This isn't a technology or a QA problem, it's vendors refusing to acknowledge that customers own their devices.
It sounds like a terrible user experience.
If you told me it was a fresh OS with no ability to recover your old data, then maybe I could see it. But even then we’re assuming you didn’t use any cloud services that migrated your data once all devices had been upgraded, which isn’t true for either major platform. We’re also assuming that you can downgrade all firmware that’s changed successfully (which is expensive new QA).
I’d rather just have companies really prioritize performance to begin with.
>So you as a user are going to take a backup of os version N, then upgrade to N+1, live on it for a long time, then both want to pay/keep the storage costs of N AND potentially months later downgrade and lose all new data to go back to N?
You realize Apple already does this, right? Backups go to your laptop if you have itunes installed and icloud by default unless you tell it jnot to.
>It sounds like a terrible user experience.
I've literally never heard anyone complain about the experience.
>If you told me it was a fresh OS with no ability to recover your old data, then maybe I could see it. But even then we’re assuming you didn’t use any cloud services that migrated your data once all devices had been upgraded, which isn’t true for either major platform. We’re also assuming that you can downgrade all firmware that’s changed successfully (which is expensive new QA).
What are you talking about? Have you actually used a modern smartphone? When I restore, everything that was in the cloud resyncs. Everything that was local is still local. if my iphone were to blow up tomorrow, and I were to do a restore, it would be no different than a downgrade.
>I’d rather just have companies really prioritize performance to begin with.
Ahh, right, so they should be designing their OS for 4 year old hardware? Or maybe they should just allow users to downgrade, which would require almost 0 effort on their part.
If you restore from a months old backup, then you’ve lost months worth of data. That’s not a great experience if you can’t backup before downgrading, and super hard to explain to the user why. What you may or may not have “heard” is not a good sample size for decision making.
Just because your phone syncs to the cloud doesn’t mean the way that your data is stored is somehow immutable. It’s extremely common to have various “versions” of people’s data (schemas, most likely) that get migrated once all of a users devices have gone into a new version. This was public in a recent version of notes which said new features would only become available once all of one’s Macs were on High Sierra and all iOS devices were on 11. Restoring on a recent version post-migration IS different than a downgrade.
I believe companies should support old hardware, and Apple clearly prioritizes this as well. Moving software forward is important for the whole ecosystem. As I’ve outlined, it is far more than 0 effort to support downgrades.
It also means you lose security updates, and generally hold your platform back. Part of what makes iOS so much better to develop for is the general availability of modern APIs to most of the user base. If you increase those on older versions, then you hold back development of the platform as a whole.
iOS 12 was a major step forward in performance and battery consumption. Moves like that — making it a company priority - are a better way forward than allowing people to go backward.