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Comment by mlinksva | Hacker News Reader

The positive (and there's plenty of criticism; search and read) point being made about iphone is that it has a longer support duration. This seems highly complementary to repairability -- both seem important to maximize useful life -- and thus an entirely fair point, no?

I'm recently on my 4th Android smartphone in 12 years (Galaxy S, Moto G, Pixel 2, Pixel 7) and would be still on the Pixel 2 if not for lack of updates, as it's still completely fine hardware wise. I guess if I had been an Apple fanboi, I would've had at least 1 fewer phones in that time period. Really made me think this last time. Hoping my eventual 5th smartphone will have very long support and very good repariability.

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FYI you can get LineageOS 20 (Android 13) for your Pixel 2 with the latest updates: https://www.xda-developers.com/lineageos-20-google-pixel-2-a...

Last time I used LineageOS while you got the Android updates on most devices the underlying kernel and drivers were stuck at whatever the manufacturer originally shipped, and that included a bunch of security problems on most phones. Android security and updates is still a mess after all these years. For a while Android One seemed to help and I bought all my phones off that list, but even that's now gone. At this point anything that's not a Pixel within the (very short) support window is probably a big risk. Google really screwed this up.

This is all fixed now. Android 11 based ROMs introduced GSI (generic system images) which allow over the air updates and they even work with LineageOS.

Needs a newer underlying linux kernel though, so all the outdated 2.x kernel ports won't be compatible.

But I agree with you in your general point. Android OEM ROMs are a joke when it comes to support and they usually are out of date within the first year due to lack of maintenance on the vendor side.

I wish there was a more generic platform approach to this where drivers could be just packages instead of this whole statically built images mess that is also unusable for most endusers.

That's defnitely a big benefit. I used LineageOS (whatever it was called then) to extend the life of my Galaxy S, but at that time not having a working phone for awhile was a lot less disruptive to life and work, so I didn't attempt this time. But once I'm 100% migrated to my new Pixel 7, I'll certainly put an alternative ROM on the Pixel 2 to extend its non-phone life!

>I used LineageOS (whatever it was called then)

It used to be called CyanogenMod and it was easily hacked by the UK authority's.

Whereas the big vendors don't need hacking, the UK authorities just have to ask

I used to be a fan of LineageOS, but after a few devices, I've found that it's not very robust (for different reasons).

There's a bug where location services don't work (and require a fix). Then my latest phone where I've installed reboots randomly one or more times per day. Both bugs are reported, and affect other users.

The camera app of LineageOS 19 was terrible, and wasn't able to handle the two cameras of one phone where I've tried it.

I will use it in order to make my phone last longer, but I don't have high hopes (and I'm not a big fan anymore).

There is this [0]. Gonna fire up Android Studio tomorrow and try to get the release build going.

0: https://github.com/SebaUbuntu/android_packages_apps_Aperture

Whose "latest updates"?

By unlocking the bootloader to use Lineage, I lost ability to do contactless payments. And dm-verity is disabled.

I think I've had 3 phones in the time my wife has had 1 iPhone 7. Every time I buy a new phone I'm like "but Android is cheaper", but I'm fairly sure the lifetime cost of "phone" is in her favour at this point. I think my next phone will be an iPhone.

Don't forget AppleCare+ if you do. Not worrying about broken screens ($200/each replacement without vs $30 service fee, with $100 one time AppleCare fee for 2yrs) and getting replacement phones on the spot for other damage is really a huge anxiety relief and comes with more savings than the initial cost. That what helps turn a "phone a year" into 3yrs.

Does Google offer something equivalent to AppleCare for Pixel phones? I guess there's think like Best Buy extended warranties but I've never had to use one for a phone. I'm curious how it compares.

They do, with uBreakIFix providing fulfillment: https://store.google.com/us/magazine/preferred_care?hl=en-US

Nice looks like it's the exact same service fees for broken sceens and accidental damage. They copied it wholesale to be competitive. Which is a good idea.

AppleCare will hand you a new phone if you break a new, flagship model before they have spare parts. I suspect “UbreakIfix” will not do this.

