Such users should be able to click "update" on their system, get up-to-date with patches, so they can go on to do what really want to do (which probably isn't "maintain their technology"). I'm even someone who's capable of doing that, but I don't want to because I've got much better and more important things do with my time now.
Installing Linux is often far easier than installing Windows nowadays, and multiple distributions offer long-time support. It's an excellent way of getting more life out of semi-old systems.
Been there, done that, got the tshirt (a nice CyanogenMod one). Then I switched to iPhone years ago, and my regret is that I should have done that WAY earlier.
I had a: Nexus S, Galaxy S3, Sony XPeria Ultra, Nexus 6, Moto S. All those were bought with custom ROM support in mind. My experience was love and hate:
- Clean minimal Android is really NICE.
- Not having (insert Facebook bloatware here) on your phone is NICE!
- Custom ROMs break often, the moment you move away from a big project like CyanogenMOD (later LineageOS), you are pretty much depending on one or two people. If those people change phones, you are sol. Hell, it happens with big projects as well.
- Some apps don't work unless you install Magisk to bypass Google's Safetynet.
- One slight mistake flashing a device and you risk in having a nice paperweight.
- Flashing/modding your phone takes a LOT of time.
- Bootloader unlock might void warranties (might not be legal) but as an individual I can't fathom to sue a megacorp.
I realized that my time was way more precious than fiddling often with a phone, so I just went over to the iOS camp, never looked back. My mom is now using my old iPhone 6S Plus with latest and greatest version of iOS.
Knowing about ROM flashing and being able to do it or wanting to spend the time on it are very different things.
The author specifically says they want their phone to be a reliable appliance. I do not think they have the appetite for reflashing the ROM, nor should a consumer be required to do so.
-----
This is from the website, this is not something an average person should attempt:
Open a terminal on your host computer, change to the directory where you saved device-flasher, and then run:
shasum -a 256 device-flasher.darwin
And ensure the result says 04b4cf9912d853e0f108b42a756fd74db7a11cc6c951e05820e96d28ce56e543.
Furthermore - should the user succeed in flashing CalyxOS, they will inevitably be faced at one point with something about their device that doesn't work quite right. Maybe it's tied to Google Play Services (and the g-apps shim that Calyx supports) or a banking app that won't pass the security checks and thusly, won't open.
I've not run Calyx myself, but those are issues I've personally experienced with other ROMs. If the author just wants a phone that works, this isn't the best option. I find the "is forcing me to.." a bit hyperbolic, but their point stands.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I had a Nexus 6P and after that experience I promised myself that I will never buy a Google hardware device ever again. The company has the wrong mentality regarding its handsets and how to take care of the customers who buy them.
I bought an LG G7 from Google Fi, and it was exactly 18 months from the phone's release to when they stopped updating it. I didn't buy it on day one either, so I got even less. I vowed that was the last e-waste phone I'm buying and moved to an iPhone last year.
There are still a lot of things I like better on Android, but it's not worth it.
This is in large part due to poor luck and changing phones a lot, but I managed to use Android for around 4 years without ever receiving an over the air system update.
I jumped off when the third Nexus 5X replacement Google gave me also bootlooped. Total junk and probably the most frustrating product experience I've ever had.
The writing's on the wall when it comes to Android SOCs now anyway, Apple phones from 4 years ago perform better and still get updates. They have their own issues, but they're not existential level problems.
This is sort of what I wonder about the Tensor in the new Pixels... but after Pixel 3 I'm not willing to gamble that much money on what looks like yet-another of Google's attempts to shift blame about why they can't support their phones. If Pixel "6a" has Tensor and is priced like a phone that will only be supported for 3 years, I'll consider it.
But frankly it's really hard to justify not getting an iPhone anymore. I have three kids and they all want iPhones and all their social life is on iMessage. Not to mention that all the apps I have to use for work are better supported in iPhone and have issues on Android but IT doesn't really care. It's becoming really difficult to justify not just getting my wife and I iPhones in the next cycle and planning to hand them down.
Apple makes some really nice devices, but there's a lot of people (myself included) that have a strong aversion to their "you don't want this, you want this other thing that we decided" mentality. Their software commonly does something totally different than what you tell it to do, because they decided it's better. Because of that, I will never own an iphone.
Its frustrating that all the big companies act like "we're big, so we'll do what we want, no matter how annoying it is to the end user" ... and the small companies really can't compete/disrupt the market because they're not big enough.
I guess I'm at the point where I just don't care to futz with the device much anymore and try to limit my use of the phone. In the early days you'd load custom ROMs and tweak things and that was a lot of fun. Nowadays I just want something that is secure and works. Nexus and Pixel devices have always been very good at that for me. But now that I don't care so much about that it means the focus is on device lifetime, security and long-term cost. Apple wins those.
But also so many of the people around me use iOS devices now that I end up having to learn how to use them anyway. Yikes I sound like an Apple shill... but the opposite is true. lol
My wife went into iTunes and moved a bunch of songs onto her phone. Then she went out and tried to play those songs... and it tried to download them off the cloud (using data, which is a limited resource). Apparently, copying to the phone didn't _actually_ copy them, just put sort of "shortcut" there pointing at it on the cloud. That was definitely _not_ what she wanted, but the software decided otherwise.
Similar pet peeve: how you can have a tab open on iOS Safari, even for a static page, leave it for 20 seconds, and come back, and then it has to re-download the entire page. It somehow won’t even cache what you had to local storage.
I mean.. that's not a feature. That's a bug (likely due to RAM being full). I rarely if ever have this issue, but I do remember it happening at some point, but that's definitely not a feature that iOS thinks is better.
Really? I mean, I've seen it over ten years of usage, and it's never been any other way, so that sounds like a deliberate decision. At the very least, not using internal storage -- when RAM is needed for something else -- is a decision.
Mobile device OS's do not swap to storage because the typical mobile storage is bottom-of-the-barrel eMMC and the wear-and-tear of swapping on the flash would be a killer.
It would only need to do it in the few occasions when the tabs have filled up the available RAM and they're large enough to be worth dumping. iPhones use bottom of the barrel storage?
I see that sporadically but it's uncommon enough to be noteworthy on an iPhone 11. Do you have an extension installed or are switching to a very RAM-hungry application? I typically only see that if I switched over to do something like edit a video.
No, nothing RAM hungry. Only extensions are adblockers. And it's an iPhone 8, which, yes, I know, is from the Dark Ages where no one could ever expect any amount of data to be stored ever, but this has happened with every iPhone I've had back to 2012, including ones that were bought close to release.
I get this, but honestly it's more important for me to have a phone that works... I can deal with inexplicable software changes, I make some of my own. At one point I had the same iPhone for 4 years.
When I tried Android I couldn't get the same device to stick around for more than a year. After my 5X bootloop fiasco I tried another manufacturer and found out I couldn't even upgrade my software to patch a security issue because I had to wait on the vendor to add their crapware before releasing the update. I waited 6 months after Google released their update and then gave up... I don't know how Android users deal with the update nonsense.
I had my last Android phone for 5 years, and never had a problem until the last month; when it was just too slow and would reboot every now and again. It had security updates for the first 4 years.
My wife just switched off her iphone to an android because there were just too many places where it would ... just do it's own thing instead of what she told it to (like I noted in another response; placing songs on the cloud instead of on her phone like she told it to). It didn't "just work" in a lot of cases, for any sane definition of that phrase.
> It didn't "just work" in a lot of cases, for any sane definition of that phrase.
I was thinking about this the other day, and how Apple's departure from skeuomorphism made a lot of "just works" analogies a lot more dilute. I've never been particularly fond of Apple's design chops, be it from 2008 or 2018, but there's something to be said about how digital Corinthian leather and wood textures makes a person perceive a device. It also made their design philosophy fairly straightforward: if you're designing a digital bookshelf, it should work similarly to a physical one. There was no ambiguous frosted-glass layer of UI, nor "lickable" candy buttons littering your experience. It was just... functional. Modern Apple seems pretty disinterested in that stuff though. Relative to the rest of the tech industry, they're the same clowns in a different circus.
> Apple makes some really nice devices, but there's a lot of people (myself included) that have a strong aversion to their "you don't want this, you want this other thing that we decided" mentality. Their software commonly does something totally different than what you tell it to do, because they decided it's better. Because of that, I will never own an iphone.
I feel like this gets talked about a lot in the abstract but it's rare that I actually run into a limitation in normal usage, and when it is I usually agree with the decision behind it (e.g. limiting cross-application data access for security reasons or moving away from kernel extensions). I think the best example is not supporting different browser engines but I have very mixed emotions there because I'd love to be able to use Firefox but iOS is basically the main thing keeping “the web” from meaning “what the Chrome team chooses to support”.
The update period on iphones is mind boggling good if you are coming from Chinese android phones for example. I've seen android phones ship a version behind and never get an update.
Apple were releasing updates to the 6s in 2021 still. That's a 7 year old device. Security updates only pretty much - but still its crazy. My wife will not upgrade her old phone as a result (I get one every year through work and just sell my old one).
The 6S (and the SE, which also uses the A9) is still receiving all the latest OS updates, not just security updates, in 2022.
I for one won't "upgrade" to a bigger phone with no fingerprint sensor and no headphone jack. I don't agree with many things Apple does, but their iPhone support is pretty damn good.
The difference is Apple OS updates on older devices don't always have all the features the new OS gets on newer hardware (which makes sense in many cases) while older Android phones can run most of the latest updates to Android (e.g., Jetpack Compose)
A SwiftUI app vs Compose app right now is night and day, bugs from iOS 13.5 to 13.6 are catastrophic meanwhile Android devices with extremely old operating systems run the latest UI toolkit with very few issues.
My 5X died in my pocket before a year of usage. Just died and wouldn't turn on. I called support and they said to ship it out, and I would have a new one in about a week. Never mind 1) phones shouldn't just randomly die, and 2) a week without a phone??? Switched to iPhone and never looked back.
Does Apple give you a replacement before sending in your existing phone?
Maybe in the US, on Apple's homeland, but I doubt they do this in the EU. Would be cool if they did though.
Whenever I upgrade phones, I still keep my previous device around so that when I had to send my last gen to the service, I can always quickly switch to the previous one for a couple of weeks until it's back
You can walk into an Apple store and walk out with a replacement.
If you had backups running to your Mac or PC (which can happen over WiFi automatically when both the phone and mac are on line power), you've got a whole-device backup that will have you up and running as fast as it takes the backup to restore.
In situations like this I've usually had the manufacturer provide an option to immediately ship a replacement and charge the full cost of the replacement if the device isn't received within 30 days.
That's what google did for my nexus 5x when it broke - and that was over 2 years after I purchased it and out of warranty. I did get it from the play store though, and so may change depending on where you purchased it from.
Still annoying, and phones shouldn't die like that, but it was probably the best thing they could have done by that point.
I can't speak to the EU, but living in the non-California US, yes. I've gotten next-day replacements accompanied by a box for returning the bricked phone. This is accompanied by the caveat that if they don't receive the bricked phone in something like 30 days, you're on the hook for the full purchase price of the replacement they sent you.
Hey, my 5X did the exact same thing. I couldn't find anything on the web about it happening to anyone else. I thought it was just me.
The thing died on my desk at work, wouldn't even turn on, just a few days before I was going on a long trip so after a few hours of looking for fixes and talking to support I just went to an Apple store and got an iPhone. Now I at least feel comfortable that if I have an issue I can go to a physical store and get help in a pinch.
I had the 5 as well that constantly boot loaded. A couple years later I really wanted the photos off it that hadn’t been synced and so I took it apart and found the issue to be a design flaw in the power button. I made a custom power button replacement and it booted right up. I have no idea who’s idea it was to have the entire phone’s functionality dependent on a thin, flimsy piece of plastic, but it made me never buy a google product again. I had a google pixel 2 at the time and it’s the last google phone I’ve had.
