Germany wants Apple to offer iPhone updates and parts for 7 years | Hacker News Reader

Germany wants Apple to offer iPhone updates and parts for 7 years

appleinsider.com

84 pointsDocFeind16 comments

This is not limited to Apple but would apply to all smartphone producers. I would even say that Apple has to be a lot less concerned (about the update rule at least) than manufacturers of Android phones. Those are outright terrible in that regard. The oldest iPhone model that will get the iOS 15 update will be the iPhone 6s and it was launched back in 2015 already.

So Apple is already there, hopefully the other smartphone manufacturers will follow, even if that means cutting down on the amount of models they release every year.

On the early Android years I followed with interest what each Google IO brought.

Nowadays I don't care.

Android Java is still cherry picking whatever Google feels like, NDK offers enough for multimedia stuff and mobile Chrome brings enough updates for mobile Web, and most apps are anyway doable as Web sites.

Most OS updates from last years seem just being updates for the sake of forcing everyone to update which APIs they are using on their apps anyway.

I agree that a new version of Android does not really do anything for me. I would however appreciate it if security patches make it to my phone.

You should look at GrapheneOS context to AOSP. Even just the improvements seen to memory management are impressive and worth making sure you're on a modern OS.

This all strikes me as overwhelmingly reasonable, and in fact I think security patches ought to be mandated for at least ten years.

Such a law would likely affect Android phone manufacturers much more than Apple, however.

It’s so reasonable that Apple has already reached that level. My iPad Air 2 from 2014 is on iPadOS 15 right now and it works well.

This will hit android OEMs hard if it is implemented.

Indeed. Samsung's Gear360 camera from 2017 is rendered useless recently, because Samsung refuses to update their client app for the latest version of Android.

I had similar ideas for what a regulator can do to protect our consumer rights (including right to repair):

- All devices should come with unlocked bootloader. No exceptions.

- OS updates should be mandated for a certain period. Especially security updates.

- Standardisation: An open standard API for device drivers should be mandated for the hardware components used so that system developers can easily create support for any OS, and don't need to resort to reverse engineering.

- Copyright restrictions on software code should be valid only for a certain period and become public domain (open source) after that. (It should definitely not be 75+ years of copyright that is currently mandated for films and books).

(A repost from another discussion on HN - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28428715 ).

Looking forward to see this approved, given that Google isn't doing this even for Pixels.

I think no manufacturer is except basically Apple, since they’ve been doing updates for 5 or 6(?) years now (I believe the 6S was updated for iOS 14).

The iPhone 5s came out in September 2013 (8 years ago) and receives security patches; latest being iOS 12.5.4 in June.

The iPhone 6s (Sept 2015) will be getting iOS 15, not just security patches.

The iPhones are currently at 6 years and the iPads at 7 (and counting)

Would they still allow telcos to shut down 3g infra like other countries? That would make 3g-only devices much worse.

And is there any chance they will require phones to inform they have a failed battery? I know people say their phones are slow, overheat and drain fast so they need an entire new phone.

Given that 2012-2013 was the year of 4G. I doubt that law would relate much to 3G phones.

On the Android side, this would be a small but welcome improvement. Though, with smartphones approaching commodity status, I'm sure we'll see more and more upstart phone vendors that go out of business 2-3 years in to dodge support requirements. I'd be curious if the regulators have measures against this. I'd expect not. I'm also a bit wary of legislation that would require hardware vendors to be good at software. They're different skill sets and there's a risk that any such measure would stifle smaller companies that serve more niche markets.

For any vendor that locks down hardware to a specific OS like Apple, I think this does very, very little. For a personal example, Apple botched the battery management software in iOS 14 causing several older model (but recently bought and healthy battery-wise) iPhones I own to drain from 100% to 0% in 2 hours with no app use and from 100% to 10% in seconds if apps like Podcasts or Mail try to sync. These phones are nominally supported, but unusable. Apple's approach to responding to user (or developer) bugs is notoriously useless unless you get media attention, and their user-interface philosophy is that no problems happen ever and if they were to happen, you the customer should not be allowed to know the information you would need to solve them. Apple is up to 14.7 and soon 14.8 and still has not fixed all the battery management issues they introduced with 14.0

If this were a PC, I would just roll back the OS, but with iOS devices, Apple requires sign off with their servers and only allows the most recent version (+/- a security update) to be installed. They do this for security, supposedly, but don't seem to care that they prevent people like me from running alternative software that might fix the problems that make their otherwise perfectly functional devices unusable. Unlike their M1 Macs running on the same architecture, they don't even give the option. Their phones ship with special fuses that get blown when given to customers to lock them down at the hardware level. That's how far they go.

Right to repair is hollow without the right to install alternative firmware and software.

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