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drivers.

really. we are back to being limited to one OS because of drivers.

this is also the reason lineageOS and other android roms can't just keep updating older phones to new releases. they need the oem to upgrade so they can extract drivers from the binaries.

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They can and do. For example, you can get Marshmallow on the Samsung s2, which didn't officially didn't get even Lollipop.

I had a S2. It died on October 2016 after 5 years of good work. It still has some good points against more modern phones but I won't recommend to buy a refurbished one now. I won't trust the hardware to last much longer.

I bet that this isonly possible because someone got the drivers for display, touch, camera, radios, etc, ...in binary form from the last oem image and put in the new one. sometimes they will backport the last kernel from android 5.1 into a 6.0 image so the binary drivers still work

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