I've considered a cheap backup phone just in case I ever have to have a repair on my phone that will either require leaving it at an Apple Store or Best Buy longer than I can wait in store or will require sending it away.
There are unlocked 4G phones such as the Nokia 225 for under $50 and the Nokia 6300 for under $70.
I could then either use the SIM from my iPhone, or if I didn't mind using a temporary number instead of my regular number while the iPhone is being repaired Mint Mobile has a "try before you buy" kit for $2 that includes a SIM and new number that is good for one week of service. It is meant to let people test out Mint Mobile before switching to make sure coverage and service are satisfactory, but seems like it would also work for someone who just wanted temporary service.
What happens to somebody who doesn't have a computer whose phone dies spontaneously like this? I assume that an iPhone user would be able to show up at a store and buy a new phone/replacement, but if you're a Google user and you don't have a good way to 2FA to log into your email... what do you do?
Personally, I support ecosystems where the people in power don't apply pressure on social media networks to ban any remotely sexually explicit content, or discussion of depression and PTSD.
From what I remember, the Nexuses 5x had a manufacturing error, which caused them to spontaneously desolder some components from the board, resulting in the bootloop. This was a problem in a lot (maybe even most) phones. Mine was in a bootloop too. There was a class action about it too, see if you may still be able to claim cash: https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/1/31/16957332/l...
I strongly doubt Google's narrative about a manufacturing defect as the root cause. Several different devices with varying manufacturers were affected. In my case, the bootloop began immediately after the upgrade to Android Oreo.
Google told me, a US customer, to send my device to Huawei's nearest service center in mainland China at my own cost for diagnosis and repair. That is unacceptable for a Google-branded product designed by Google, unveiled by Google, marketed by Google, sold directly by Google, warrantied by Google, and bricked by Google.
Imagine, if you will, Audi sending you to Bosch in Germany (at your own cost!) after an Audi dealership in Indiana bricks your ECU during a recall service.
My impression is Google's are still the most updated. I've had a Nexus S, 4, 5 and currently have Pixel 3. I've never really had any problems with the Google-managed devices. Motorola and Samsung... let's just say I will never, ever buy a phone from them ever again. The choice is between Pixel and iPhone. But after the Pixel 3 I will not pay for the "premium" class Pixels.
When is a hardware maker going to figure out that selling something that works like a PC in terms of third party system updates will immediately become the thing that techs buy and recommend?
People are willingly paying iPhone prices for Purism and Pinephone hardware with low specs and old chips. Does Samsung not want this money?
People still regularly ask me what kind of phone to get.
I start by excluding the ones with literal malware and after that the primary determinant is price, because if it's going to be rapidly disposable anyway then there's no point in making a large investment.
"Let's force them to buy a new phone more often" is the kind of first year on the job MBA move that sounds profitable on paper as long as you fail to notice that the average Android phone now sells for less than a third of the price of the average iPhone. And that's revenue; the difference in margins is even bigger.
Not a single one of my friends or family (n=50) has asked me for phone recommendations in the past 4 years (and I can only recall two recommendation requests ever).
It's certainly not common enough that you see mentions about it on HN or Reddit - and yet, you see mentions of adjacent things like requests for tech support. So, it's clearly not very common.
People vent about getting asked to do free tech support because it's time consuming unpaid labor.
The premise of asking for a recommendation is that the tech has already done the research (e.g. for themselves) and can provide a two word answer off the top of their head. There is little reason to complain about this on a message board or even bother to remember when it happens. But it does.
You even admit to doing it yourself. How many swings of a $400 purchase from one vendor to another does it take per capita to be enough to care about?
> People are willingly paying iPhone prices for Purism and Pinephone hardware with low specs and old chips.
...for almost certainly tiny numbers of sales in both cases, and nowhere near "iPhone prices" for Pinephones. Samsung cares about money, and their current strategy is far more lucrative than selling very small amounts of Librem devices at modest profit margins.
iPhone SE is $399. PinePhone Pro is $399. Samsung is averaging ~$250.
> ...for almost certainly tiny numbers of sales in both cases
They're doing preorders and are regularly sold out and backordered, despite having high prices and old hardware and weird bugs. That is what high demand looks like.
Meanwhile no change to the hardware is required and Samsung could carry on selling to everyone they currently do, plus all of those people.
This whole comments section is full of people complaining about this. If you give them a choice between two otherwise fungible phones, one that has open source drivers etc. and can therefore run an up to date vanilla kernel indefinitely, why wouldn't they all choose that one?
> They're doing preorders and are regularly sold out and backordered, despite having high prices and old hardware and weird bugs. That is what high demand looks like.
The custom Linux phone I make is also sold out! I've made zero units and there are zero available. That is what high demand looks like.
Is it sarcasm because you can't point to anyone who isn't selling out?
There is clearly more demand than there is supply.
This is the weirdest position to stake out. That nobody wants this because everybody who makes one has a line of customers around the block and mainstream media outlets are writing stories about how much people want this, which go to the front page of tech news aggregators because of all the people who feel the same way.
What evidence of demand are you looking for? A larger production run which is also commercially successful? You can't expect that as a precondition for doing one.
The thing that changed is that Google started pitching, and pricing, the Pixel phones as premium phones. At least with the Nexus line they were more modestly priced. So the lack of long term updates was still an issue, but more people were willing to swallow it given the price differential vs. the iPhone.
Exactly. Google played the "pay Apple prices for an Apple experience" tactic and already reneged. They're in a tough spot because I won't trust them again with anything not priced to be replaced in three years. So when you get to the question of wanting a device that lasts longer, the answer seems to be Apple.
Honestly I think this is the real issue: batteries barely last three years and when they start to go things go strange and people blame the phone rather than replace the battery. I expect somewhere inside Google they grok that supporting a phone beyond three years becomes the root cause problem being dying batteries.
Which is about the same thing for an iPhone? Apple stores don't magically replace batteries in seconds. On my iPhone 6s, I had both a bad battery, and a defective display - took 7 hours to get my phone back after scheduling an appointment at the Apple Store.
I wonder how much of this could be extended by phones just auto-limiting charging to 90% (current phones already time charging so when left on overnight it only reaches 100% when you wake up) most of the time, since that seems to increase battery longevity by a lot.
I had one of the affected phones and concur that it was shitty of them to try and sneak that by people, but "throttled the peak CPU boost" is a long way from "bricked"
Upside of the settlement was I got a battery replacement for $30 (performed same day in store) and coming up on 6 years since release the original iPhone SE is still running the latest version of iOS.
Also a happy OG SE user who got one of the cheap battery replacements. Replaced again a couple years later with an iFixit battery for ~$30, still using it to this day. Holding out for a worthy upgrade path...
> My impression is Google's are still the most updated
OnePlus phones are/were also quite good (at least when I bought my OnePlus 6, I have heard it went… downhill from there). But I did two years of updates, plus one more through LineageOS. And I'll probably update again when LineageOS has their Android 12 release.
OnePlus phones are good because they are (still) easily bootloader-unlockable, and are thus good (excellent) for custom ROMs. They do update fairly often on stock, but I think the stock ROM is getting worse and worse. Still, they're up there.
Do yourself a favor and let Android 12 settle down for a bit before you upgrade. I've heard nothing but bugs, bugs, and more bugs. Though I guess we can assume that they won't pump out a LineageOS release if they find a bunch of bugs, since unlike Google the LineageOS devs actually have pride in the software they produce.
> I've heard nothing but bugs, bugs, and more bugs.
I "upgraded" to a Pixel 6 and Android 12 has been completely fine for me, so it might be certain people. I am aware some of my friends had bugs with Android 12, though.
If you pick and choose your hardware correctly (waiting for reviews and news of major defects to come out), you can do fairly well -- my SO has the 4a, and it works admirably for her. Had a 3a before that and she only upgraded because the screen broke and it would cost more than the phone to replace it.
But I'm inclined to agree. Just look at the 6 and 6 Pro. They rolled out an upgrade, ruined cellular connectivity for a good chunk of users, and then all of the engineers peaced out for the holidays, with no way to downgrade to a usable release for effected users other than wiping their entire phone and starting from scratch. For their flagship phones.
With word that the 6a is ditching the headphone jack and rear fingerprint sensor, and also inching up in size to gargantuan phablet dimensions, it'll be easy to switch away in the future.
I've still got a pixel 2 and it works swimmingly. Sometimes the 4k video stops recording and sometimes there's a bit of slow down but it hasn't convince me to change devices just yet.
Also rocking a Pixel 2 (XL) 128GB here, even recently swapped the battery and its like new again. Replacing it with an equivalent or better phone would cost a good bit of money.
What security issues should I be concerned about? It's difficult to spend the time going through the CVE database to figure this out, I see a lot of privilege escalation issues but I don't install apps that I don't trust anyway. I still get browser updates. I care less about the bugs and more about the attack vectors.
What does trusted app mean? A priv esc means you're now worried that any other app has a vulnerability. You might trust your default weather app to not be malicious but do you trust it and hundred other standard apps to be secure?
I'd rather have a secure sandbox with untrusted apps then have insecure sandbox with a ton of attack surfaces in trusted apps.
Quote from the article: "The malware spread primarily through Google Play but also through third-party marketplaces, push notifications on compromised websites, sponsored links on Google, and messages delivered by WhatsApp or SMS. At the time, Brata targeted people with accounts from Brazil-based banks."
With browser updates, limited browsing, restricting app downloads, you might be in the clear. But looks like malware makers also use WhatsApp or SMS.
I respectfully disagree. I had a 3a until very recently and was happy with it.
Then it downloaded the update for Android 12 (I think), and got corrupted, and essentially became unstable and unusable - things like bluetooth headsets would crash the device.
This was a phone that was working great, until it wasn't. I wasn't able to find others with the same issue. Their customer service is non-existent. End of the line.
This is what pushed me to get an iPhone recently - at least I can walk into an apple store if the thing crashes completely. I've bought multiple android devices over the years, and its always been underwhelming and disappointing. The only upside has been that its been cheap. Now that I can afford one, I think an iPhone is the only viable choice (for me).
I know there are people who own Google devices and this has never happened with them, but this has been my experience of being a life-long android user.
I'm having exactly the same issues with bluetooth on my Pixel. You are not alone. I can't connect to my car or any wireless device, it just crashes the phone.
This is a fantastic point, thanks for bringing it up. I mentioned in my original post that my S.O. uses a 4a these days -- I'm still using an iPhone from 2016, the SE. Which is still receiving current iOS updates. Things aren't all rosy on the iPhone side of things (some iOS updates, particularly iOS 12, iirc, were full of bugs, and battery estimation has occasionally fallen apart after system updates)... but overall it's nice that I've been able to use the same phone for 6 years now. And it only cost me $400, so... the same as the 3a.
It's very, very nice that you can go into an Apple store for iPhone support. Mailing in your phone to another manufacturer to deal with an issue is a miserable experience, and Google's uBreakifix relationship is not perfect for regular customer service and manufacturer defects.
If there is an Apple store nearby, being able to walk in with a broken phone and walk out a half hour later with a new/replacement phone is more valuable than people realize.
I was an Android user back in the Nexus days, and had something similar happen to my Nexus 7 tablet. It worked fine, updated Android, became unusable. I read they finally addressed it later, but I had already moved on.
> If there is an Apple store nearby, being able to walk in with a broken phone and walk out a half hour later with a new/replacement phone is more valuable than people realize.
And if not, my single experience with Best Buy is that I can get my iPhone replacement the next day.
Like many others in this discussion, I switched to Apple after Google screwed me with one of their phones.
Yeah, they pushed an update that made the device completely unusable. I'm not sure if that was related to the issue with the storage on it also degrading. I still have it and I managed to load a custom rom on it but it's still remarkably slow. It's too bad, too. The device itself was (and still is, IMO) something that I'd love a modern version of without all the issues. I also had a nexus 5 phone which was great (and aesthetically it's still my favorite phone ever)... until it got stuck in a bootloop 2 weeks after warranty... which they helped me out with and sent me another one out of warranty, but that replacement also almost immediately started bootlooping.
