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Comment by gst | Hacker News Reader

The Android One phones (https://www.android.com/one/) are running stock Android and provide 2 years of Android OS updates and 3 year of security updates.

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Christ, being happy for “2 years of Android os updates” reminds me how awful is the android ecosystem. IPhone 5s, a phone from 5 years ago is running the latest iOS without any problem.

It also trashes the resell value of Android devices.

These phones are also way cheaper than the iPhone5s was at its launch. If you pay $350 for your phone and replace it after 2 years, that seems to me to be better than paying $700 for your phone and replacing it after 4 years?

What are the resale values in your example?

Not very much. The resale value of a 4 year old iPhone is sub $100. Even if you get literally $0 for a 2 year old Android, you aren't changing the cost calculations very significantly.

That's just a lot of waste. Cause you know most people aren't going to find a way to recycle those old phones.

I don't think that +/- 1 more phone per person per two years is a terribly big deal in the grand scheme of things.

You'd be mistaken. That would be a lot of phones and hence a lot of (rare) metals being delved. Sadly, even something as precious as a mobile phone is a throw away product nowadays. I have no solution, it's us, consumers, who are doing this. But please don't pretend it doesn't matter. Maybe, just maybe, if we could innovate on the recycling of our old phones, it would matter less.

How about you quantify how much of an increase in waste it would be? My prior is that almost all appeals to waste conservation fall apart when you examine them in depth.

Ok, shooting from the waist. Say on average people use their phone 3 years. Say, we could stretch that to 4 years. Roughly 2/3 of the world population owns a phone, that's 5 billion phones. That means we would save 5 billion phones every 12 years, or: more than 400 million phones every year.

I love innovation as much as the next guy/gal, but getting all those products to 7.5 billion people is probably not (yet) sustainable for our planet. What if we could make (in this case mobile phone) producers (partly) responsible for the waste disposal/recycling of their products?

I guess because most of world on the Android phones buy handsets as pre-paid devices, using them until they either die or get stolen, so they aren't actually being replaced every 3 years.

As for security updates, yes it is a bummer, but not much better than what feature phones and Symbian used to offer, which was basically zero updates.

All the Apple stuff I have access to has been paid by my employer.

I am not doing contracts and their price ranges are out of what I deem as acceptable to pay for hardware as private user.

Google informs me that there are 20 to 50 million tons of electronic waste per year. 400 million phones, each phone weighs less than half a pound, so let's say 200 million pounds per year, divide by 2000, that means 100 thousand tons of electronic waste saved.

Less than a percentage point of reduction of purely electronic waste. This is what I mean by "almost all waste claims fall apart when examined."

It's a bit unfair to measure by weight, because mobile phones are light. One television, monitor or desktop computer can weigh more than 10kg, but may not have the same impact on the environment as 10kg/125g = 80 mobile phones. And besides, why stop with mobile phones? We're doing the same with TVs, now they're smart, but 3 year old apps don't work anymore, so: next!

Well, that's why I asked you to quantify things. If you have reason to believe that mobile phones punch above their weight in terms of e-waste, tell me exactly why, and how much. Does that mean that saving 400 million mobile phones per year goes from saving 0.6% of e-waste to 0.8% of e-waste?

And I'm not defending the practice of throwing out TVs or computers or anything else after 2 years, just phones.

Why? That's just consumerist thinking. With iOS 12, my 3 and a half year old phone works even better than when I bought it. Why create useless waste?

Because, for example, your 3.5 year old phone has a way worse camera than a modern phone. It doesn't have wireless charging. Its hardware has deficiencies that are noticeable even if the raw speed of the CPU is still fine.

"consumerist thinking"? What other kind of thinking should a consumer have? And waste? My old Android phones are pretty useful even with marginally older software. None of them have non-patched remote execution bugs that would make them risky, thanks to the fact that some of the more risk prone components (built in browser, play services, etc) get updated independently from the OS.

>without any problem.

If you don't consider "completely unusable performance" to be a problem then yeah sure I guess it is "running" it.

iOS 12 has been widely praised for breathing new life into old devices with its performance upgrades. And even in the cases where there is a performance tradeoff, updating isn't mandatory, but it's still an option for those who want it.

iOS 12 is actually excellent on a 5S, my daughter's 5S still out-performs a huge chunk of the current Android market.

How was iOS 11?

Appalling on every generation of iPhone that it ran on.

It was widely praised, because it breathed new life into old (and not so old) devices that were utterly hamstrung by iOS 11 running them into the ground.

"Apple completely ignored performance on older devices for several generations until the complaints got too loud. Now let's act like that never happened, because they have put some effort in now."

> And even in the cases where there is a performance tradeoff, updating isn't mandatory, but it's still an option for those who want it.

Yeah. Except that many of the new Xcode updates to support iOS 12 involve builds that remove older compatibility. So sure, "you can still use your older iOS! Just ignore the fact that if your favorite apps are actively being maintained the chance they'll retain old iOS compatibility will be a rapidly shrinking one".

What? If you've had your favorite app on your phone for the past 5 years and refused to update in that time, then it'll still work? And in that case you're clearly not bothered by using old software.

People always demand new features, but want them on their old devices. Apple at least offers you the option.

Also, I don't see how that is different from an Android device that did not receive updates for 3 years and "your favorite app" that surely will be maintained for all eternity on an outdated system ...

Keep in mind that the phone manufacture is tasked with providing those updates for Android One devices.

It was once going to be Google providing them but they changed the site a while back.... that makes me skeptical about when / if you get those updates...

Google has been struggling to get manufactures to do updates and backpedaling on Android One's updates doesn't have me optimistic.

For people who want to buy phones in the several-hundred-dollar range, 2 years of official updates really isn't sufficient. My Nexus 4 lasted 4 or 5 years, the last few on unofficial firmware - but I shouldn't have had to use third party firmware on a device that was working just fine.

Well, you never had to.

It's pretty disingenuous to compare Android and iOS like it's a 1:1 comparison. Google Play services and several other components get updated independently from the system. A Nexus 4 that is running the last official security patch still works "just fine" and gives you access to the majority of apps on the Play store.

While the update model isn't perfect and a bit concerning security-wise, if you want a device that "just works" for 5 years and won't be artificially crippled, Android wins.

The old Nexus 7 was broken with stock firmware on the latest Android. So it's not always true.

2012 or 2013 Nexus 7?

2012

I know someone who has an Android One Motorola, while they like stock Android, updates are still really slow for reasons unknown. There was also no beta during Pie.

Definitely isn't a full Nexus or Pixel experience unfortunately.

It’s not that different either, only google phones 2 years old will get android p, exactly like gp said that is the case for android ones.

I have one of the first android one phones!

I'm scared to root it. Because they don't provide factory images and the update process is very fragile.

It's a far cry from Nexus.

Are there any Android One devices available in the US?

I have a Nokia 6.1 purchased from Amazon. It runs Android One and I love it. Currently costs around $230.

I find it really annoying that phones need so much hand holding from OEMs to keep up to date. Imagine the backlash if a Windows OEM said that: a.) you could only get OS updates from them, and b.) you'd only get 2 years of updates.

That's 2 years assuming you buy it on launch day, significantly less for most people.

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