It's probably not a huge priority, given the replacement cadence of most phone users.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/619788/average-smartphon....

If, on average, people are replacing their phone within three years, 5 years or more of support is largely marketing.

I agree with this. 5 years seems like plenty until smartphones sufficiently plateau resulting in longer ownership. I believe this is another case of HN's biases versus the 80-90% that the major players actually build for.

And ironically, I highly doubt the majority of the users here on HN use their devices through their EOL. They just like the idea, philosophically.

I'm still using my iphone 6s plus from 2015. Smartphones sufficiently plateaued for me a long time ago. It's a shame the rest of you fine folks find everything so inefficient ;-)

I'm guessing there's a generational aspect to this as well, and if the devices are the person's only compute device. The assumption on my part is that the younger users are the ones to upgrade quickly as it is upgrading their only compute device. For someone like me, I'll always prefer a desktop/laptop to use for the sheer usability aspect. I just hate the small screen and hunched over posture of using a phablet-like device. That's me and my opinion, and we all like different things.

Apple didn't start with 6 years of support. Everyone keeps improving.

Android has to play catch up because of the way it works and because OEMs don't control everything. Apple develops their own SoC, while most Android OEMs have to use a SoC from Qualcomm or Mediatek... which also need to support new Android versions. All this is improving... slowly. In other areas it has been better than iOS for years (eg: apps like the browser receive updates via the app store even after end-of-life, same with some Android features).

Everything has trade-offs. A $500 Windows laptop gets better support than my $3500 Macbook Pro, and we've had laptops for a long, long time. Still, I own a Mac. I also use Android because it lets me do more than iOS.

If Qualcomm stops supporting a particular chipset version after N years, all the Android OEMs that use Qualcomm chips can't do anything about it. Apple, however, builds their own SoCs, so they can support them as long as they want.

Google has recently managed to strike some better deals with Qualcomm to get updates for 5 years for the latest crop of Pixel devices. I agree it's still not as good as Apple, but that's just how market forces work, and shows you who has the most leverage.

I don't think anyone is trying to "impress" anyone; merely stating the facts as they are.

> Google has recently managed to strike some better deals with Qualcomm to get updates for 5 years for the latest crop of Pixel devices

The last 2 generations of Pixels use Google's own SoC (developed with Samsung?) called Tensor[0].

Google deserves some criticism here. The main force behind Android is now behind Apple and other Android brands. Samsung uses a mix of Qualcomm and Exynos, and their flagships get 4 major Android updates. OnePlus, which relies on Qualcomm and Mediatek, will do the same for "selected devices"[1]. A Pixel 7 only gets 3 major updates... at least the phone receives security updates for 5 years, but they need to improve.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Tensor [1] https://www.xda-developers.com/oneplus-four-platform-updates...