After that I just can't trust Google at all with hardware and since then my opinion of Google as a whole has largely soured. The Galaxy S6 I got to replace it worked quite well but after several years went back to the iPhone .
Chiming in to say I had the same bluetooth issue that resulted in the phone telling me that my storage was corrupt shortly after pairing a new device. Managed to resolve it by updating the Google app and all other Google Play Services related apps that I could.
>Now that I can afford one, I think an iPhone is the only viable choice
On a low budget used iPhones are pretty good choice. I've a couple of 2016 SEs bought for ~$100 each. Work well, usual Apple plus points. Easy to get fixed when you break screens, batteries etc. too - go to any phone fixers.
I had one of those defective google Nexus 7 tablets which suffered from bad hardware and software rendering the device unusable. It died after a year. Well not completely dead, it booted but was so slow as to be totally unusable. Google did nothing to compensate save for some bullshit discount on a new nexus device. Like I'm going to give them more money after telling me to go fuck myself.
I also bought a Nexus/Pixel 5 phone or whatever around the same time and that too had issues after 2 years. I forget the issues but it had to be rebooted frequently, at least once a day due to slowdowns. Replaced with an HTC that ran much better for 4 years until I accidentally killed it.
After those two turds I will NEVER buy google garbage ever again.
Yeah, I jumped ship earlier. I had the Nexus One, Nexus S, and Galaxy Nexus (which was a horrible phone) and then jumped to an iPhone 5. It's hard to find hardware as consistently good as the iPhone and after the redesign from 12 onward it's been really great (I wish they'd keep the mini around).
I would have thought Google finally bringing the hardware design in house with the pixel phones would let them create a real competitor, but they seem to be just okay?
Lack of focus maybe? Might just be a case of commoditize your complement, in this case the complement for Google is the hardware.
I've had an Android phone since the TMobile 3G (second ever Android phone) and I'm starting to seriously consider an iPhone.
I'm not an Apple fan. I don't use any Apple products right now. However, it's impossible to deny that Android phones are always 2-3 years behind Apple in terms of hardware and software.
I also never spend more than $500 on a phone, which has iPhones out of reach.
I think the iphone SE is under $500. I used an apple iphone 8 up until this Christmas. The iphone SE is basically a slightly upgraded iphone 8 which i think has 1 more gb of ram or something.
I will sometimes just buy a model or 2 back used or refurbished since they last for quite a while. You could probably get the 11 for under $500 as well.
You can get a lot of used iPhone for $500. I bought my XS maybe 3 years ago for a little less than 500€. I’m still using it. The battery starts to age but not enough for a replacement (it generally finishes the day but I have no more extra buffer). Other than that, I can’t imagine what could make me buy anything else.
I would totally love an iPhone mini because i find the Xs too big but i don’t feel like it’s worth spending money. I would also totally buy a non-googled Android (because I don’t like nowadays Apple mentality) that I could keep updated for years but it just doesn’t exists.
So here I am, with my Xs, which honestly, feels like, to me, an exceptional phone for 2022: beautiful, fast, updated, nice picture quality, reliable, and totally cheap. It would be a total dream if the App Store wasn’t a dictature or if side loading was possible.
Ah, same here. I really like the positives the iphone seems to have, but can't justify buying a phone that's as expensive as they are to myself, and then still be bogged down with consciously user-hostile design choices like no headphone jacks, sd card slots or app-sideloading.
Sucks, because everything else about iOS is super cool and well thought-out IMO.
Galaxy Nexus was a great phone at the time for the price. I had just gotten the galaxy 2 then realized that sprint had no coverage in Portland so I cancelled my contract (didn’t have to pay because I proved they mislead there coverage area). Moved to a GN on T-Mobile and loved it until I replaced it with a nexus 5x. GN was a good little phone to learn android dev on as well.
I really disliked the hardware, battery life was awful for me even after replacing it with their extended size OEM battery.
It felt like cheap plastic crap too (imo).
The iPhone 5 was the first iOS phone with turn by turn nav and LTE which were the reasons I stuck with the Nexus phones as each one got worse. The 5's battery life was also ridiculously good in comparison and the hardware design holds up even now ten years later.
The HTC Nexus One was the best of the first three, I'm not sure why Samsung gets so much love for hardware. The Nexus S and Galaxy Nexus builds were both ugly and poor. The Nokia N9 was beautiful and I was bummed when Microsoft turned them into windows only devices, they would have been great android phones.
I like them now. I'm using some $300 Nokia and its nice. Big clear screen, surfs the web just fine. Can make calls and texts. That's all I use my phone for.
The GN was meant to be a budget phone for developers to jump into Android. It wasn’t meant to be the best phone. Samsung offered the Galaxy 2 at that time that was much better. The GN cost $350 no contract which was unheard of at the time.
The Nexus phones were the only ones that shipped pure android without a lot of OEM crapware installed you couldn't remove (Samsung's "Touchwiz").
That was another thing at the time which pushed me away from android, they didn't have control over their OS because of this lack of control over hardware.
It was a little like Windows and all the crap that came installed on it, except worse because you couldn't even reset it.
Well, they also have the wrong mentality on virtually everything else that Google does. They've shut down many more half-baked projects, far more than their successes. Google at least to me was/is solely successful at search, and ads. Even those are quickly turning to junk and the bane of the entire internet. Google should be busted up, sooner than later. But that's just me!
My Pixel XL bricked itself one morning due to a software update that triggered some kind of hardware bug. Great phone until that point, then poof, and it wouldn't even connect with a debug connection to my PC to replace the firmware or recover itself.
I've put it on a shelf until I can get time/money to recover the data from the flash, but lesson learned.
Regret to inform you that it almost certainly isn't a bug - the flash died. It's unrecoverable.
Large numbers of pixel 3/3xl's have started dying in the last year and it looks like it's the flash wearing out on all the early adopter/heavy user devices. This happened to me too.
> Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I had a Nexus 6P and after that experience I promised myself that I will never buy a Google hardware device ever again. The company has the wrong mentality regarding its handsets and how to take care of the customers who buy them.
Regardless, as of 2020 the only non absolute shit Android phones are Pixels. Essential, which was another non-shit Android, is dead because rather than re-iterating its boneheaded founder decided the market was in the TV remote control like device.
Samsung's flagship phones push ads as a part of the operating system. Let that sink in. On a $1,200 phone!
OnePlus can't make its interface not crash. Neither can it convince the carriers to whitelist its profiles in the United States for 5G and Wifi calling.
My neighbor has a Galaxy S21 Ultra. It had ads last week.
Out of all sucky Android devices and due to my work I probably touched at least 3/4 of models sold via non-grey market channel in the US the only phones that are functional are Pixels, which sucks.
My wife has an iPhone 12. Pixel 6 today is either in the same class or beats it. Of course it is highly unlikely that it will beat it in 2024 given Google track record of refusing to reiterate.
I had the exact same experience! Had a Nexus 6p, it boot looped and I sweared off Android forever. Ever since then I've been iPhone only and I have no complaints --- went from the 8 plus to a 13 Pro Max recently, but honestly it was a vanity upgrade and was not necessary at all.
I was eventually forced to upgrade my iPad because the YouTube app stopped working due to a required update that was unavailable for my device. Several others such as banking apps stopped working before that.
Before that I had to ditch my otherwise perfectly fine OnePlus phone for similar reasons. I went with a Nokia because they promised several years of Android updates, so we'll see how that pans out.
You know, I am so bummed Microsoft gave up on a mobile OS. I feel by this time they would've been be a real refreshing alternative to the <expletive>show we have right now.
I have plenty of issues with Google's posture on privacy, but I don't expect them to steal credentials for other services, drain my bank account, blackmail me based on personal information, or any such thing. Conflating the two removes a lot of much needed nuance from the discussion.
"A bad actor within the manufacturer" and "the manufacturer itself" are entirely different threats. There's no particular reason why Google would be more exposed to that sort of bad apple than Apple, or any other provider.
How long should they provide software updates for? 3-years? 5-years? 10-years? What would be an acceptable cut off date for providing updates? I wouldn't expect companies to provide updates for their old hardware forever, but what would be an acceptable date that will benefit both consumers and the company itself.
What I want is for them to commit to supporting a device for some number of years after it's introduced so I know what to expect when I buy one. It should be one of the things manufacturers compete on.
Right, that's the calculation any consumer good producing company has to do. When we buy industrial equipment we pay a huge markup for vendor promises that they'll support for 10+ years. It's painful at the time but we have automated manufacturing equipment that's been running 20+ years. When I purchase controllers, sensors, motors, etc. it cost me double or triple what I could have paid but now I'm happy I did.
But I also know that our products (PCs and printers) can't have that same support model, we'd be out of business and we don't have a lucrative ad business that could buy us customer loyalty via loss leaders. I think 5-8 years is reasonable.
As this article aptly demonstrates every time a phone is bought it is an opportunity to leave an ecosystem.
The manufacturer cannot guarantee that that the phone sold to a consumer will be replaced with a phone from the same company. So it's definitely within the interest of the company to support the phones for longer to keep consumers in the ecosystem.
At least as long as their main competitor, which currently has a phone that has been supported for 6.5 and will probably remain supported up until 8 years from its release date (iPhone 6S).
What if vendors released the source code for the hardware drivers after the devices fall out of official support? Even if nobody at the company has time to support the hardware there is always a chance that the community can take over.
This is how Linux maintains driver support for hardware long past the point where it doesn't work on modern Windows or MacOS. I've noticed several occasions where the support stops because the kernel was updated and nobody wants to make the effort to port the drivers forward, especially since those drivers were delivered as a binary blob.
Or improving updates. Why can my Linux distro not care what model I whatever I have but every bit of android is specifically tailored to that exact phone model
They offer five years of security updates on the Pixel 6 and eight years of security updates for any chromebook from 2020. Nest and Chromecast devices also all get five plus years of updates. The minimum should be this across all android/chrome OS manufacturers though.
If you buy a Pixel 6 today you get OS updates until October 2024 and security updates until October 2026 which is shown on Google support pages. Similar to if you were to buy an iOS device except you'd only have past experience to go off because they won't actually promise you anything.
It's easy you know from testing when your silicon or other parts of the phone are going to degrade beyond the point of it being useable. If you sell hardware that is not obsolete for your customers but you make it obsolete because of software you pulled the trigger to early.
>Unless you routinely destroy your phone within two or three years, there’s no justification from a sustainability perspective to keep using Android phones. Of course, Apple is only good by comparison, as it also manufactures devices that are difficult to repair with an artificially short shelf life. It just happens to have a longer shelf life than Google.
Most of the iPhone users I see are using a phone they purchased within the past three years. Does the average iPhone get used for longer than the average Pixel?
Yes, because that old iphone is handed down to a kid or sold to someone else. The android resale market was trash last I looked. I still have family using iPhone 7 pluses but the battery is showing wear (but thats pretty cheap to replace).
Sure, back in the iPhone 4/4S days iOS 7 trashed older phones. Unusably bad. Should never have rolled out those UI updates if they couldn't perform well on older hardware.
These days? I'm using a 2016 SE with iOS 15. Works great. I do not hate my phone. In fact, the small size, fingerprint sensor, and headphone jack make it a better buy than any modern smartphone. I can live without AI text recognition on my photos, which seems to be limited to newer phones. The app switcher, settings, browser, and everything else are still as snappy as the day I bought this thing. Only thing that doesn't run well? Spotify, which apparently doesn't bother to test their UI on small hardware (constantly clips links and text off the bottom of my screen), nor older CPUs (the app takes forever to start up, regularly freezes up when searching for songs, and can take anywhere from 1 second to 30 seconds to load even already downloaded albums).
Instead of making knee-jerk anti-Apple assumptions, you might try to check some facts.
edit: apparently the statistics I linked are behind a paywall, but the stats from the app I'm working on show me that approx 10% of users are on iPhones that are 7 years or older.
