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Comment by bsharitt | Hacker News Reader

Android should be the focus of this. I’d be upgrading every two years with most android manufacturers, and maybe a year or two more with a Pixel, but I’ve got an iPhone XR than I probably won’t even think about upgrading until the iPhone 15 but will have to think about it because my XR will still be getting updates. The Pixel 3a is the closest Pixel Android contemporary to my phone and has been been in the new lately due to random bricking so… iPhones aren’t perfect but it’s been a while since I’ve needed to jailbreak to do something I’ve needed to do.

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It’s unreal the difference. Almost every one of my android devices has bricked, failed in some other way, or become unusable due to a lack of updates while my apple devices have lasted so long that they become completely obsolete hardware wise long before they stop getting updates.

I have a 2015 MacBook Air and a 2014 iPad which both still receive updates and work fine while my 2017 pixel phone is unsupported and stopped booting recently. My nexus 5X also bricked and stopped getting updates shortly after release.

If we're talking anecdata, my original Samsung Galaxy Note (I think the first dual-core smartphone?) still does fine, whereas my iPhones from that period (4, 4S, 5) are all unusable now, in spite of replacing batteries in them (sometimes - several times). The most annoying was the failure of the Home button and, in the 5, the lightning socket.

But all this does not matter much. What's important for me is that if I wanted, I could still develop apps for the Galaxy Note, whereas it's practically impossible to develop apps for discontinued iPhones, even if they continue to work perfectly fine.

Comparing many Android phone manufacturers to one iPhone manufacturer is apples to oranges. I've used a Nexus 6P (would have kept it longer if it accepted a memory card), an LG G6, and an LG G8 (still my current) as long or longer than those with iPhones around me as they tend to updated so they can 'have the latest'. Android devices aren't as differentiated in the hardware (from my perspective) and choosing a manufacturer that has a good OS update policy is really all it takes.

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