Re the AppleCare+ point. If you are unlikely to break a screen more frequently than every 2 years on average, it's more economical to just not get the service. This is ignoring other benefits the AppleCare+ may provide.

I used to never break screens, but the newer larger phones crack, at least on the corners.

My iPjone XS will turn 4 years old in 2 months. I see no reason to change it.

Maybe in 2 more years…

As for hardware repairs should I need them… there are 3rd party shops. Dont care what Apple says about genuine parts or approved parts or whatever.

I only ever had one smartphone, and that's Samsung Galaxy S7 (bought in the year it hit the market: 2016). I will have to replace it very soon though because my banking app is going to stop supporting the Android version it has, and Samsung doesn't provide upgrades.

But... it's not really Android's fault anymore than this is Samsung's fault. The phone itself is in a good condition. The battery holds the charge for almost as long as it used to when bought. Maybe I'm not a typical user, or have very modest use patterns that allowed this phone to survive this long. Whichever this is, it shows that it's not really a problem of Android (I don't like the system for other reasons).

Before replacing, I'm going to try to install LineageOS on it, and, we'll see, maybe I'll get another couple years out of it.

At the same time span, my wife burned through 4 smartphones. All of them died for reasons unrelated to the operating system they have (i.e. were dropped, stolen etc.) It's possible that being, in general, cheaper and more disposable, Android phones don't live as long as iPhones, but this doesn't mean they shouldn't or cannot live just as long.

>Whichever this is, it shows that it's not really a problem of Android

It kind of is though because Android allows for phone brands to tweak the stock OS and stop updating even if the OS itself is getting updates.

If Android forced all manufacturers to use the stock OS with updates, the phone could still get updates, no?

At least when I still used Android, some SoC manufacturers made unmaintainable hacky patches for one specific kernel tree (and sometimes the manufacturer would then add more customizations to make it even worse) and you'd be stuck on that kernel forever.

I have two teenagers. One has an iPhone and he needed a screen replacement already three times. The other is on android and he just had his screen broken and bought a new one, a cheap Samsung phone. Screen replacements are just as expensive on both ecosystems. But sometimes it is nice to be able to get an affordable, fresh phone, and not have to worry as much about loss or theft

Also the top tier Samsungs are more expensive than iPhones nowadays

> The positive (and there's plenty of criticism; search and read) point being made about iphone is that it has a longer support duration

Yup, and the OTA updates with Tesla are also better than you'd get on a car that's 1/10th of the price. Isn't it just a little bit over-entitled to bring up any iPhone in a discussion about budget phones?

Newsflash: the vast majority of the planet can't afford to drop $1000+ on a mobile device.

Newsflash (just looked it up), an iphone se is $429, a used one is cheaper, and factoring in support duration, may be cheaper yet. A friend who would've been among the last people I'd expect to use an iphone blogged this https://announce.asheesh.org/2022/09/i-switched-to-iphone-fo...

I'm really embarrased by this (I've been a borderline Apple hater basically my whole life) but also acknowledge reality.

> a used one is cheaper, and factoring in support duration, may be cheaper yet

Q: For all those hundreds of millions of people who have paid less than $150 for their phone, how many of them even gave a second thought to the support duration when they decided what to purchase?

I'd guess approximately the same number as those who have given a second thought to repairability, i.e., negligible. I'm all for increasing demand for both at the margins, including as part of savvier consumers' financial calculus.

I had an iPhone 4 many years ago, and Apple nerfed it with software updates when the iPhone 6 came out. These updates significantly slowed down the phone, pretty much forcing me to get a new one after only two years. So I bought an Android and never looked back.

Apple actually lost a lawsuit over this, but of course it didn't matter because the capitalist government theatre is controlled by the ruling class protecting their own, so Apple still came out on top.

IIRC due to the degrading/faulty(?) batteries they had to choose between random shutdowns and slowing down the phone. I'm not sure I agree with the way they handled this but I don't think they did that because of "corporate greed".

