We entered the new millennium with the concept that most computers could use most extension hardware with (relatively) little effort, and you could upgrade your computer's basic operating system at will; even change it to another one entirely.
I'd love to update my still-decent Android phones that have long since stopped receiving security updates, but I can't. This is objectively inferior, a massive regression from general computing.
> I'd love to update my still-decent Android phones that have long since stopped receiving security updates, but I can't. This is objectively inferior, a massive regression from general computing.
this is one of the smelliest BS i've read on hn in the last year or two. phones before android were not upgradable AT ALL. if you were lucky, you could put a bigger memory card, and that was it.
nowadays you can access most of the sources of the os for your average android smartphone, you can rebuild the os and reflash it yourself. doing such thigs was a basically just wet dream in early 2000s.
Sure, some carriers restricted updates - but that's still a problem Android faces.
They weren't general computing devices. They were for making phone calls, sending SMS messages, and tracking contacts. The security risk profile did not include access to social media accounts and/or online banking.
For many folks, and a growing many folks, their phones are now their primary computing devices. For many folks, their primary computing devices no longer receive security updates.
> you can rebuild the os and reflash it yourself.
Tell me how I do that if I cannot root the phone.
What you need is a bootloader that is not locked so you can boot a different OS instead.
In my experience most major Android vendors do support bootloader unlocking.
Apparently I dreamed of doing Series 30, Series 40, Symbian and Windows CE updates.
If you show me such a device, I would instantly ditch my iphone, pretty much the only reason I have one is the great hardware and the lack of google supervision. I even bought a pinephone, but it needs a lot of work (and a new hardware iteration) before it can become truly usable.
And who enabled that? Not everyone wants to admit it, but it was IBM together with Microsoft which made this possible. This openness was thanks to a proprietary vendor wanting to make one operating system that ran on a wide variety of hardware.
The chaos of the embedded world is Linux's doing.
Which is the funny thing, given how much closed source drivers have hurt android as far as I can tell.