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Re:Google urges Android phone users to switch off Wi-Fi calling by sofixa on Tuesday March 21, 2023 @02:12AM (#35243027)
> Unfortunately I can't stand iOS. No kidding, I'd rather have a Nokia 5110. I've tried repeatedly, thinking "I'm just not used to it", but there's too much about the design philosophy that I find actively obnoxious. Strangely, I don't have this problem with macOS.

That's how i feel with iOS and macOS, the whole design philosophy and UX feel alien to me, and makes me hate every actual issue I encounter even more.

> I'm getting a bit sick of this treadmill. I don't buy the defence some people offer that it's too much work to support the older devices. Having a security-only backports release series for old devices would be _trivial_ compared to the enormous piles of money Google sets on fire for shits and giggles on a daily basis. It's planned obsolescence, plain and simple.

From what I've understood, it's mostly the hardware components' vendors' fault - Qualcomm and co that provide the SoC and modem. It's their firmware which isn't kept up to date by the manufacturer (because it isn't easy to do so), thus phone lifecycle is inherently limites. There have been massive recent advances in that area though, with on one hand more vendors (MediaTek, Samsung) that could maybe be forced to compete and thus have to differentiate from one another, but also big changes to Android and the way updates are done, to keep firmware/driver/kernel updates as simple as possible to develop and roll out. We can see the effects with multiple Android vendors (e.g. Google, Samsung) now supporting phones for much longer. So hopefully soon things will improve.

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