We can't tell because Apple is a little opaque with the devices that are in the wild, and Pixels are such a small slice of the entire Android population. What we have are only third party accounts of the iPhone population, e.g. https://deviceatlas.com/blog/most-popular-iphones
According to that (maybe selection-biased) source, it looks like the most popular iPhone is the one released the same year the first Pixel was released. We can't conclude anything about which is used longer, but Android app updates are required to target API level 30 I think for Android, which is no longer supported on the first Pixel, so there's probably a pressure that urges users off of that phone. I'd be surprised if percentage-wise, a larger share of Pixel users are on the original Pixel than iPhone users on iPhone 7.
Funny how "dumb"phones are better at reliability. No need for updates, and battery lasts for more than a week.
Funny how they still offer replaceable batteries, even though they cost a fraction of "smart"phones.
To avoid financing the software-planned-obsolescence empire, you can use a combination of cheap second-hand "smart"phones for maps and chat apps that are important for you, and a dumb phone for reliable stuff like alarms, calls, and SMS.
Now when dumb phones also have internet connectivity, is this really sound advice? Having no updates only means that vulnerabilities are not getting fixed. Since 4G connectivity and WhatsApp have become the minimum requirement for the bulk of the market, dumb phones have become Linux pcs with always-on internet, too.
I've been curious about the KaiOS phones for a few years now... the OS is derived from the old Firefox mobile OS, but most KaiOS devices seem to be candybar/flip-phones; the OS is "smart"ish, but the hardware looks "dumb".
It's kind of hard to find information about them, but if I could get a basic flip-phone that has a maps app, I'd be reasonably happy. I used to get by with a dumb phone and just write down directions before I left the house, but now that I'm married, plans tend to change more often.
I have the Nokia 8110 4G bananaphone, it has what's app and maps, and syncs with your google account, thr battery lasts about 2x as long as thay of a smartphone. It imagined using it on trips or hikes, but its just collecting dust in the drawer
Unfortunately, it seems that modern "dumb" (or feature) phones now are being required (or only) to support LTE and their stand-by battery life has declined quite dramatically. Many now seem to advertise battery life of quite a bit less than a week.
It's unclear to me why LTE appears to consume much more power to "do nothing." But I recall easily getting a week or so of actual battery life being completely normal a decade ago.
As a current Pixel 3 user, I think this article is slightly hyperbolic. The phone still works great other than a worse battery, definitely not "garbage". The author is making it sound like the phone stops working. But then again I still use Windows 7 which also doesn't have security updates.
Its not hyperbolic. I wrote the policy for my company's phone policy. If an employee wants to access any company resources from their personal phone (optional) they must submit to a phone audit. The audit is a checklist of security best practices including verifying that the phone is receiving security updates for the OS. So if they need a phone for work, they either upgrade to a newer phone or carry a second phone with security updates for work purposes. Either way they have to get a new phone. What else would a company do? You can't just have employees storing credentials for company accounts on a device that is likely to get pwned.
Personally I don't see how anyone could justify having an out-of-date phone. Assuming you have it configured to read your email, it becomes a gateway to every account you own, which can have its password reset over email. MFA might help as long as that MFA isn't an app on your phone. But most websites don't support hardware security keys. If you care enough to have a dedicated TOTP device, then why would you want a phone with no security updates?
This use of "forcing" does not require bricking the phone. Creating a situation where the only reasonable choice is to upgrade the hardware qualifies as "forcing" in my opinion. The phone is no longer capable of performing the job for which it was designed in a safe way.
Google isn't holding a gun to anyone's head or intentionally bricking devices, but if you use your phone for work (or it's a work-issued phone) and your employer requires you update to the latest security patches (enforced via MDM), the Pixel 3 is now useless.
And you're probably thinking "oh but this is an old device, just get a newer one for work." True, but consider that Pixel 6/6 Pro users got screwed over when the December update was yanked [0] and the January update got delayed for them [1] - while it was good for most users not to take the buggy update, anyone whose device had those security requirements ended up getting work-related functionality disabled.
Of course, the companies that set these policies are generally ones who will not make exceptions, so even though you had the latest and greatest from Google, you couldn't use it for work for several weeks until they finally pushed out the January security update.
"People who have MDM-enforced security requirements" might not be a large part of the smartphone market these days, but every little bit counts when it comes to reducing the volume of e-waste that usually ends up being dumped in third-world countries.
Did we read the same article? Without security updates, you really shouldn't rely on a phone for banking/payments/secure messaging. Google has effectively killed the Pixel 3 for real usage.
You should be able to throw LineageOS on there as long as you don't have a locked Verizon bootloader. But there are a lot of caveats to that, in terms of which apps will work when rooted, which won't etc. etc.
There's also the fact that LineageOS will fix only Android-related bugs, you're still stuck with the unpatched vendor firmware (which includes the kernel, unless I'm mistaken).
So just to clear up my understanding: using LineageOS up-to-date means you should be safe from kernel and Android bugs, but you're still vulnerable to firmware issues, which would just be... hardware level, like your WiFi chip, CPU, USB-C port, camera, microphone, etc?
Potentially. Google also stills updates AOSP too, so you're not 100% reliant on LineageOS et al for these updates.
There's nothing stopping you from grabbing those blobs out of Google's AOSP images and updating them, but there's no way to ensure the abstraction layers work correctly with them unless you test it.
> Without security updates, you really shouldn't rely on a phone for banking/payments/secure messaging. Google has effectively killed the Pixel 3 for real usage.
There is a lot of real usage which is not "banking/payments/secure messaging". Besides, stopping security updates does not mean the phone suddenly becomes open to the whole world. Many vulnerabilities might be exploitable only when running code natively on the device, or only when within radio range, or only when plugged directly to the USB port.
> Unless maybe you count email as secure messaging in some way
I would say yes, considering email is often used as a primary means to reset account passwords. Most services support MFA (which could be somewhat of a mitigating security control), but a LOT of services still don't.
How important are these security updates to your average user? If they're meant to prevent hypothetical targeted attacks, I honestly wouldn't be too worried about them. Plenty of people continue to use their Android phone despite not receiving security updates, yet I haven't heard anyone having a issue with this.
Losing control of your email/google/social media accounts and reputation (eg scams made in your name, blackmail, etc) is a comparable risk to most people. Banks are experienced at handling fraud and you're also legally shielded from bank fraud in many jurisdictions.
(though banks are also clueless in other respects, outlawing devices with lineageos but allowing devices with out of date vendor OS)
Frankly I don't get why you still use Windows 7. For the Pixel I understand that you make a choice between throwing perfectly good hardware and security but for 7, I'm not aware of any PC that can run 7 that can't run 10.
Yeah - and it's worth noting that you still get updates for your browser and messaging apps (because the android version isn't too old). Just don't install risky apps. If you're a minimalist, you're fine with a phone that stopped getting base system updates in the last year or two. I still use a Galaxy S8 that got its last security update 10 months ago.
If there's a vulnerability like stagefright in the base system that could make many up-to-date apps vulnerable, you'll hear about it on the news.
What drove me off of Android was my bank stopped supporting my device because of security updates. When I bought the phone it was a just released LG flagship, I got a full 18 months worth of sporadic at best updates, followed by nothing.
My bank disabled the app on my phone some 4 months later, when some major vulnerability was still unpatched on my phone. They told me to get a new phone, so I picked up an 2016 iPhone SE and went on my way.
Honestly, Google needs really needs to do better. Samsung has raised the bar by supporting its devices with 4 years of patches: https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/22/22295639/samsung-galaxy-d.... And frankly, how hard/expensive would it be to support these devices for far longer? Google is a massive company, and I see little reason why that can't employ a team of devs backporting patches to older phones. Current versions of Windows and Linux run happily on decades-old hardware, so a phone should at least be able to get patches for known security issues for a decade. Dev resources would be far better spent on this than yet another hamfisted attempt to build a messenger app that they'll kill in a couple years anyway.
The problem is usually complexity and opportunity cost.
Once you have a team that can keep Android patched, someone at Google is going to use them to speed up another product or create a new one.
Why not add another team more? First, the situation will repeat itself, other needs would be prioritized higher. And there is a limit on the number of teams an organization can manage without non-linear manager cost increase.
Linux runs on old hardware because big corporations own old hardware and are willing to pay to not have to replace it. Replacing a phone is a cost for the individual owner. And my experience with company phones is that they are seen as a retention perk. So newer flashier phones are worth the cost, it could be different in other industries, thou.
One common solution to these problems is regulation. The government forces phone makers to patch the software for X years. Now there is a strong incentive to do so if the phone makers want to continue operating in that market.
To be fair, part of it is due to supporting the SoC, and that means dealing with Qualcomm. Samsung has the advantage of being able to develop their own SoC's and so can support them for far longer with updates and such
This excuse doesn't hold much water anymore since the Pixel 6 is based on Google's own SoC, yet it also only offers 3 years of Android version updates.
Why can't Google do like Apple and offer many years of version updates? The iPhone 6s is still running the latest version of iOS.
I really hope there would be some regulations enforcing a decade of software support, not just for the operating system but also to provide drivers for hardware. After that, having to continue providing support or provide the source code with a permissive license and documentation.
I’m pretty free-market oriented but I think this might be the right answer. If you sell a network-connected device you should be on the hook for at least security updates for 10 years.
Good free-market solution is to price-in the cost of manufacturing emissions and eventual disposal of the hardware into the sticker price of the device by e.g. a pollution tax assessed by a regulatory agency on a per-item basis.
Manufacturers will then be incentivized to make and support lasting hardware as consumers get averse to paying the pollution tax repeatedly. (And, they will try to make more sustainable hardware that gets assessed less tax in the first place).
I don't think this kind of solution works to be honest. This creates a right to pollute or generate waste more than focusing on solving the original problem.
Having clear regulation and forbid this kind of practice that apply to everybody, not just the poor.
A tax would not solve anything, it would just give a free pass to the wealthier part of the world to pollute and generate waste. The wealthy parts of the world are the biggest source of waste and polution in the first place.
It would also allow powerful companies to bargain between countries and continue playing the dog and cat game they've been doing. Trying to force companies like Apple or Gooogle to pay existing taxes is already a lost cause. Those companies don't care about it and would rather invest in avoidance schemes.
On the contrary, if you hit where things are sold, like closing a whole market like the EU until you abide to a regulation, like the one mentionned in my comment, is much likely to have a real impact, and would be much faster to.
To me, security updates are imperative. The first security update that I don't receive is when I look for a new phone. OS updates are practically window dressing- I can go without.
Based on Android 12, I'd rather zero years of OS updates and more years of security updates.
Sick of each Android update requiring relearning where all the stuff I've been doing for the last year (or longer) has been moved to.
Android 12 made one of my major workflows start failing - leaving browser tabs open and coming back to them later. Something about how Android 12 works (I'm guess to do with how it swaps out background apps) means now most of the time when I go back to my browser, it forces a page reload, meaning I lose context of whatever I was doing before.
Bunch of other small irritating changes. I guess it doesn't matter now that it's out of support - I'm too scared to keep using it. Just gives me the shits.
Nowadays OS upgrade gives us near zero feature, especially since Google distributes some updates as Play Services and other mechanism. Only security update is fine, maybe they don't need Qualcomm's update for latest kernel.
> Samsung has raised the bar by supporting its devices with 4 years of patches
For all its warts, Apple set the bar and Android as a whole has never really reached it. The 6S is still supported right now, right? And we're on the 13?
Yep. Though, the 6s was sold for quite a long time, and I think it’s the guts of the original SE, so we’re probably still in the 5 years from last sale time frame.
My 6splus is still in the “not a bad phone” range for what I need it for today, and I haven’t managed to destroy it in 4 years.
The original 2016 iPhone SE is still arguably the highest performance small smartphone ever released as well. Good thing it's still supported because there's nothing to replace it in the same or smaller dimensions.[1]
It was really good value too. But I had to stop using it because some critical apps I need stopped supporting the smaller screen size and would be disfunctional.
