And even when Android phone manufacturers bring updates, you have no idea when it's going to be. At a minimum, months after the reference version comes out (excluding Google's line of course).

Isn't it more like 4 years, at least on the Phones?

I wouldn't mind getting an additional Android device, but two years of upgrades really isn't enough. It's nice to get a new OS upgrade every year.

Taking the 4S as an example because that was my old phone:

    Launched October 2011 (w/ iOS 5.0)
    Discontinued September 2014
    Last OS update August 2016 (iOS 9.3.5)
    OS becomes outdated September 2016 (iOS 10 released)

So even if you bought it at the tail end of its availability, you had two years of updates. If you bought it when they were new, you got 5 years of updates.

For reference, the September 2016 release of iOS 10 (which the 4S didn't get) corresponds to the iPhone 7 release. Software for the 4S was maintained through the releases of 5, 5S, 6, and 6S.

Granted it chugged a bit on the newer OSes and developers (especially 3rd party and web developers) started to waste enormous chunks of screen space because they collectively didn't give a shit about anyone who still had a 4" phone, but it's better treatment than you'd have gotten with any Android phone.

It can be around 5 years, the iPhone 4S technically had the latest version of iOS from October 2011 to June 2016.

iOS 10 launched in September 2016, and I think the 4s was kept current up until then.

Also five years for the iPhone 5 (2012-2017). since iOS 11 supports the iPhone 5s, it will also get its fifth years of updates. (Hopefully more! Mine is still going strong, the arm64 processor was revolutionary.)

Five years does not seem to be an outlier for iPhones anymore.

Except, you know, all Android manufacturers are free to support their OS as they see fit and have different update cycles.

The closest apples-to-apples comparison would be Google's Nexus and Pixel lines to iPhone. In that case, the Nexus 5 came out in 2013 and received updates into 2016, before being dropped for Nougat. Pretty much all of their phones have seen similar support (N4: 2012-2015, N6: 2014-present, etc).

What confuses is me is what kind of work needs to go in to updating android on different phones? If Android is compatible with the architecture of the phone shouldn't the software update from Google work?

Unfortunately there is no real standard hardware architecture for Android devices. Some pieces are the same, but every device has different incompatible components. So the device vendors have to re-apply a unique set of patches every time.

AFAIK, they don't use Google's software updates, because they have their own "distribution" that's mostly the same but slightly different from the vanilla Android version, so they need to merge those changes and test them before they can push the updates to the phones they made.

When you have as many types of hardware as Android supports, it becomes a shit show. iOS can do updates for longer because the hardware isn't all over the place.