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Comment by andi999 | Hacker News Reader

EOL is 3 years after purchase (if bought in 2015)? Just imagine a car and after 3 years no more spare parts? Personally everything below 10 years sounds ridiculous to me.

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With modern high end smartphone it's the same issue. At best you get 2 years of patchs now, which is ridiculous because they really expect people to be able to afford >700€ phones that often.

You have a Citation? I read 5-7 years.

Pixel XL released October 2016 (from [1]), no guaranteed updates after October 2018 [2].

I looked at the Pixel 4, released October 2019, discontinued October 2020, no guaranteed updates after October 2022...

[1] https://www.gsmarena.com/google_pixel_xl-8345.php [2] https://support.google.com/nexus/answer/4457705?hl=en#zippy=...

That is not at best, probably this is at worst. But thanks for the info.

In Android-land this is currently about the best actually. There is a chance of it improving over time as the updates will be decoupled from hardware support but the situation is markedly worse than on iOS.

Unfortunately the 3 guaranteed years of updates for pixels is pretty much the best in the Android world. There are very few exceptions like FairPhone reliably providing long term updates

I think that's more a specific vendor / android thing? I just bought a 2016 iPhone SE second hand. It's running the latest iOS 14 right now, and is officially supported on iOS 15 too.

I think Apple is an outlier in terms of support, which i think is silly, because 5 years of support really should be taken for granted. There are many working phones or computers that are 10 or 15 years old and healthy.

This is why I'm partway through switching from Android to Apple as I replace devices. I could go with Android devices more likely to have third-party ROM support, but if I'm going to be concerned about security and patching why should I trust a pseudonymous person on a website forum to run my device?

As more security-related features get added in Android is also losing some of its differentiating abilities - e.g. wifi scanning isn't possible on iOS, but I think it's also been getting more restricted on Android in the last couple releases. That and the must-use-our-webkit browser restrictions on iOS are the only things that that have really annoyed me on iOS.

2015 iPhone 6S's are still getting patches, in fact it'll be compatible with iOS 15 this coming fall. It'll have seven years of ongoing support by this time next year.

It's difficult to imagine many of the smaller IoT companies providing support for junk made back in 2010, but I do have a daydream law/policy compromise:

Require all hardware devices to have ongoing security support for twenty years. A company can opt out of that support after three years, provided that they open source everything down to the firmware, and provide documentation and any necessary jailbreaking tools.

also an amendment to bankruptcy law that requires open sourcing propriety digital tech as part of filing.

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