To avoid a case of 'no good deed goes unpunished', I do hope Samsung, Google and co get some attention over lack of updates for older phones/OSes too. Their approach of not updating perfectly good phones just leads to greater e-waste, not to mention wasting consumer dollars.
A downright scummy company. /s
Has Samsung, Google et al provided any clarification on why particular phones do not receive updates?
Probably because they don't want to spend time supporting these devices?
It's more fair and conceivable that Apple should be forced to meet certain standards for updates they choose to release, than for any manufacturer to be forced to make updates for some arbitrary/indefinite period of time.
Security patches provide herd immunity and today it’s more important that everyone around you is patched than you or just you.
You share a metric ton of personal information with people and if their devices are compromised so is your data.
Now you might be on top of every vulnerability and wake up in be middle of the night to check up the NVD RSS feed but I would bet my life on the fact that the majority of your social circle doesn’t.
You wouldn’t accept Facebook or Google not patching their servers why would you accept your friends and family not patching their devices when they are in a much better position to compromise you if they are compromised?
Against my will, 99.5% of my email and social connections are saved by Google, Facebook, and the servers of whatever random apps slurped my friends' contacts. (Example: Venmo has a large and accurate friend suggestion list for me, somehow. I assume all those people have my number in their phone and their Venmo app matched it with my number.) So that ship has kind of sailed anyway. Their devices are compromised by design.
No real people hold this opinion. You don't hold this opinion.
You're saying that phone OS updates in general (whether from Google or Apple) are so low quality that its better NOT to get them on older phones?
I didn't take a general position; I expressed skepticism in GP's implicit argument that every update is a good update, and my frustration at the idea of having updates shoved down my throat. I included some other related ideas without explaining clearly enough, partially because I'm not sure how/if this should actually be regulated.
My old iPhone 5 started with iOS 6.0 and went all the way to iOS 10 but got noticeably less performant with each new major update. I'm certainly not arguing those updates were necessarily bad but I think it's worth discussing. Security and bug fixes are tethered with changes designed for much more powerful hardware.