I wouldn't be so generous. Slowing down the phone without any notification is a major problem. Had they added a notification this was happening, there would be no problems at all.

Of course, adding such a notification would've prompted many users to seek out battery replacements (and a lot of non-Apple-authorized repair shops would've been happy to meet this demand) and give a new life to their devices, where as silently slowing down their device would prompt those users to eventually upgrade once they get tired of it.

Yeah, they didn't tell Apple Geniuses either IIRC so when users came into the store complaining about a slow phone they weren't recommending a $99 battery replacement but a $699 iPhone 7.

The iPhone 4 slowdown came several years before "batterygate".

i remember my initial ipad2. Yeah new ipads came out, updated, and the old one became too slow to use after the updates. I hated apple products for a long time after that. that was 2013

Wouldn't that be 4 years? I also had an iPhone 4 ruined by the last iOS updates, but because of the S years it was: 4->4S->5->5S->6, so 4 years before battery life and performance went bad.

> This seems highly complementary to repairability -- both seem important to maximize useful life -- and thus an entirely fair point, no?

Repairability is more that once you buy it, you actually own it.

Apple does not support this model. Real repairability is when you can hack all components of hardware and software in your domain (which precludes hacking against cell towers, ISP telecom equipment, etc.).

Nor do most Android vendors.

Correct, though that isn't concomitant to the point under discussion.

Does that compete much against a $150-ish phone with 3 years of software support and super cheap, user replacable parts? I think it's making excuses that the iPhone isn't just a giant burning money pit for customers. Why are folks in a completely different market segment comparing the two?

They're comparing them because software support shouldn't be a problem, regardless of market segment. You can run fully up to date linux on 15 year old computers, but in moving to phones, they destroyed what we took for granted. This is a manufactured problem, and it's no coincidence that it lines the pockets of smartphone makers.

Support costs money, and it's part of the price. This moralizing is ridiculous.

That's my point - it doesn't cost money on PC. I don't need "support" from my motherboard vendor to install the latest linux.

Yeah. Part of that is radio support (open source phone projects have had this problem) and packaging - you still need a separate packaged image per phone model. Openmoko had the support problem (iirc) pretty early on.

Until those ecosystem issues are fixed, dumping on a $150 phone for concessions that a $800-1000 phone doesn't have to make us pretty ridiculous.

> Until those ecosystem issues are fixed

Again, that is my point. No company has any incentive, or has made any moves to, fix the ecosystem. They're happy how there are no standards or documented APIs, how everything is a closed binary blob that changes from one insignificant version to the next. They don't demand any kind of support or openness from hardware suppliers, they don't form any standards or demand adherence to them, despite their massive market power (if Samsung wanted open or standards-compliant hardware, they'd get it), because they directly financially benefit from the broken status quo they created.

> concessions that a $800-1000 phone doesn't have to make

You can spend 2x that on an Android phone, and the software situation won't be any better. This is deliberate.

Actually this phone is less then 1/4th the price

And a raspberry Pi costs even less, made by a firm with negligible resources compared to Nokia, yet has far better software support.

That's neither a phone nor the topic of the article. What are you going on about?

> radio support

What do you mean? Wireless cards on PCs are dirt cheap and have fantastic forwards-compatibility with future OS releases. There's no reason mobile network cards should be any different.

> you still need a separate packaged image per phone model

Only if you insist on packaging the image yourself. If you don't lock bootloaders and provide API/ABI documentation on how to interact with your hardware (through a binary blob if necessary), the community will often do the rest.

The Android update dumpster fire is a self-inflicted problem.

Wifi is unlicensed spectrum. FCC and counterparts have restrictions on what cell transceivers can do and that has repurcussians when the limits may not be enforced with a misbehaving driver. Check out the old openmoko lists for details.

We haven't had an IBM PC-level of openness from a phone hardware platform. Not one. Shitting on incremental improvements (like the serviceability of this Nokia) is counterproductive.

That’s why this discussion matters: Apple devices have much longer lifespans because their economic model is correctly aligned — Apple doesn’t mind if you hold your iPhone for years because your use of things like the App Store, Apple Music, etc. also fund their OS development.