I'm still using mine. I want a small phone and there's literally nothing to upgrade to, even on Android. The iPhone 13 Mini looks okay, but is still a bit larger.
I’m writing this comment from my SE 2016. Since 2016 I had to replace the battery (~30€) and the screen (my fault, ~40€) once each. I don’t plan to replace it before a while!
The 5s still gets security updates 8 years on. The 6S still gets the latest OS (iOS15). My old landline phones still work ~30 years on. The idea that electronics has to be chucked and replaced every 2 or 3 years is rather wasteful.
I kept my OG Pixel for 5 years and had the battery replaced twice (2.5 years and ~4 years in). It worked fine until the last moment when it just died on me (like, absolutely bricked).
I stopped getting software updates after 3 years but the hardware continued to be very capable until the very end. The battery was expected to degrade after some time, and the phone didn't feel as snappy with modern apps, but it was perfectly fine as a phone.
I'm now on a Pixel 5 and expect to go through something similar. It is absurd to me that people switch phones every 2-3 years (or even annually).
I just bought a new phone because OnePlus just stopped supporting my 6T which was released in November 2018, so for all intents and purposes 3 years ago as well.
It was (well, is, I'm still using it while I await its replacement) a perfectly good phone aside from some wear on the USB-C port which I would have had serviced had this not happened.
Frankly, if manufacturers aren't willing to continue to offer support for these devices they should just stop making phones.
I think it's time someone ask if Google's vaunted claims about being carbon neutral count all of the Android and Chromebook hardware that Google forces consumers to discard due to their poor support lifecycle. I think they hide the sheer environmental waste tsunami behind third party manufacturing.
(tbh, this might be a good area to kill two birds with one law/stone: Force companies to account in their environmental impact for decisions which drop product support. Dropping updates from a hardware model then is weighted by the carbon cost of all of them in use. As governments turn the screws on environmental regulations, this may also help product support lifecycles and more long-lived products.)
I do use Lineage base OSes and I'm really thanksfull to its contributors allowing me to extend the life of my devices for years, but there is still a tradeoff in term of security, the firmware blobs which are closed source cannot be updated so those do not receive any security update. Unfortunately, there's not much that can be done about that without forcing manufacturer to open source those blobs or maintain their hardware for longer periods of time.
1. Just get a new phone every two years. Sell or donate the old one. It's not being "dumped". Or keep as your backup phone.
2. As the owner of a 2004 Volvo who will soon be looking for a new car, should I be concerned that the same issues will soon plague cars? Have they already?
for 2. Yes to some degree, at least in terms of degraded functionality It's happened in the past with built in navigation systems where the manufacturer stops releasing updated dvds with new maps, and recently with the retiring of the 2G/edge cellular network - https://www.thedrive.com/tech/43187/how-the-3g-shutdown-in-2...
Done, now your phone will be supported damn near forever.
----
I get that Google themselves should be supporting their phones for longer. I completely agree. I just can at least say that they've given you the tools to still use the phone after the updates stop.
That's a damn sight better than other manufacturers... e.g. Nokia 6, the bootloader is locked, and I had to pay some kid in some random country to unlock it for me with his reverse engineered tool.
So no, I give Google a lot of shit about their behaviour, but phone updates? Could be longer but I won't hold them to it.
Perhaps for an end user, but from a developer POV, the Pixels are some of the most developer friendly Android devices -- very easily rooted, little unnecessary bloatware by default compared to the likes of Samsung, Huawei etc.
It's always funny to me that companies pay developers to make worse versions of Android instead of just not doing that. Although obviously it's to force in some unremoveable shovelware.
Google has actually started extending its security update policy for its hardware to 5 years. I don't know what "enough" is, but as someone who has to do these updates (ironically, for Fitbit devices, yes we are owned by Google now) I will say that continuing to ship updates for products you shipped 5 years ago is far from trivial. It forces you to develop in ways that are not natural for people that work with hardware (the natural thing is to branch per product, but good luck managing that if you need to land a security fix on the 15 or so products we shipped in the last 5 years). This is manageable now that we're owned by Google, but prior to the acquisition it was a serious drain on my team. And folks on my team would tell you that they don't love it even today -- having to support 5-yr old MCUs when you're trying to keep your BOM down can be very challenging, especially managing available memory.
Google has generally supported Chromebooks for about 6 years and just recently seem to have started extending that duration to about 8 years. Some recent Chromebook launches have support through 2029.
If Google can do this for Chromebooks, most of which aren't even designed by Google (although usually based off reference designs), clearly they can also do this for the actual phones they make and sell under the Pixel brand. And Chromebooks span quite a wide variety of hardware capabilities, from school-targeted low cost models with eMMC and <4GB RAM all the way up to devices with NVMe and gobs of RAM on cutting edge CPUs from a variety of manufacturers, both ARM and x86.
Chrome OS is proprietary (Chromium OS is not) and it also cannot be modified by any manufacturer. Every chromebook manufactured also is developed with Google being aware so that the chipset and underlying hardware can be supported. It's quite a different licensing model than Android and that's most likely why giving eight years of updates was much easier.
Sure, but Google has all the source code and all the design files for their Pixel phones. I'm not saying Google needs to support ALL Android devices, just Pixel devices. It is definitely possible for them to support Pixel phones for more than 5 years if they wanted to. It's just an economics question of if it's worth it to Google to do so and clearly it hasn't been.
Even 5 year support for Pixel phones is new with the Pixel 6 line. Previously it had been 3 years max.
But they really don't have all the sources. Up until Pixel 6, they've all used Qualcomm chipsets.
Qualcomm is such a ridiculously horrible company to deal with. They're in the business of selling new SoC designs every 6 months and trying to support a device for more than a few years is considered a massive opportunity cost for them.
It's the same concept as Apple mulching old MacBooks so they don't enter the used market except killing them by lack of software support instead.
They have an absolute stranglehold over the SoC market in the US. Samsung made a stupid deal back in the 90's to license CDMA patents in exchange for not selling SoCs (eventually Exynos) in the US or to any other manufacturer for that matter. At the time it probably made sense because Qualcomm agreed to use Samsung to manufacture their chips, but the deal is so hilarious lopsided these days. 30 years on and Qualcomm still won't renegotiate. It might've drawn regulatory ire if Samsung wasn't a foreign company.
I imagine there's a major attitude difference in the support model for SoCs made for Chromebooks and laptops compared to the ones for smartphones. Smartphones on average are kept for barely over two years in the US, whereas people hang onto a laptop for nearly 5 years.
People are used to desktops and laptops chugging along until they get tired of them being slow, rather than their device or OS vendor cutting them off.
I don't know much about Fuschia. I'd be surprised, though, if updatability wasn't a major concern. Part of why I don't know much about it, though, is that AFAIK it's 64-bit only, and the MCUs we run are 32-bit affairs.
Thanks for contributing first-hand experience. Your story highlights how dysfunctional historical hardware dev practices are for the connected age. Forking for each product absolutely does not scale in an era of continual updates, and manufacturers that don't figure this out are not gonna make it. People don't forget having to discard working hardware because of some stupid software EOL.
The memory limits of old devices is a real problem, and I don't know the solution besides doing the hard work to fight the the bloat, and produce a modular solution. Apple pretends to support the Apple Watch 3, but you can not upgrade the os without a hard-reset every time because the local flash can't hold the update and user config at the same time. But I can't help wonder if they _really_ need multiple GB for the core OS in a watch.
Heh. Not going to comment on Apple Watch for obvious reasons, but I will say that we measure free memory in 10s or 100s of bytes on most of our older products. Even a single GB would be amazing, but also amazingly expensive.
Not your responsibility I know but given that Google can't seem to be able to notify everyone who is impacted by their GSuite changes I do worry about the path they seem to be going down. To me it seems that very simple things are falling by the wayside more and more these days which doesn't bode well for the future.
Yeah, a pure service model would be lovely in many ways. If I ever start a company that makes HW (fat chance) my experience at Fitbit means it will certainly be service-based.
> It forces you to develop in ways that are not natural for people that work with hardware (the natural thing is to branch per product...)
The problem rather seems to be that close-to-hardware developers are unwilling to adapt to modern software development practices: modularity (i.e. drivers and sane HAL), automated (regression) testing and, at least for some cases, even using version control.
Since the market hasn't managed to achieve that, the government needs to step in and mandate stuff like repairability, longevity and update support - then there won't be any other choice than to drag the industry by its ears into the 21st century.
> having to support 5-yr old MCUs when you're trying to keep your BOM down can be very challenging, especially managing available memory.
And again, the answer is government regulation: when the tradeoff between extra cost on the BOM vs ability to update shifts towards extra cost for an actual Linux-capable CPU, you won't have that problem any more.
You seem to saying a lot of things here rather declaratively. I will speak to my experience only, but we have used version control, drivers, various HALs, and automated testing (plus some manual, this is HW after all and some end to end tests are simply not worth automating) throughout my time here. So those things have not been holding us back.
With respect to government regulation, every dollar on the BOM is $2-3 to the customer. Many of our competitors are not based in the US. When buying memory you’re probably competing for supply against large car companies who have longer contracts with more committed volume. These are just facts, but they affect what the solution space here looks like.
Unfortunately not with such a broad statement. Our CS team is usually abreast of issues with products that are in market and keeps me and others in the loop when there’s something we need to fix from an engineering side.
Within the last couple of weeks, people have been having issues with syncing, time being accurate, and sleep tracking. Seems like it is tied to a forced update of some sort.
I haven’t heard about that. I’ll reach out to CS and see what’s up. We haven’t made any forced updates that I know of (and I should know). That said phone updates do sometimes break or lower the reliability of our Bluetooth connection, and radio updates are sadly forced on people’s phones all the time.
I recently switched to an iPhone 12 for this reason. It's been almost a year and I still hate iOS. It's significantly dumber than Android and has some truly baffling UX choices. However, the phone is undeniably better than any Android phone I've ever used so I can't convince myself to switch back.
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. I used nothing but Nexus and Pixel and finally switched to an iPhone 11 Pro from my Pixel 2 in 2020 and I have the same opinion.
The phone itself is so much better, but the UX is so bizarre and full of what seems like "its this way because its always been this way" stuff. Almost every day I go to change a setting, and have to choose between the "Settings" app, or the app itself. It still irritates me that I can't assign a specific sound to an app. So now when I get a generic notification sound I have to check my phone to see if its urgent (food delivery) or trivial (twitter), because Apple forces both of those apps to sound the same.
Why do you even have "trivial" notifications like Twitter making a sound? You can allow only truly "urgent" apps to make sounds, so there's no confusion.
I have a friend who sometimes likes to contact me via twitter rather than SMS. Those messages are not urgent, but I do want to know about them.
The other annoying issue is multiple urgent apps, but one is sending spammy notifications regarding promos. So if they all have the same sound, I don't know if that's my instacart melting on my porch, or grubhub annoying me with a promo. (which I just disabled).
> So now when I get a generic notification sound I have to check my phone to see if its urgent (food delivery) or trivial (twitter), because Apple forces both of those apps to sound the same.
It's not ideal, but I've disabled sounds + banner and lockscreen notifications for almost all of my apps, allowing them to only display notifications in the notification centre. It lets me check trivial notifications when I want instead of being interrupted by them.
The one that really gets me is not having a separate slider for alarm and notification volume. Slept through my alarm the first night, now phone stays in silent all the time.
> “We find that three years of security and OS updates still provides users with a great experience for their device.”
What about the 4th year?
It's ludicrous to throw a perfectly functioning thing to buy a new one just because the gazillion dollar company behind it needs to make even more money without regard to the environment (oh but rest assured the next version will be 5% greener ... yeah right).
My Pixel 4 XL will be EOLed at the end of the year (bought it in January 2020) and I'm torn between security and wastefulness.
There are several aftermarket OSs that work on the Pixel 4. LineageOS is one of those. You might consider going that route if you want to sustain your hardware.
