Google Is Forcing Me to Dump a Perfectly Good Phone

Re:Google Is Forcing Me to Dump a Perfectly Good Phone by sigmar on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @12:17PM (#30074561)

>Unless you routinely destroy your phone within two or three years, there’s no justification from a sustainability perspective to keep using Android phones. Of course, Apple is only good by comparison, as it also manufactures devices that are difficult to repair with an artificially short shelf life. It just happens to have a longer shelf life than Google.

Most of the iPhone users I see are using a phone they purchased within the past three years. Does the average iPhone get used for longer than the average Pixel?

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Re:Google Is Forcing Me to Dump a Perfectly Good Phone by nickthegreek on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @12:22PM (#30074641)

Yes, because that old iphone is handed down to a kid or sold to someone else. The android resale market was trash last I looked. I still have family using iPhone 7 pluses but the battery is showing wear (but thats pretty cheap to replace).

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Re:Google Is Forcing Me to Dump a Perfectly Good Phone by chomp on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @12:40PM (#30074971)

We can't tell because Apple is a little opaque with the devices that are in the wild, and Pixels are such a small slice of the entire Android population. What we have are only third party accounts of the iPhone population, e.g. https://deviceatlas.com/blog/most-popular-iphones

According to that (maybe selection-biased) source, it looks like the most popular iPhone is the one released the same year the first Pixel was released. We can't conclude anything about which is used longer, but Android app updates are required to target API level 30 I think for Android, which is no longer supported on the first Pixel, so there's probably a pressure that urges users off of that phone. I'd be surprised if percentage-wise, a larger share of Pixel users are on the original Pixel than iPhone users on iPhone 7.

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Re:Google Is Forcing Me to Dump a Perfectly Good Phone by null_object on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @12:36PM (#30074912)

> Most of the iPhone users I see…

Instead of making knee-jerk anti-Apple assumptions, you might try to check some facts.

edit: apparently the statistics I linked are behind a paywall, but the stats from the app I'm working on show me that approx 10% of users are on iPhones that are 7 years or older.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/626631/smartphone-market...

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Re:Google Is Forcing Me to Dump a Perfectly Good Phone by sigmar on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @12:41PM (#30074976)

Just speaking from my own experience and asking if my view is not representative. That link just goes to a paywall for me.

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Re:Google Is Forcing Me to Dump a Perfectly Good Phone by mantas on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @12:49PM (#30075144)

My iPhone 6 held up fine for 6 years and was still getting security updates last fall.

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Re:Google Is Forcing Me to Dump a Perfectly Good Phone by whacim on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @12:25PM (#30074705)

I think iPhones get 6-7 years of support. I believe the new Pixel 6's are up to 5 years.

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Re:Google Is Forcing Me to Dump a Perfectly Good Phone by zibzab on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @12:29PM (#30074780)

Note that that 6-7 year "support" includes updates that will make you hate your phone.

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Re:Google Is Forcing Me to Dump a Perfectly Good Phone by dont__panic on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @12:41PM (#30074987)

Sure, back in the iPhone 4/4S days iOS 7 trashed older phones. Unusably bad. Should never have rolled out those UI updates if they couldn't perform well on older hardware.

These days? I'm using a 2016 SE with iOS 15. Works great. I do not hate my phone. In fact, the small size, fingerprint sensor, and headphone jack make it a better buy than any modern smartphone. I can live without AI text recognition on my photos, which seems to be limited to newer phones. The app switcher, settings, browser, and everything else are still as snappy as the day I bought this thing. Only thing that doesn't run well? Spotify, which apparently doesn't bother to test their UI on small hardware (constantly clips links and text off the bottom of my screen), nor older CPUs (the app takes forever to start up, regularly freezes up when searching for songs, and can take anywhere from 1 second to 30 seconds to load even already downloaded albums).

So uh... good on Apple. Shame on Spotify.

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Re:Google Is Forcing Me to Dump a Perfectly Good Phone by null_object on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @12:38PM (#30074940)

> Note that that 6-7 year "support" includes updates that will make you hate your phone

My kid is still using an iPhone 6s and loves it. It works perfectly.

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