Again, this is a solved problem with Windows - Microsoft writes drivers for popular hardware. Like I said below - Windows 7 supported my 2006 Mac Mini hardware - USB, FireWire, gigabit Ethernet, and it even recognized the IR sensor for the remote. I couldn’t find a way to use it.

If you as a PC OEM, no matter how small, if you used popular components, Windows would support it.

I mean if random people on XDA Developers can figure out how to port AOSP or Lineage to everything, often in the span of a few days then surely you'd think device manufacturers could too without relying on Qualcomm to do it for them.

The problem is that a lot of those ports are using old kernels and various hacks that a) OEM wouldn’t want to support since it can produce unreliable results and b) may quite likely be in violation of whichever agreement they have signed with the SoC manufacturer.

That said the larger OEMs could easily provide updates since they can simply compel Qualcomm to support newer kernels heck some of them like Samsung even produce their own SoCs.

They don’t want too, planned obsolescence has pretty much been integrated into the android ecosystem.

This is why I left it, OnePlus One was my last Android phone, iPhone 6S was my first iOS phone (I had an iPad and a iPod touch before but didn’t really used them, these were gifts and a raffle win).

The iPhone 6S will still get iOS 14 this year.

Overall I could sum up my Android experience as - lost weekends of tinkering with ROMs and kernels trying to get my phones in-line with new releases.

Not to mention the worst shit they cam up with and that was when updates were linked to carriers so sometimes you had to wait a year to get an update if you didn’t want to risk bricking your phone by applying an update form a different region.

Honestly if there was a $300 iPhone coming out each year I don’t think Android would have gotten above single digit percentage in the west.

And while I’ll probably get flack here for saying this but Android is the biggest piece of shit out there not because the OS is bad but because even Google cant get their asses out of their head long enough to provide support for more than a couple of years to their own devices.

And the worse thing about this is that because of how utterly garbage the Android ecosystem is we are somehow supposed to pat Apple on the back for supporting devices for 5 years.

No. Apple supports the iPhone 6S from 2015 with the latest OS until at least September of 2021.

Apple also released a point update to correct bugs in devices going back to the 2011 iPhone 4s last July. Apple supported a phone that was 8 years old.

Microsoft has a vested interest in getting Windows to run on hardware going as far back as possible, within reason. They mainly sell the OS and legacy support is a huge selling point.

Phone manufacturers are at the other end of the spectrum. They sell the hardware and it's their vested interest to sell as much as they can. Making it obsolete by not offering software updates and taking advantage of the free work from XDA works perfectly for them. Being able to blame Qualcomm is even better since it's a "boogieman" that doesn't need to look good for consumers.

I’m not blaming the phone manufacturers - I am blaming Google. Apple definitely didn’t go out of its way to make sure that my 2006 era Mac Mini worked with Windows. But since back then, Apple used mostly standard PC components, MS supported it.

> I’m not blaming the phone manufacturers - I am blaming Google. Apple definitely didn’t go out of its way to make sure that my 2006 era Mac Mini worked with Windows. But since back then, Apple used mostly standard PC components, MS supported it.

But Google doesn't control the hardware in the same way that Apple does. It seems odd to blame Google for the lack of hardware support when the target platforms are not homogenous and have no single entity controlling the platform.

Microsoft doesn't control hardware, neither does the Linux community, yet I can run Windows and Linux on all sorts of random PC configurations. You can absolutely give Google/Android shit for this.

Actually they do. Microsoft maintains a well-defined standard and certification tests that define whether a machine is Windows compatible. The current one is the Windows HLK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Hardware_Lab_Kit. FOSS operating systems simply ride on the coattails of that.

PCs follow well defined standards. Embedded hardware has nothing comparable.

Yes and Microsoft/Intel defined these standards over 25 years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_Plug_and_Play

Microsoft doesn’t control the hardware either. They solved the problem in 1995. Even my old DX/2-66 DOS Compatibility Card created by Apple installed in my PowerMac 6100/60 that shipped with Windows 3.1 could run Windows 95 on release day. Apple never released new drivers for it.

If Windows ran on something that esoteric 25 years ago, why can’t Google solve the problem now?

Because they don't care, and it is curious how in Google's case their SV fans are so fast blaming the OEMs, as if poor Google wasn't capable to enforce it, if they really cared.

And that can be blamed back to users. Average Joe couldn't care less if his phone won't get updated so often or at all after some time.

They should, but they don't. Can be said about many aspects of our lives generally, humans are on average not that clever. Voting with wallet is something companies understand very well, I don't see any other fix (maybe EU could force them into something, till they find a way to skip it).

> And that can be blamed back to users.

That's victim blaming. Companies are the ones who shaped this situation and they managed to because each intrinsically acts as a unified entity with a unified goal and a lot of power behind it. People may be many but have little to no individual power, and they don't act in any coordinated fashion.

Users accept this because they can't really imagine it differently. Many of them never saw it working any other way. And phones never had the same kind of flexibility and repairability that PCs offer so people unwittingly assume this is normal and not even give it a second though.

Exactly. Plenty of users care, they're just powerless to do anything about. The OEM's are so big A LOT of people would have to outright boycott them to make any difference, but even then where are the going to go? ALL OEMs do this, so customers really have no choice in the matter.

Honestly, the users are right here - look at the history of this one, there's millions of dated Android devices out there lacking years of security patches, but do they get exploited?

Not in any significant number certainly, there haven't been any wildly successful Android worms like we've seen on Windows even in recent years.

The nature of sitting behind NATs, implementation of modern exploit mitigations in even older versions of Android, the diversity of devices, installation only via a marketplace, sandboxing and being able to rapidly update apps like browsers and email clients that do interact with network services makes those big OS-level exploits almost entirely unimportant.

The Average Joe has limited reason to care even if they stop getting security updates.

In 2020, I’m kind of amazed to hear you say that NAT is a mitigation for security exploits. “NAT is not a firewall” has been a mantra for at least 20 years.

This is just one exploit that can’t be patched by the app level and is dependent on the OEM.

https://threatpost.com/mediatek-bug-actively-exploited-andro...

I don't think its that Microsoft writes drivers for popular hardware. It's more so that Windows has a stable binary driver abi. Windows 7 drivers will still generally work on Windows 10. In contrast the Linux kernel will happily break any binary drivers between releases.

Android One has solved this, but I don't think it existed in 2018.

Not really. But even then you only get two years of guaranteed updates.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/The-Android-One-program-is-a-s...

Oh, that's a really big pity.

Android One was on very few devices, many international ones on 2018.

I do hope as Android One devices are easier for projects like LineageOS or Postmarket to support.