Reading through the comments, almost everyone missed the elephant in the room.
The big problem with long term support is not on the phone or chip manufacturers.
…::: It’s GOOGLE! :::…
Just compare the history of Android with Windows. Windows 10 is still supported for another 2 years, yet it was released in mid 2015.
Every Windows 10 capable device is still receiving updates till then.
Contrast that with Android.
Android 6.0 came out in October 2015. Yet very few devices from that era are supportable today. Why? A large part of that is based on Google’s never ending -> breaking changes <- and random new requirements that make older devices incompatible.
This got me personally when I bought a Sony Z3 with the intention of having a “future proof” phone. It was openly advertised as being a dev device for Android 7, so much so that a preview release was downloadable for it.
Only for Google to drop a new requirement for the GPU to have minimum OpenGL ES 3.1, while the GPU only had the instructions for 3.0. WTF?! I might add, the specification for 3.1 was only released to the public 2 years prior.
I seriously hope that some alternative to Android will establish itself again. We had Windows phone, which Microsoft utterly butchered. IOS is not an alternative as that’s tied to one manufacturer.
The one thing I wish google never did was introduce SafetyNet without enabling us a way to essentially say “I modified my own phone, so let me use my damn banking and tap-to-pay apps without issue” and reenable it.
In fact they’ve actively made safetynet more invasive by adding CTS profile matching alsongside basic attestation, with a system for telling what phones are compatible with the new profile matching so you can’t force disable it.
If they never added that I could’ve bypassed basic attestation and gotten google wallet back. But no. The most I can get back is banking and Pokemon GO. But there’s still a risk one of them will decide to use CTS and therefore making it impossible to use that app on my current phone, all in the name of “security”
It’s my phone, stop trying to smother my attempts to do what I want with it!
Reading through the comments, almost everyone missed the elephant in the room. The big problem with long term support is not on the phone or chip manufacturers.
…::: It’s GOOGLE! :::… Just compare the history of Android with Windows. Windows 10 is still supported for another 2 years, yet it was released in mid 2015. Every Windows 10 capable device is still receiving updates till then.
Contrast that with Android. Android 6.0 came out in October 2015. Yet very few devices from that era are supportable today. Why? A large part of that is based on Google’s never ending -> breaking changes <- and random new requirements that make older devices incompatible.
This got me personally when I bought a Sony Z3 with the intention of having a “future proof” phone. It was openly advertised as being a dev device for Android 7, so much so that a preview release was downloadable for it.
Only for Google to drop a new requirement for the GPU to have minimum OpenGL ES 3.1, while the GPU only had the instructions for 3.0. WTF?! I might add, the specification for 3.1 was only released to the public 2 years prior.
I seriously hope that some alternative to Android will establish itself again. We had Windows phone, which Microsoft utterly butchered. IOS is not an alternative as that’s tied to one manufacturer.
The one thing I wish google never did was introduce SafetyNet without enabling us a way to essentially say “I modified my own phone, so let me use my damn banking and tap-to-pay apps without issue” and reenable it.
In fact they’ve actively made safetynet more invasive by adding CTS profile matching alsongside basic attestation, with a system for telling what phones are compatible with the new profile matching so you can’t force disable it.
If they never added that I could’ve bypassed basic attestation and gotten google wallet back. But no. The most I can get back is banking and Pokemon GO. But there’s still a risk one of them will decide to use CTS and therefore making it impossible to use that app on my current phone, all in the name of “security”
It’s my phone, stop trying to smother my attempts to do what I want with it!