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Comment by thesnide | Hacker News Reader

The battery is indeed the HW part that has the most decay.

But in that 5y time-frame the SW part is the one that is the most problematic.

It would be nice to be able to replace the ROM easily after the EOL of the device.

Will self-regulate itself immediately, as then incentives to have longer life is real and you cannot force customers to just buy another device because you decided it's time.

By "replace ROM easily" it means that one has the access (keys) and documentation to do it.

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The sad part is that you can't even do "ROM" replacements, it won't work for most people. Many countries have multiple apps that you more or less need to function in society, there needs to be a requirement for those apps to be installable on jail broken phones, not just via the official app store, if custom firmware is to make sense. Otherwise that old phone isn't going to provide much value anyway.

10 years of software update isn't actually unreasonable, if you can replace the battery on your phone easily. An iPhone 7 for instance is still a pretty useful phone for many, and I don't see any use cases that would chance that in the next couple of years.

It's not just the official store. Google Safetynet, used by a whole lot of essential android apps such as banking apps (particularly essential in the EU after app confirmation became legally required for online transactions) and also completely unnecessarily by a lot of frivolous apps, prevents implementing apps from functioning in open/rooted android installs, unless you jump through a bunch of hoops to fool the app about the device's rooted state.

> there needs to be a requirement for those apps to be installable on jail broken phones

That will not happen.

You can't just allow banking and financial software to be run on a compromised OS. It is great for you but terrible for older people who would be exposed to rampant criminal fraud.

The better approach is to force OEMs to support their phones for longer. 10 years is realistic.

I'm pretty confident that by most metrics custom ROMs are less compromised than OEM ROMs. It will have less malwares, I better sandboxing, less 3P backdoors , more up-to-date security updates.

1P here being the user/owner of the device

Depends on how you use it. Most people don't know you should not let your battery drain below 25%, and that the recommendation is to have it plugged in a charger as often as possible.

My Pixel 2 has probably more flash damage than batter degradation.

Is ROM really used anymore? It seems like these days, everything is OTA update compatible.

Customers aren’t forced to buy new devices, they just no longer get software updates after N (5?) years. You would need an alternative OS, like a version of Android that lacks google apps or something.

"ROM" is just used as a term for the system image. It is no longer truly "read only". And replacing that is often intentionally made difficult by cryptographically signing the image, making it impossible to boot a custom one.

Oh wow, that’s a weird anachronism that I didn’t expect. Here is the explanation from wiki:

> The term "ROM" is sometimes used to refer to a ROM device containing specific software or a file with software to be stored in a writable ROM device. For example, users modifying or replacing the Android operating system describe files containing a modified or replacement operating system as "custom ROMs" after the type of storage the file used to be written to, and they may distinguish between ROM (where software and data is stored, usually Flash memory) and RAM.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Read-only_memory

So what was once a very hardware term had become a completely software one.

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