This makes me wonder if there's a market for "save my phone", where you send your cellphone in and have a new OS installed...
Not that having another big player would solve the problem, but I do wish we at least had Microsoft still in the game as a foil against Google and Apple.
In lieu of that, it's still on my very long to-do list to figure out how to flash my Android phone to finish extricating myself from the Google ecosystem. One of these days...
For most devices, supporting a device indefinitely is just a matter of letting the user flash their own firmware or replace the existing one using an SD card.
Using your devices for a long time is not possible not due to the difficulty of the community maintaining the software, but because the original company put user-hostile signature checks on the firmware.
It’s not realistic because tech companies have conditioned us into that expectation. My dad has a 40 year old high end sound system which works flawlessly. Why can’t Google maintain some servers and push some fixes for 20 years?
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 319 ms ] threadHonestly, that's way too much trouble to actually be a solution. Custom ROMs should be a hobbyist thing for people who want to spend their time tinkering with their phone, not a way to support a not-very-old device.
~ Linux should be a hobbyist thing for people who want to spend their time tinkering with their computer, not a way to support a not-very-old device. ~
Whether it comes to phones or computers, I disagree respectively when it comes to custom ROMs or Linux.
So? The problem is both Linux and a Custom ROM take a few orders of magnitude more technical skill and effort to install and maintain, which is completely unreasonable to expect from a typical non-hobbyist retail technology user. Such users should be able to click "update" on their system, get up-to-date with patches, so they can go on to do what really want to do (which probably isn't "maintain their technology"). I'm even someone who's capable of doing that, but I don't want to because I've got much better and more important things do with my time now.
Even if that's true, most computer users don't install Windows. It comes preinstalled.
> It's an excellent way of getting more life out of semi-old systems.
Maybe so, but it's not nearly as good of an option as getting continued support for your preinstalled OS.
Pre-installed with a decent support plan is hard to beat regardless if it's Windows, MacOS or something like Linux Mint.
Been there, done that, got the tshirt (a nice CyanogenMod one). Then I switched to iPhone years ago, and my regret is that I should have done that WAY earlier.
I had a: Nexus S, Galaxy S3, Sony XPeria Ultra, Nexus 6, Moto S. All those were bought with custom ROM support in mind. My experience was love and hate:
- Clean minimal Android is really NICE.
- Not having (insert Facebook bloatware here) on your phone is NICE!
- Custom ROMs break often, the moment you move away from a big project like CyanogenMOD (later LineageOS), you are pretty much depending on one or two people. If those people change phones, you are sol. Hell, it happens with big projects as well.
- Some apps don't work unless you install Magisk to bypass Google's Safetynet.
- One slight mistake flashing a device and you risk in having a nice paperweight.
- Flashing/modding your phone takes a LOT of time.
- Bootloader unlock might void warranties (might not be legal) but as an individual I can't fathom to sue a megacorp.
I realized that my time was way more precious than fiddling often with a phone, so I just went over to the iOS camp, never looked back. My mom is now using my old iPhone 6S Plus with latest and greatest version of iOS.
If only he knew about CalyxOS:
> If you have a Pixel 3 or newer, you can install CalyxOS on your own device.
https://calyxos.org
The author specifically says they want their phone to be a reliable appliance. I do not think they have the appetite for reflashing the ROM, nor should a consumer be required to do so.
-----
This is from the website, this is not something an average person should attempt:
Open a terminal on your host computer, change to the directory where you saved device-flasher, and then run:
shasum -a 256 device-flasher.darwin
And ensure the result says 04b4cf9912d853e0f108b42a756fd74db7a11cc6c951e05820e96d28ce56e543.
I've not run Calyx myself, but those are issues I've personally experienced with other ROMs. If the author just wants a phone that works, this isn't the best option. I find the "is forcing me to.." a bit hyperbolic, but their point stands.
There are still a lot of things I like better on Android, but it's not worth it.
The writing's on the wall when it comes to Android SOCs now anyway, Apple phones from 4 years ago perform better and still get updates. They have their own issues, but they're not existential level problems.
But frankly it's really hard to justify not getting an iPhone anymore. I have three kids and they all want iPhones and all their social life is on iMessage. Not to mention that all the apps I have to use for work are better supported in iPhone and have issues on Android but IT doesn't really care. It's becoming really difficult to justify not just getting my wife and I iPhones in the next cycle and planning to hand them down.
Its frustrating that all the big companies act like "we're big, so we'll do what we want, no matter how annoying it is to the end user" ... and the small companies really can't compete/disrupt the market because they're not big enough.
But also so many of the people around me use iOS devices now that I end up having to learn how to use them anyway. Yikes I sound like an Apple shill... but the opposite is true. lol
My wife went into iTunes and moved a bunch of songs onto her phone. Then she went out and tried to play those songs... and it tried to download them off the cloud (using data, which is a limited resource). Apparently, copying to the phone didn't _actually_ copy them, just put sort of "shortcut" there pointing at it on the cloud. That was definitely _not_ what she wanted, but the software decided otherwise.
When I tried Android I couldn't get the same device to stick around for more than a year. After my 5X bootloop fiasco I tried another manufacturer and found out I couldn't even upgrade my software to patch a security issue because I had to wait on the vendor to add their crapware before releasing the update. I waited 6 months after Google released their update and then gave up... I don't know how Android users deal with the update nonsense.
This right here is what sums this topic up for me.
I had my last Android phone for 5 years, and never had a problem until the last month; when it was just too slow and would reboot every now and again. It had security updates for the first 4 years.
My wife just switched off her iphone to an android because there were just too many places where it would ... just do it's own thing instead of what she told it to (like I noted in another response; placing songs on the cloud instead of on her phone like she told it to). It didn't "just work" in a lot of cases, for any sane definition of that phrase.
I was thinking about this the other day, and how Apple's departure from skeuomorphism made a lot of "just works" analogies a lot more dilute. I've never been particularly fond of Apple's design chops, be it from 2008 or 2018, but there's something to be said about how digital Corinthian leather and wood textures makes a person perceive a device. It also made their design philosophy fairly straightforward: if you're designing a digital bookshelf, it should work similarly to a physical one. There was no ambiguous frosted-glass layer of UI, nor "lickable" candy buttons littering your experience. It was just... functional. Modern Apple seems pretty disinterested in that stuff though. Relative to the rest of the tech industry, they're the same clowns in a different circus.
I feel like this gets talked about a lot in the abstract but it's rare that I actually run into a limitation in normal usage, and when it is I usually agree with the decision behind it (e.g. limiting cross-application data access for security reasons or moving away from kernel extensions). I think the best example is not supporting different browser engines but I have very mixed emotions there because I'd love to be able to use Firefox but iOS is basically the main thing keeping “the web” from meaning “what the Chrome team chooses to support”.
Apple were releasing updates to the 6s in 2021 still. That's a 7 year old device. Security updates only pretty much - but still its crazy. My wife will not upgrade her old phone as a result (I get one every year through work and just sell my old one).
It also really helps with resale value. I can't believe what I was getting for my old iphones.
I for one won't "upgrade" to a bigger phone with no fingerprint sensor and no headphone jack. I don't agree with many things Apple does, but their iPhone support is pretty damn good.
A SwiftUI app vs Compose app right now is night and day, bugs from iOS 13.5 to 13.6 are catastrophic meanwhile Android devices with extremely old operating systems run the latest UI toolkit with very few issues.
Does Apple give you a replacement before sending in your existing phone?
Maybe in the US, on Apple's homeland, but I doubt they do this in the EU. Would be cool if they did though.
Whenever I upgrade phones, I still keep my previous device around so that when I had to send my last gen to the service, I can always quickly switch to the previous one for a couple of weeks until it's back
If you had backups running to your Mac or PC (which can happen over WiFi automatically when both the phone and mac are on line power), you've got a whole-device backup that will have you up and running as fast as it takes the backup to restore.
Still annoying, and phones shouldn't die like that, but it was probably the best thing they could have done by that point.
The thing died on my desk at work, wouldn't even turn on, just a few days before I was going on a long trip so after a few hours of looking for fixes and talking to support I just went to an Apple store and got an iPhone. Now I at least feel comfortable that if I have an issue I can go to a physical store and get help in a pinch.
There are unlocked 4G phones such as the Nokia 225 for under $50 and the Nokia 6300 for under $70.
I could then either use the SIM from my iPhone, or if I didn't mind using a temporary number instead of my regular number while the iPhone is being repaired Mint Mobile has a "try before you buy" kit for $2 that includes a SIM and new number that is good for one week of service. It is meant to let people test out Mint Mobile before switching to make sure coverage and service are satisfactory, but seems like it would also work for someone who just wanted temporary service.
https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/29/tumblr-ios-tags-ban-apple/
I escaped from such a world as a child. Apple's sanitization of the internet is fundamentally unethical.
Google told me, a US customer, to send my device to Huawei's nearest service center in mainland China at my own cost for diagnosis and repair. That is unacceptable for a Google-branded product designed by Google, unveiled by Google, marketed by Google, sold directly by Google, warrantied by Google, and bricked by Google.
Imagine, if you will, Audi sending you to Bosch in Germany (at your own cost!) after an Audi dealership in Indiana bricks your ECU during a recall service.
Shame, because my Nexus 5 and Nexus 4 still run great. I don't use them as phones, but they're still solid devices I use for other projects.
My impression is Google's are still the most updated. I've had a Nexus S, 4, 5 and currently have Pixel 3. I've never really had any problems with the Google-managed devices. Motorola and Samsung... let's just say I will never, ever buy a phone from them ever again. The choice is between Pixel and iPhone. But after the Pixel 3 I will not pay for the "premium" class Pixels.
People are willingly paying iPhone prices for Purism and Pinephone hardware with low specs and old chips. Does Samsung not want this money?
Now people look at the ads and the product placement. If you want to sell millions of a device, that's how you do it.
I start by excluding the ones with literal malware and after that the primary determinant is price, because if it's going to be rapidly disposable anyway then there's no point in making a large investment.
"Let's force them to buy a new phone more often" is the kind of first year on the job MBA move that sounds profitable on paper as long as you fail to notice that the average Android phone now sells for less than a third of the price of the average iPhone. And that's revenue; the difference in margins is even bigger.
It's certainly not common enough that you see mentions about it on HN or Reddit - and yet, you see mentions of adjacent things like requests for tech support. So, it's clearly not very common.
The premise of asking for a recommendation is that the tech has already done the research (e.g. for themselves) and can provide a two word answer off the top of their head. There is little reason to complain about this on a message board or even bother to remember when it happens. But it does.
You even admit to doing it yourself. How many swings of a $400 purchase from one vendor to another does it take per capita to be enough to care about?
...for almost certainly tiny numbers of sales in both cases, and nowhere near "iPhone prices" for Pinephones. Samsung cares about money, and their current strategy is far more lucrative than selling very small amounts of Librem devices at modest profit margins.
iPhone SE is $399. PinePhone Pro is $399. Samsung is averaging ~$250.
> ...for almost certainly tiny numbers of sales in both cases
They're doing preorders and are regularly sold out and backordered, despite having high prices and old hardware and weird bugs. That is what high demand looks like.
Meanwhile no change to the hardware is required and Samsung could carry on selling to everyone they currently do, plus all of those people.
This whole comments section is full of people complaining about this. If you give them a choice between two otherwise fungible phones, one that has open source drivers etc. and can therefore run an up to date vanilla kernel indefinitely, why wouldn't they all choose that one?
The custom Linux phone I make is also sold out! I've made zero units and there are zero available. That is what high demand looks like.
There is clearly more demand than there is supply.
This is the weirdest position to stake out. That nobody wants this because everybody who makes one has a line of customers around the block and mainstream media outlets are writing stories about how much people want this, which go to the front page of tech news aggregators because of all the people who feel the same way.
What evidence of demand are you looking for? A larger production run which is also commercially successful? You can't expect that as a precondition for doing one.
