The funny thing is the SoC in these smartphones can totally run Linux & Darwin, but the driver support for the peripherals is shovelware. Vendors do the bare minimum to suppprt the hardware, and you get a mess.

Its frankly shocking that the Allwinner A10/A20/A64 (which can run Win10!) /H3/H5/H6 has nearly complete mainline kernel support, whereas nearly any of the smartphones made since 2008 can't boot mainline Linux and drive their cameras, screen, GPS, etc. Its a huge failing of the industry.

Allwinner can't run Win10 (hah, A33 can barely run Android :/ ) and has barely any mainline support on actual physical commercial devices (i.e. tablets, not SBCs)...

I don't know what your on about, Windows 10 can run UWP apps just fine on any Allwinner A64 based device: https://github.com/Leeway213/Win10-IoT-for-A64-Release-Notes...

With regard to supporting tablets, most of the older Allwinner based tablets have feature parity between the mainline kernel and the vendor BSP kernel: https://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort

Just the other day I installed the latest lineageos on my original moto G, I think thats from 2013. And it works great.

Edit: actually, when I say 'latest' I mean 'latest available for the moto g'. I'm not 100% sure that's the very latest version that exists.

>actually, when I say 'latest' I mean 'latest available for the moto g'. I'm not 100% sure that's the very latest version that exists.

It's not. You're stuck with an Android that's 2 versions behind current and are still using the original kernel version that shipped with the device.

I guess that explains why it works so well.

iPhone 5s is a cell phone from 5 years ago, and it absolutely does run the latest operating system.