I ran it myself as a secondary device for phone app testing and didn't have that problem. Maybe as a daily driver I would have had more trouble?

In my experience, the bigger issue was designers assuming everyone has the taller iPhone 5 screen size (or worse, iPhone 6) and burning up 95% of the screen with keyboard + giant fixed header + fixed footer. Some apps would give you space for maybe two lines of content in between all that.

More of a complaint with 3rd party devs on that though.

So - what would you prefer, a slower but secure OS on an older phone, or no updates at all?

Also the "cherrypick" comment is a bit of a dodge - Google already does security patches for older releases (3 years vs. 2).

It would arguably be just as easy to secure one codebase and pare features down for performance.

Comments like this are ridiculous. It wasn't a pared down operating system by any definition. Features just weren't available if you didn't have the requisite hardware.

Not everything was hardware related, or at least not obviously hardware related. My friends both really wanted public transit directions in maps and airdrop but neither feature shipped on the 4S. I also seem to remember that predictive Siri (Google Now-ish competitor, don't remember what they called that) didn't make it to the 4S.

So I do commend apple for getting updates to that device for 4 years, but at least in their experience, it made the phone worse and didn't bring all the features that they wanted.

> My friends both really wanted public transit directions in maps and airdrop but neither feature shipped on the 4S. I also seem to remember that predictive Siri (Google Now-ish competitor, don't remember what they called that) didn't make it to the 4S.

As I recall all those features were built only for 64bit CPUs which the 4s/mini didn't have.

Oh I never heard that before, interesting and thanks. Well, at least I did say it wasn't "obviously hardware" ;)

That's mostly true, but not entirely. When Google released OpenGL 3.0 and 3.1, older Nexus devices couldn't get that.

> Google doesn't cherrypick features for older hardware - it's all our nothing.

well they should.