Until Apple bricks your phone with a stealth update because you haven't upgraded quickly enough.
https://www.reuters.com/article/apple-iphones-settlement-idU...
If their phone doesn't have a replaceable battery then blaming the phone is correct.
Upside of the settlement was I got a battery replacement for $30 (performed same day in store) and coming up on 6 years since release the original iPhone SE is still running the latest version of iOS.
OnePlus phones are/were also quite good (at least when I bought my OnePlus 6, I have heard it went… downhill from there). But I did two years of updates, plus one more through LineageOS. And I'll probably update again when LineageOS has their Android 12 release.
OnePlus phones are good because they are (still) easily bootloader-unlockable, and are thus good (excellent) for custom ROMs. They do update fairly often on stock, but I think the stock ROM is getting worse and worse. Still, they're up there.
I "upgraded" to a Pixel 6 and Android 12 has been completely fine for me, so it might be certain people. I am aware some of my friends had bugs with Android 12, though.
But I'm inclined to agree. Just look at the 6 and 6 Pro. They rolled out an upgrade, ruined cellular connectivity for a good chunk of users, and then all of the engineers peaced out for the holidays, with no way to downgrade to a usable release for effected users other than wiping their entire phone and starting from scratch. For their flagship phones.
With word that the 6a is ditching the headphone jack and rear fingerprint sensor, and also inching up in size to gargantuan phablet dimensions, it'll be easy to switch away in the future.
What security issues should I be concerned about? It's difficult to spend the time going through the CVE database to figure this out, I see a lot of privilege escalation issues but I don't install apps that I don't trust anyway. I still get browser updates. I care less about the bugs and more about the attack vectors.
I'd rather have a secure sandbox with untrusted apps then have insecure sandbox with a ton of attack surfaces in trusted apps.
Quote from the article: "The malware spread primarily through Google Play but also through third-party marketplaces, push notifications on compromised websites, sponsored links on Google, and messages delivered by WhatsApp or SMS. At the time, Brata targeted people with accounts from Brazil-based banks."
With browser updates, limited browsing, restricting app downloads, you might be in the clear. But looks like malware makers also use WhatsApp or SMS.
Then it downloaded the update for Android 12 (I think), and got corrupted, and essentially became unstable and unusable - things like bluetooth headsets would crash the device.
This was a phone that was working great, until it wasn't. I wasn't able to find others with the same issue. Their customer service is non-existent. End of the line.
This is what pushed me to get an iPhone recently - at least I can walk into an apple store if the thing crashes completely. I've bought multiple android devices over the years, and its always been underwhelming and disappointing. The only upside has been that its been cheap. Now that I can afford one, I think an iPhone is the only viable choice (for me).
I know there are people who own Google devices and this has never happened with them, but this has been my experience of being a life-long android user.
It's very, very nice that you can go into an Apple store for iPhone support. Mailing in your phone to another manufacturer to deal with an issue is a miserable experience, and Google's uBreakifix relationship is not perfect for regular customer service and manufacturer defects.
I was an Android user back in the Nexus days, and had something similar happen to my Nexus 7 tablet. It worked fine, updated Android, became unusable. I read they finally addressed it later, but I had already moved on.
And if not, my single experience with Best Buy is that I can get my iPhone replacement the next day.
Like many others in this discussion, I switched to Apple after Google screwed me with one of their phones.
After that I just can't trust Google at all with hardware and since then my opinion of Google as a whole has largely soured. The Galaxy S6 I got to replace it worked quite well but after several years went back to the iPhone .
On a low budget used iPhones are pretty good choice. I've a couple of 2016 SEs bought for ~$100 each. Work well, usual Apple plus points. Easy to get fixed when you break screens, batteries etc. too - go to any phone fixers.
I also bought a Nexus/Pixel 5 phone or whatever around the same time and that too had issues after 2 years. I forget the issues but it had to be rebooted frequently, at least once a day due to slowdowns. Replaced with an HTC that ran much better for 4 years until I accidentally killed it.
After those two turds I will NEVER buy google garbage ever again.
I would have thought Google finally bringing the hardware design in house with the pixel phones would let them create a real competitor, but they seem to be just okay?
Lack of focus maybe? Might just be a case of commoditize your complement, in this case the complement for Google is the hardware.
I'm not an Apple fan. I don't use any Apple products right now. However, it's impossible to deny that Android phones are always 2-3 years behind Apple in terms of hardware and software.
I also never spend more than $500 on a phone, which has iPhones out of reach.
I will sometimes just buy a model or 2 back used or refurbished since they last for quite a while. You could probably get the 11 for under $500 as well.
https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-iphone/iphone-se
I migrated to Android back in the IPhone 8 and IPhone 10 Max Plus++ whatever era. I just couldn't deal with a $1000 phone.
But now Apple has the IPhone SE which goes for as low as $399.
I would totally love an iPhone mini because i find the Xs too big but i don’t feel like it’s worth spending money. I would also totally buy a non-googled Android (because I don’t like nowadays Apple mentality) that I could keep updated for years but it just doesn’t exists.
So here I am, with my Xs, which honestly, feels like, to me, an exceptional phone for 2022: beautiful, fast, updated, nice picture quality, reliable, and totally cheap. It would be a total dream if the App Store wasn’t a dictature or if side loading was possible.
It felt like cheap plastic crap too (imo).
The iPhone 5 was the first iOS phone with turn by turn nav and LTE which were the reasons I stuck with the Nexus phones as each one got worse. The 5's battery life was also ridiculously good in comparison and the hardware design holds up even now ten years later.
The HTC Nexus One was the best of the first three, I'm not sure why Samsung gets so much love for hardware. The Nexus S and Galaxy Nexus builds were both ugly and poor. The Nokia N9 was beautiful and I was bummed when Microsoft turned them into windows only devices, they would have been great android phones.
That was another thing at the time which pushed me away from android, they didn't have control over their OS because of this lack of control over hardware.
It was a little like Windows and all the crap that came installed on it, except worse because you couldn't even reset it.
I've put it on a shelf until I can get time/money to recover the data from the flash, but lesson learned.
I bought a Samsung.
Large numbers of pixel 3/3xl's have started dying in the last year and it looks like it's the flash wearing out on all the early adopter/heavy user devices. This happened to me too.
Regardless, as of 2020 the only non absolute shit Android phones are Pixels. Essential, which was another non-shit Android, is dead because rather than re-iterating its boneheaded founder decided the market was in the TV remote control like device.
Samsung's flagship phones push ads as a part of the operating system. Let that sink in. On a $1,200 phone!
OnePlus can't make its interface not crash. Neither can it convince the carriers to whitelist its profiles in the United States for 5G and Wifi calling.
Out of all sucky Android devices and due to my work I probably touched at least 3/4 of models sold via non-grey market channel in the US the only phones that are functional are Pixels, which sucks.
My wife has an iPhone 12. Pixel 6 today is either in the same class or beats it. Of course it is highly unlikely that it will beat it in 2024 given Google track record of refusing to reiterate.
I admit that Bixby is a ridiculous barnacle whose eradication would improve the product.
Before that I had to ditch my otherwise perfectly fine OnePlus phone for similar reasons. I went with a Nokia because they promised several years of Android updates, so we'll see how that pans out.
Quite annoying.
Nokia wad okay-ish for a while but I don't think I would buy one today.
Which iPad is this? I’m running YouTube Premium on an iPad Air from 2013 - soon 9 years old.
I have plenty of issues with Google's posture on privacy, but I don't expect them to steal credentials for other services, drain my bank account, blackmail me based on personal information, or any such thing. Conflating the two removes a lot of much needed nuance from the discussion.
Ironically I hated financially supporting Google but felt I had no choice but to get a Pixel to use GrapheneOS and have 5 years of security updates
https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/4457705?hl=en-G...
But I also know that our products (PCs and printers) can't have that same support model, we'd be out of business and we don't have a lucrative ad business that could buy us customer loyalty via loss leaders. I think 5-8 years is reasonable.
The manufacturer cannot guarantee that that the phone sold to a consumer will be replaced with a phone from the same company. So it's definitely within the interest of the company to support the phones for longer to keep consumers in the ecosystem.
Pretty sure that's the whole point of pixel 6.
This is how Linux maintains driver support for hardware long past the point where it doesn't work on modern Windows or MacOS. I've noticed several occasions where the support stops because the kernel was updated and nobody wants to make the effort to port the drivers forward, especially since those drivers were delivered as a binary blob.
Why must software always need to be updated? Software can be stable.
This industry makes throwaway software just so it can keep pumping hardware forever.
The thing is - apple has the history / reputation here. Google has promised updates forever with various initiatives, rarely delivers.
Apple doesn't actually promise much here that I know of, but seems to deliver and deliver.
On apple, iOS 15.2 is available for a phone that is 8 years old?
Based on past experience, I expect if I bought an iOS device today - I'd have updated for at least 5 years.
Apple was releasing updates for iOS 12 as recently as 2021. That's for phone back from 2013 (!).
Most of the iPhone users I see are using a phone they purchased within the past three years. Does the average iPhone get used for longer than the average Pixel?
My kid is still using an iPhone 6s and loves it. It works perfectly.
These days? I'm using a 2016 SE with iOS 15. Works great. I do not hate my phone. In fact, the small size, fingerprint sensor, and headphone jack make it a better buy than any modern smartphone. I can live without AI text recognition on my photos, which seems to be limited to newer phones. The app switcher, settings, browser, and everything else are still as snappy as the day I bought this thing. Only thing that doesn't run well? Spotify, which apparently doesn't bother to test their UI on small hardware (constantly clips links and text off the bottom of my screen), nor older CPUs (the app takes forever to start up, regularly freezes up when searching for songs, and can take anywhere from 1 second to 30 seconds to load even already downloaded albums).
So uh... good on Apple. Shame on Spotify.
Instead of making knee-jerk anti-Apple assumptions, you might try to check some facts.
edit: apparently the statistics I linked are behind a paywall, but the stats from the app I'm working on show me that approx 10% of users are on iPhones that are 7 years or older.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/626631/smartphone-market...
According to that (maybe selection-biased) source, it looks like the most popular iPhone is the one released the same year the first Pixel was released. We can't conclude anything about which is used longer, but Android app updates are required to target API level 30 I think for Android, which is no longer supported on the first Pixel, so there's probably a pressure that urges users off of that phone. I'd be surprised if percentage-wise, a larger share of Pixel users are on the original Pixel than iPhone users on iPhone 7.
You can't eacape this, now even batteries refuse to work without a software update.
https://twitter.com/internetofshit/status/148496134391649485...
You can. Use a "dumb"phone.
Funny how "dumb"phones are better at reliability. No need for updates, and battery lasts for more than a week.
Funny how they still offer replaceable batteries, even though they cost a fraction of "smart"phones.
To avoid financing the software-planned-obsolescence empire, you can use a combination of cheap second-hand "smart"phones for maps and chat apps that are important for you, and a dumb phone for reliable stuff like alarms, calls, and SMS.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/unremovable-malware-found-prei...
It is irrelevant if they have a touchscreen or are 'cheap second hand', it has a processor and it runs software.
You want dumb phones, use analogue ones that plug into a socket with a rotary dial and use a paper map for navigation.
It's kind of hard to find information about them, but if I could get a basic flip-phone that has a maps app, I'd be reasonably happy. I used to get by with a dumb phone and just write down directions before I left the house, but now that I'm married, plans tend to change more often.
It's unclear to me why LTE appears to consume much more power to "do nothing." But I recall easily getting a week or so of actual battery life being completely normal a decade ago.
That's a bit hyperbolic. Your point stands, otherwise.
Personally I don't see how anyone could justify having an out-of-date phone. Assuming you have it configured to read your email, it becomes a gateway to every account you own, which can have its password reset over email. MFA might help as long as that MFA isn't an app on your phone. But most websites don't support hardware security keys. If you care enough to have a dedicated TOTP device, then why would you want a phone with no security updates?
