Most people don't care about having the latest specs, they want the latest features. If new features only ship to devices that are < 2 years old (like Android updates), older devices will quickly become obsolete. The hardware is still fine - I'm writing this on an almost exact 7 year old OnePlus 3 running a barely year old version of Android and the vast majority of things perform perfectly fine. Even the camera is perfectly fine even for modern standards now that I've switched to a modern camera app by tricking it into thinking my phone is a Pixel.
If we stop making old devices obsolete, dealing with old devices will be a lot easier.
> If 6% of Android users globally are on an ancient OS version, how many man-hours would it be sensible for my to spend testing that our systems work for them? How many of those 6% are likely to be paying customers for us?
From a purely financial point of view, I agree. But it stills sucks for the 6% and indirectly this is one of the reasons for electronic waste.
In a way there is a long tail of consumers with smaller incomes and living in countries with weak currencies that benefit from computer hardware and software and services that are developed targeting wealthier consumers but still have to deal with the fact they aren't really the target market.
If so, I hope they're covering both hardware and software and configs.
That certs eventually expire is obvious to me now that someone raised the issue. But I wouldn't have foreseen the problem on my own. So I imagine policy makers will need to be informed too.
Yes, there is legislation for this that mandates a number of OS updates and security updates. I'm hoping Android manufacturers will stop shovelling new SKUs and concentrate on a few they can actually keep up to date.
It's planned obsolescence, plain and simple. It's just surprising how frequently they obsolete things now. I fully expect them to "train" all the good little consumers out there to replace their phones every year lest most of the web stop working on them.