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Comment by Red_Leaves_Flyy | Hacker News Reader

I've got a couple old android devices that won't even load most websites these days. Hell, the play store doesn't even work anymore. It's similar on old apple devices, but not quite as bad.

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This is such an utter failing of the ecosystem.

It's why I call out bullshit whenever I hear Android is Linux.

Android is Linux, even if it doesn't follow the philosophy of your favourite Linux distributions. Maybe RMS had a point when suggesting people call it GNU/Linux. Maybe Android/Linux?

It's more like Google Play Services/Linux these days.

Yes, it's a very different experience running Android with Amazon's setup on a Fire Device than on with Google Play Services, even if it's binary compatible.

Yep: GNU/Linux is very different from busybox/Linux is still different from Android/Linux, because the userland is (often) more important than the kernel; a user of Debian GNU/Linux has more in common with GNU/kFreeBSD than Android/Linux.

It's also a symptom of a wasteful greed driven system. By abandoning old hardware the industry at large can quietly force people into 'regular' upgrade cycles. That's two years for their ideal consumers who trade in their old phones and get the latest. At most it's like 6-8 years before the hardware is simply too old to possibly keep running. Many frugal people run a cycle or two behind, eg they're on iPhones (or model year equivalents) 8-11 currently depending on their cycle timeline. There's no way out of the cycle. I had a few coworkers get dropped by their cell providers over the last few years as the carriers dropped support for cell phones they bought in the 20xxs.

Essentially this planned obsolescence is manufactured consent in the population wide crowd funding of cellular technologies by for profit (mainly public) companies providing essential communication services.

I'll leave the moralizing of this to philosophers, but all these dynamics and their externalities undeniably bear further scrutiny.

The way to get out of the cycle is to push back with great force. Unfortunately people are too easily swayed by propaganda.

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