This use of "forcing" does not require bricking the phone. Creating a situation where the only reasonable choice is to upgrade the hardware qualifies as "forcing" in my opinion. The phone is no longer capable of performing the job for which it was designed in a safe way.
And you're probably thinking "oh but this is an old device, just get a newer one for work." True, but consider that Pixel 6/6 Pro users got screwed over when the December update was yanked [0] and the January update got delayed for them [1] - while it was good for most users not to take the buggy update, anyone whose device had those security requirements ended up getting work-related functionality disabled.
Of course, the companies that set these policies are generally ones who will not make exceptions, so even though you had the latest and greatest from Google, you couldn't use it for work for several weeks until they finally pushed out the January security update.
"People who have MDM-enforced security requirements" might not be a large part of the smartphone market these days, but every little bit counts when it comes to reducing the volume of e-waste that usually ends up being dumped in third-world countries.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/rxiv5r/enterpr...
[1] https://support.google.com/pixelphone/thread/143968432/googl...
You should be able to throw LineageOS on there as long as you don't have a locked Verizon bootloader. But there are a lot of caveats to that, in terms of which apps will work when rooted, which won't etc. etc.
Firmware doesn't include kernels, generally speaking.
There's nothing stopping you from grabbing those blobs out of Google's AOSP images and updating them, but there's no way to ensure the abstraction layers work correctly with them unless you test it.
As always, it depends.
There is a lot of real usage which is not "banking/payments/secure messaging". Besides, stopping security updates does not mean the phone suddenly becomes open to the whole world. Many vulnerabilities might be exploitable only when running code natively on the device, or only when within radio range, or only when plugged directly to the USB port.
In fact, I don't do any of those on my phone. Unless maybe you count email as secure messaging in some way.
I would say yes, considering email is often used as a primary means to reset account passwords. Most services support MFA (which could be somewhat of a mitigating security control), but a LOT of services still don't.
(though banks are also clueless in other respects, outlawing devices with lineageos but allowing devices with out of date vendor OS)
If there's a vulnerability like stagefright in the base system that could make many up-to-date apps vulnerable, you'll hear about it on the news.
My bank disabled the app on my phone some 4 months later, when some major vulnerability was still unpatched on my phone. They told me to get a new phone, so I picked up an 2016 iPhone SE and went on my way.
Once you have a team that can keep Android patched, someone at Google is going to use them to speed up another product or create a new one.
Why not add another team more? First, the situation will repeat itself, other needs would be prioritized higher. And there is a limit on the number of teams an organization can manage without non-linear manager cost increase.
Linux runs on old hardware because big corporations own old hardware and are willing to pay to not have to replace it. Replacing a phone is a cost for the individual owner. And my experience with company phones is that they are seen as a retention perk. So newer flashier phones are worth the cost, it could be different in other industries, thou.
One common solution to these problems is regulation. The government forces phone makers to patch the software for X years. Now there is a strong incentive to do so if the phone makers want to continue operating in that market.
> Once you have a team that can keep Android patched, someone at Google is going to use them to speed up another product or create a new one.
Apple is still supporting phones made in 2016. Given Google size and profit margin, it is a business choice.
Why can't Google do like Apple and offer many years of version updates? The iPhone 6s is still running the latest version of iOS.
Manufacturers will then be incentivized to make and support lasting hardware as consumers get averse to paying the pollution tax repeatedly. (And, they will try to make more sustainable hardware that gets assessed less tax in the first place).
Having clear regulation and forbid this kind of practice that apply to everybody, not just the poor.
A tax would not solve anything, it would just give a free pass to the wealthier part of the world to pollute and generate waste. The wealthy parts of the world are the biggest source of waste and polution in the first place.
It would also allow powerful companies to bargain between countries and continue playing the dog and cat game they've been doing. Trying to force companies like Apple or Gooogle to pay existing taxes is already a lost cause. Those companies don't care about it and would rather invest in avoidance schemes.
On the contrary, if you hit where things are sold, like closing a whole market like the EU until you abide to a regulation, like the one mentionned in my comment, is much likely to have a real impact, and would be much faster to.
Sick of each Android update requiring relearning where all the stuff I've been doing for the last year (or longer) has been moved to.
Android 12 made one of my major workflows start failing - leaving browser tabs open and coming back to them later. Something about how Android 12 works (I'm guess to do with how it swaps out background apps) means now most of the time when I go back to my browser, it forces a page reload, meaning I lose context of whatever I was doing before.
Bunch of other small irritating changes. I guess it doesn't matter now that it's out of support - I'm too scared to keep using it. Just gives me the shits.
For all its warts, Apple set the bar and Android as a whole has never really reached it. The 6S is still supported right now, right? And we're on the 13?
My 6splus is still in the “not a bad phone” range for what I need it for today, and I haven’t managed to destroy it in 4 years.
[1] Here's everything since 2015 that fits in the size criteria: https://www.gsmarena.com/results.php3?nYearMin=2015&nHeightM...
I stopped getting software updates after 3 years but the hardware continued to be very capable until the very end. The battery was expected to degrade after some time, and the phone didn't feel as snappy with modern apps, but it was perfectly fine as a phone.
I'm now on a Pixel 5 and expect to go through something similar. It is absurd to me that people switch phones every 2-3 years (or even annually).
It was (well, is, I'm still using it while I await its replacement) a perfectly good phone aside from some wear on the USB-C port which I would have had serviced had this not happened.
Frankly, if manufacturers aren't willing to continue to offer support for these devices they should just stop making phones.
First released September 20, 2013; 8 years ago
Operating system iOS 12.5.5, released September 23, 2021
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_5S
(tbh, this might be a good area to kill two birds with one law/stone: Force companies to account in their environmental impact for decisions which drop product support. Dropping updates from a hardware model then is weighted by the carbon cost of all of them in use. As governments turn the screws on environmental regulations, this may also help product support lifecycles and more long-lived products.)
Still hoping that Fuscia will have some advantages in legacy support, but personally not buying any Android phone.
https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/#google
Should be illegal imo to stop supporting a phone that's also locked. All it does is generate waste.
1. Just get a new phone every two years. Sell or donate the old one. It's not being "dumped". Or keep as your backup phone.
2. As the owner of a 2004 Volvo who will soon be looking for a new car, should I be concerned that the same issues will soon plague cars? Have they already?
https://www.androidauthority.com/unlock-pixel-3-bootloader-9...
Then
https://lineageosroms.com/blueline/
Done, now your phone will be supported damn near forever.
----
I get that Google themselves should be supporting their phones for longer. I completely agree. I just can at least say that they've given you the tools to still use the phone after the updates stop.
That's a damn sight better than other manufacturers... e.g. Nokia 6, the bootloader is locked, and I had to pay some kid in some random country to unlock it for me with his reverse engineered tool.
So no, I give Google a lot of shit about their behaviour, but phone updates? Could be longer but I won't hold them to it.
While that site links to official LineageOS builds, that's not the official LineageOS website.
- https://lineageos.org/
- https://download.lineageos.org/blueline
By the way, I really like your Google Camera ports! Keep up the good work.
Verizon refuses to unlock Pixel 3 devices if you don't have an account with them.
https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6220366?hl=en
If Google can do this for Chromebooks, most of which aren't even designed by Google (although usually based off reference designs), clearly they can also do this for the actual phones they make and sell under the Pixel brand. And Chromebooks span quite a wide variety of hardware capabilities, from school-targeted low cost models with eMMC and <4GB RAM all the way up to devices with NVMe and gobs of RAM on cutting edge CPUs from a variety of manufacturers, both ARM and x86.
Even 5 year support for Pixel phones is new with the Pixel 6 line. Previously it had been 3 years max.
Qualcomm is such a ridiculously horrible company to deal with. They're in the business of selling new SoC designs every 6 months and trying to support a device for more than a few years is considered a massive opportunity cost for them.
It's the same concept as Apple mulching old MacBooks so they don't enter the used market except killing them by lack of software support instead.
They have an absolute stranglehold over the SoC market in the US. Samsung made a stupid deal back in the 90's to license CDMA patents in exchange for not selling SoCs (eventually Exynos) in the US or to any other manufacturer for that matter. At the time it probably made sense because Qualcomm agreed to use Samsung to manufacture their chips, but the deal is so hilarious lopsided these days. 30 years on and Qualcomm still won't renegotiate. It might've drawn regulatory ire if Samsung wasn't a foreign company.
https://wccftech.com/qualcomm-prevented-samsung-selling-exyn...
https://www.androidcentral.com/qualcomm-licensing-blocked-sa...
Something tells me there's something wrong, either with Android or with Google itself.
People are used to desktops and laptops chugging along until they get tired of them being slow, rather than their device or OS vendor cutting them off.
Do you see any prospects in terms of Fuscia making long-term support perhaps a matter of just keeping legacy drivers within the available mix?
The memory limits of old devices is a real problem, and I don't know the solution besides doing the hard work to fight the the bloat, and produce a modular solution. Apple pretends to support the Apple Watch 3, but you can not upgrade the os without a hard-reset every time because the local flash can't hold the update and user config at the same time. But I can't help wonder if they _really_ need multiple GB for the core OS in a watch.
The tooling and modular design to support back to an original Fitbit Tracker might be beyond our current skills.
My employer still upgrades 10yrs old TV boxes just fine. (Rocking Linux 5.4 LTS, launched on 2.6)
It is not natural for companies whose business model is selling hardware. Or course their business incentive is not to make long-term support!
But my employer's business model isn't about selling hardware, but a service, hence the incentive to upgrade perfectly working hardware.
The problem rather seems to be that close-to-hardware developers are unwilling to adapt to modern software development practices: modularity (i.e. drivers and sane HAL), automated (regression) testing and, at least for some cases, even using version control.
Since the market hasn't managed to achieve that, the government needs to step in and mandate stuff like repairability, longevity and update support - then there won't be any other choice than to drag the industry by its ears into the 21st century.
> having to support 5-yr old MCUs when you're trying to keep your BOM down can be very challenging, especially managing available memory.
And again, the answer is government regulation: when the tradeoff between extra cost on the BOM vs ability to update shifts towards extra cost for an actual Linux-capable CPU, you won't have that problem any more.
With respect to government regulation, every dollar on the BOM is $2-3 to the customer. Many of our competitors are not based in the US. When buying memory you’re probably competing for supply against large car companies who have longer contracts with more committed volume. These are just facts, but they affect what the solution space here looks like.
The phone itself is so much better, but the UX is so bizarre and full of what seems like "its this way because its always been this way" stuff. Almost every day I go to change a setting, and have to choose between the "Settings" app, or the app itself. It still irritates me that I can't assign a specific sound to an app. So now when I get a generic notification sound I have to check my phone to see if its urgent (food delivery) or trivial (twitter), because Apple forces both of those apps to sound the same.
The other annoying issue is multiple urgent apps, but one is sending spammy notifications regarding promos. So if they all have the same sound, I don't know if that's my instacart melting on my porch, or grubhub annoying me with a promo. (which I just disabled).
It's not ideal, but I've disabled sounds + banner and lockscreen notifications for almost all of my apps, allowing them to only display notifications in the notification centre. It lets me check trivial notifications when I want instead of being interrupted by them.
What about the 4th year?
It's ludicrous to throw a perfectly functioning thing to buy a new one just because the gazillion dollar company behind it needs to make even more money without regard to the environment (oh but rest assured the next version will be 5% greener ... yeah right).
My Pixel 4 XL will be EOLed at the end of the year (bought it in January 2020) and I'm torn between security and wastefulness.
This makes me wonder if there's a market for "save my phone", where you send your cellphone in and have a new OS installed...
I found Linaro, which claims to be doing work on Qualcomm devices: https://www.linaro.org/blog/highlights-from-linaro-connect-o...
In lieu of that, it's still on my very long to-do list to figure out how to flash my Android phone to finish extricating myself from the Google ecosystem. One of these days...
Using your devices for a long time is not possible not due to the difficulty of the community maintaining the software, but because the original company put user-hostile signature checks on the firmware.