Very convenient for them and also easy to accomplish by buying the cheapest parts. It's probably eMMC-based and writing a logfile constantly. Source: every Android that has ever died on me in this exact way (four and counting)
https://www.tesla.com/support/8gb-emmc-recall-frequently-ask...
The people who have been in the field for a decade or more can't be arsed putting up with all that and so you get stupid issues which were solved years ago but the devs were not aware of them.
With bottom-of-the-barrel (and/or "value add") IoT garbage, hardware suppliers are a commodity, and under competitive pressure, the winners will be ones that can make cheapest hardware that just about outlasts a typical warranty period of their customers' products. Shorter-lived parts will not bring repeat business; longer-lived parts will get value-optimized further. Failing just after warranty period is Just Right.
(Just look at Amazon marketplace if you think I’m exaggerating.)
Customers have been "noticing" this pattern for couple decades now; it's not just in tech, but everywhere across the board - from foodstuffs, through appliances, sports equipment, clothing, hygiene, all the way to computing. Unfortunately, this is a pattern in the same sense a tsunami is - you notice the wave is growing and about to flood everything around you, but there's fuck all you can do about it.
Depends. For some product lines there's the "commercial grade" stuff available - for TVs, look into Digital Signage product lines and add some sort of TV stick (or an rpi) to them for the brains, for power tools look at what the tradespeople use (it's probably Bosch blue series, Makita or DeWalt), for kitchen equipment ask your nearest restaurant. For computing, I'd go to Apple (if your ecosystem supports it), Lenovo/Dell/HPs business line stuff (you don't need to buy the next day on-site package, but you want the models that do have that as an option because that's the ones that are both made for easy repair and have better components in the first place) or Framework. You pay quite the hefty premium over Chinesium stuff, but it's worth it.
Only thing I'd stay far away from if you're not trained on how to use them is cleaning supplies of all kinds, hair and body shampoo as the commercial ones are way stronger concentrated and you can do serious damage to your (or your loved ones) bodies if you, say, leave them on too long.
In terms of online shopping, if the distributor cooperates with the consumer then there is something to do about it. One of the largest Swiss online shop started to share warranty statistics of all products. That information is quite useful to avoid the cheap and soon to break stuff. Of course it's not perfect, since it only tracks faults within the 2 year warranty period. But it provides a proxy signal for quality. But maybe that only works in smaller markets with less incentives to game the statistics.
I do not have exact statistics but I believe that this is the most common failure mode of SD cards in embedded systems that we supply (but a friend who works for certain ARM and PowerPC SoC vendor told me that he has statistics that disprove my theory, so take that with a grain of salt).
My guess is that their "RAM Plus" feature (aka swap) combined with the memory hungry modern android apps turned out to be a nasty timebomb. Which has or still is bricking millions of smartphones after a few years of usage.
The underlying flash memory is trash and the controller already does a ton of heavy lifting to keep the data coherent.
Its a shame mobile devices don't have a SMART equivalent, would be nice to have some warning as something approaches the end of its life.
It’s not going to write at twice the rate just because more space is available.
You can find out a bit more here https://www.seagate.com/gb/en/blog/ssd-over-provisioning-and...
I also remember a guide a while ago on how to reprogram a SSD to operate in SLC mode instead of MLC. You lost disk capacity but gained a large performance boost and a reduced error rate.