Great to see commitment to older devices. I hope this becomes the norm in this space.
E2EE requires all devices to be updated to the latest version of the OS
Without legislation, it probably won't become the norm. With Apple, they know they will capture the value of future device purchases since if you want an iOS device, they're the only seller. Margins can be better since they're the only seller which leaves more money to support the product long term. Long-term support positions them as a premium product.
One of the big issues is that Google can't patch an issue and then push it out to everyone. They need buy-in from phone manufacturers and even carriers who have customized Android. Apple doesn't need any coordination. They can update iOS when they want to and they control all the hardware it's running on.
Yes, you'd think that competition might lead people to become loyal to one Android manufacturer if they provided longer-term support, but I think the ecosystem encourages shopping around for the best deal/promo rather than brand loyalty and money spent on long-term support makes products more expensive.
I think part of it is even a different market segment between iOS and Android. I think a lot of iOS users are people that want something that just works that they don't have to worry about and are willing to pay for a premium product that does that. I think Android users are split between power users who want to upgrade frequently (negating the utility of long-term support) and low-end users who don't care or need to prioritize purchase price over updates/security. Again, needing 2-3 parties involved for updates makes them more expensive, more difficult, and less likely to happen.
Part of it is simply the Apple experience. Apple Stores aren't cheap. Apple could use cheap materials and try to build stores that look and feel like most retail. That's not their game. They're looking to sell a premium experience and part of that includes long-term support. Of course, that comes with a price. It's easy to find $100 Android phones, but not $100 iPhones.
A $1,000 Android phone will likely be slower and supported for less time than a $400 iPhone, however. Most of the Android users I know spend the same or more on their phones, they just have to replace them more frequently.
This means that the price comparison is usually the iPhone 1-2 generations back - for example, if you were considering a Samsung Galaxy S22 you could get a faster CPU with a $100 iPhone SE (2nd generation) rather than the current model.
1. https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/4457705?hl=en#z... 2. https://grapheneos.org/releases#bluejay-stable
Since this is a technical forum, I am going to plug the blog post Alex Russell (not usually described as an Apple fanboy) made about real-world performance for web developers. One of the challenges we have is that normal people hang on to phones for a while and that's especially true for people who buy cheap phones since they often can't afford to buy a new one every year. When a developer testing on an “old” iPhone has a browser which runs code faster than the current flagship Android phone (iPhone XS ~= Galaxy S22), that means that they effectively have no idea what the web is like for a person using a $200 phone which they've had for a few years. There's a great chart here:
https://infrequently.org/2022/12/performance-baseline-2023/#...
Now, the Pixel line does have a decent camera so that's potentially a plus but it's not really relevant to the device's capabilities or long-term support situation. It's also unlikely that a single test is telling you that such an old sensor is really the best thing in the world rather than Google's ML pipeline is good at adjusting images to make them appealing to phone users.
Also, sensor doesn't matter, what matters is millions of people watching MKBHD channel think Pixel 6a makes better photos than 14 Pro Max, regardless of sensor.
For $400 you can buy a touch ID SE with 60Hz screen and camera that is ages behind what $350 Pixel 6a will give you. Ultimately it doesn't matter what you use I just hate the Kool aid "Apple has no competition" thinking, it's not like that and never was since at least 2016. Even price alone there are more expensive android flagmans than iPhones and some people go that way, so it's not just poor people choice or whatever Apple elitists tend to think.
> Also, sensor doesn't matter, what matters is millions of people watching MKBHD channel think Pixel 6a makes better photos than 14 Pro Max, regardless of sensor.
The number of views doesn’t mean that everyone voted (at 5-15 minutes per test, I’d be surprised if it was anywhere near), and it especially doesn’t tell you that a camera is better in absolute terms. His test methodology is randomized, which is good, but it shows small images side by side and they’re not perfectly consistent on composition. That favors certain types of image: higher contrast, brighter colors get the quick wow, very few people are likely to zoom in enough to notice noise or loss of detail, and that last part is especially important as ML processing becomes the norm - one thing people have commented on are the subtle processing artifacts (often described as smudging) that can produce which aren’t obvious at first glance.
That doesn’t mean that this is wrong: a ton of photos are never viewed at larger than the Facebook/Instagram default thumbnail size, and punchier photos stand out in those galleries, but it says that a single test giving a single ranking is incomplete. There’s also a selection bias concern: his audience skews towards Android users who are going to be accustomed to the camera, processing, and color matching of those devices. Familiarity matters a lot when you’re making a ton of rapid comparisons.
> For $400 you can buy a touch ID SE with 60Hz screen and camera that is ages behind what $350 Pixel 6a will give you
Ah, yes, through my amazing power of getting data rather than assuming that my preferred brand is best, I can see the iPhone SE’s 60Hz screen pales before what Google calls “up to 60Hz”:
And insufficient RAM is not a good reason not to support older phones?
Yet and still Microsoft figured this out with computers from different manufacturers almost 30 years ago.