In my opinion, manufacturers who cannot be bothered to provide updates to their software should not be allowed to claim intellectual property rights on the hardware. When support ends, drivers and documentation should be made open source, enforceable by law if need be.

I think that the problem is central to how phones are developed and constructed. Dell doesn't determine how long my XPS 13 gets updated; they provided the hardware, and I can put any software I want on it. It can keep running a secure, up-to-date OS as long as I want it to, until the hardware truly can't keep up (which, based on computer lifetimes these days, is a long time).

Conceptually, I dislike that mobile development hasn't followed a similar path. Samsung should not dictate how many updates my phone gets and for how many years. Practically, I realize that this is a consequence of how we've built SOCs and mobile hardware and there's no incentive for companies to change. That doesn't make it less problematic.

In my case the Manufacturer (LG) already did the updates, the phone was offered on 2 of 3 carriers, of the 2 one of those carriers are still offering updates for it, but because it was a less popular model on the 2nd carrier it is not longer getting updates