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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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).

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.

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.

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...