Limiting it to 3 years masks the fact that lots of people still had iPhone 3G phones on 2 year contracts when Apple stopped offering updates for it.
That said, the fact even that's off the scale is worrying for Android.
That said, the fact even that's off the scale is worrying for Android.
And I'm okay with it because I know Apple has conservative product life cycles and will stick to it. And I know the next iPhone get will be supported for 2-3 years at least, as well.
I think ajanuary is talking about the fact that the 3G was still for sale until right before the iPhone 4 was released (see black rectangle). So people who bought a 3G right before the 4 was released (not necessarily a smart move) got about 10 months of support (support essentially ended in March 2011, with iOS 4.3)
The 3G should have stayed with the 2G in being restricted to iOS 3.1.3, which whilst no speed demon, at least runs reasonably well, even now.
The 3GS is the lowest hardware that should have been given iOS 4.
The only reason why I had iOS 4 on my 3G was app compatibility. I eventually was frustrated enough to go back to 3.1.3 and it was like having a new phone again.
The device is still much slower and less smooth than on 3.1 due to higher base memory requirements (as a result, not only are most applications slower to load some will not load at all on 4.2 and will instead crash due to going OOM and not being able to clear out anything upon receiving an OOM signal).
My own app FemCal, runs pretty well on 3.1.3 on a 2G, but I think almost everything is a struggle for iOS 4 on the 3G.
In particular, the new Facebook app appears to be unusable on the 3G nowadays.
Improve over 4.0, which was completely and utterly unusable. I still have my 3G, so I can see what it is daily. A 4.2.1 3G is generally slow and laggy, but for the most part it works (as far as I'm concerned anyway: all tapbot applications run acceptably, Instapaper, Wikipanion and Terminology work and so do most — though not all — of my games).
Not saying it's great, or even good (compared to 3.1), but that I can use my phone is a net improvement over 4.0, which had essentially killed the bloody thing.
> In particular, the new Facebook app appears to be unusable on the 3G nowadays.
I wouldn't know about that. I have no use for facebook's application.