They do care about stuff the can actually see, like having big bright high resolution OLLED display, not that dim low-res display on the SE pulled straight out of a 2008 parts bin.

Especially that phones are now the main computing and content consumption platforms for most people. and if you put a 6.2 inch 1000 nits 1080p OLED vs 4.7 inch 720p 400 nits IPS, the difference will be as big as the grand canion and sway purchasing decisions way more than years of SW updates.

Non techie folks care when their insecure phone allows something as important as their bank account to be hacked.

The original Google Pixel also came out in 2016, and was completely dropped from support at the end of 2019.

How many times are we gonna play this boogieman card? As if everyone gets their bank account instantly emptied by hackers the moment their Android is a day out of it's support window.

How many times has that actually happened to users of older un-updated Androids in the real world, documented? I know about over half a dozen people with out of date Androids and they seem to still be solvent with their banks accounts intact. One of them is me.

Hackers in the real world wanting to steal your savings are more likely to use phishing to get you to hand over your banking credentials voluntarily, rather than to build some elaborate malware targeting some unpatched flaw in your phone's OS to steal your banking credentials. Not that the latter isn't a risk, but it's being blown way out of proportion.

>The original Google Pixel also came out in 2016, and was completely dropped from support at the end of 2019.

We're talking here about buying modern phones today, not buying phones from the past. Google and Samsung did a 180 recently where they promise 7 years of updates to their lates phones. What argument are you gonna use 6 years from when those phones will still get updates?

If text comprehension is challenging for you might I suggest using a LLM to summarize things and extract the bullet points.

No, they care when apps stop allowing them to watch DRMed content or they can’t get the latest version anymore because it requires a newer API version. They also care that Android apps cost more to develop because the developers have to avoid using newer APIs or spend more time on QA testing multiple versions. I’ve seen that enough times to know it’s a real problem, and it’s WAY more frustrating to the average person to learn that the phone they “just” bought is no longer supported. This is especially true for older users who are used to keeping a PC for a decade.

And what's the cutoff point for that on Android? I have an Android 9 phone I keep around for tinkering and every ap I need still works just fine.

> to learn that the phone they “just” bought is no longer supported.

In which universe your Android you just bough becomes outdated? Unless you got a time machine and went and Just bough an Android from 2016.

The real one? I know multiple people who paid decent money ($2-300) for phones they saw on sale while shopping, not realizing that they were close to the end of the manufacturer’s run and about to stop getting updates. I used to have a Lenovo tablet which never saw an update to the version of Android released a couple months before the hardware shipped, and stopped getting updates within a year.

I know about this because things like banking apps started nagging them and they asked me for help. Transferring to a new device is scary for a lot of people so this is not a great experience all around.

Another big step function was when security standards started dropping TLS 1.0 or 1.1 and so people who’d been using older devices started getting errors from things they’d been using for years. That’s a bit old by now, but this is still an issue for users of some assistive devices and “smart” appliances which aren’t easy to replace, and is representative of the problems you can hit with an unresponsive vendor and outside services changing due to factors outside of the user’s control - you might scoff and say “that’s so old, who cares?” but that blind person with a Braille display which costs a grand or two to replace probably feels differently.

Please stop dramatizing things with poor examples that are at best anecdotal. But let's say anecdotally, you do buy an old Android phone today by accident, something that gets no updates, something on Android 11 that >3 years old that some shop still has in stock for some reason. All banking apps will still work on Android 11 today and most likely will well into the future. So will Netflix. You're probably thinking of the days of Android KitKat or Jelly bean. In no way buying an older Android today will mean your popular apps will immediately stop working due to APIs getting deprecated. Things don't get deprecated so quickly as you imagine anymore.

I've had phones that hadn't received OEM updates in a half-decade but still ran Netflix just fine. Quite literally, the only thing you're describing right here is the TLS cutoff which also exists for Apple devices.