On Android, that’s fractured: Qualcomm wants you buying a new phone every year or two because they only get paid for CPUs and Google doesn’t want to subsidize them with Play purchases.

This is amplified because the architecture prevents people from doing their own support. A PC user can run Linux even if Microsoft gives up because the boot loader isn’t locked to prevent it, although driver support does show there are still problems here for the fraction of hardware without robust open source drivers or documented firmware.

My ideal fix for this would be legislative, requiring mandatory minimum support lifetimes (say 7-10 years for at least prompt security updates) and some threshold for requiring boot loader unlocking. The only Android device I had was a Lenovo tablet which they never updated to the OS version released a month or so _before_ the hardware, and which became unsafe to use on the internet many years before the hardware failed (we used it as a white noise generator for a baby). That’s a ton of e-waste which could have been avoided if they weren’t allowed to just walk away from support because they didn’t sell enough units to care.

This is disingenuous.

If price was the reason, we'd have phones with longer term support at a higher price point. The problem is that support is cheaper than making new stuff, but the companies would rather sell a more expensive good if they can prevent customers from buying the cheaper option.

Support is cheaper for customers because companies providing support have to invest into something customers want, but doesn't create the same competitive advantage in the market where stakes are always rising. I.e. companies are incentivized to replace rather than support because they need to amortize the cost of R&D that goes into making phones with more memory / storage / cameras / hoo-hoo-ga-ga. If instead the effort is diverted into support, that effort doesn't generate future revenues as much as the effort spent on, well, future technologies.

So, the customers don't get good service not because it's impossible or prohibitively expensive, but because of the lack of a free platform (equivalent to Linux on PC), and a lack of regulation that would make it necessary for manufacturers to provide longer term support to their products (which would've leveled the field, because everyone would have to provide similar length of service, and so the competitive edge would stay the same).

As long as the manufacturers are in the rats race for the fraction of the future market, they'll cut every corner possible to get a bigger slice. The cost and the price today aren't as much of a concern for them as the survival in the next few years.

Depends how likely either one is to break. I haven’t had case on my latest iPhones for 4 years and never seen break it at all. Also - how waterproof is this Nokia?

> I'm recently on my 4th Android smartphone in 12 years (Galaxy S, Moto G, Pixel 2, Pixel 7) and would be still on the Pixel 2 if not for lack of updates, as it's still completely fine hardware wise. I guess if I had been an Apple fanboi, I would've had at least 1 fewer phones in that time period. Really made me think this last time.

In regards to longterm OS support, iPhones have been getting better and better[1]. 6-7 years is pretty darn good for the last batch to fall out of support (6+, 7, and SE). It'll be interesting to see when the next batch (8 and X) of iPhones falls off the cliff.

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1. https://www.statista.com/chart/5824/ios-iphone-compatibility...

On the other hand I can still get modern versions of android with all the security updates for some ancient android phones, you just have to do a tiny bit of tinkering with unlocking the bootloader first. That's something you can't do with any iPhone.

To be clear, the Pixel 2 is unsecurable at reasonable performance against Spectre style attacks.

Might not matter to some.

> The point being made about iphone is that it has a longer support duration. This seems highly complementary to repairability

Seems like you might call that “software repairability”

No, I'd just call it software support duration, or more narrowly software security update duration. "Software repairability" basically means FOSS (though I don't want to underestimate what creative people will do without source or permission).

> The positive point being made about iphone is that it has a longer support duration.

How so? Apple iPhones have one year warranties, are notoriously difficult to repair, and Apple charges an arm and a leg to "repair" them (usually by basically forcing you to do a trade-in and buy a new phone). Apple products will also quickly degrade over iOS upgrades.

For example, my iPad Air 2 can barely browse the web with no other apps open.

> How so? Apple iPhones have one year warranties, are notoriously difficult to repair ...

I think your parent was talking about OS support.

How so? Apologies for not being specific, I was referring to support for security updates.

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