I look forward to these vendors delivering on their promises, and I look forward to Apple perhaps formalizing a promise with less variability for future products.

Neither of these hopes retroactively invalidates the fact that Apple has had a much better track record of supporting old phone models up to this point. Even if you do split hairs about the level of patching some models got in their later years, they still got full iOS updates for years longer than most Android phones got any patches at all, regardless of severity.

This is not an argument that somehow puts Android on top, at best it adds nuance to just how much better iOS support has been up to this point.

Let's also not forget that if Apple wasn't putting this kind of pressure on Google, they wouldn't have even made the promise to begin with, because it's clear how long they actually care to support products with no outside pressure.

I agree. This is the type of competition I like to see between these two companies. In the end the consumer wins regardless of which one you buy. Google has also promised 10 years of Chromebook support, so they've clearly got the message on the importance of supporting hardware much longer than a lot of people would use them for.

They made that pledge for the Pixel 8 (2023). Let's revisit this in 2030 and see what the nature of their support is at that point and how it compares to Apple's support for iPhone devices. We can't make a real comparison since they haven't done anything yet, only made promises.

What we can do today is note that Apple never made a promise, but did provide very long security support for their devices despite that. They've already met or come close to the Samsung/Google pledge (for one device) on almost half their devices, and those are all the recent ones (so it's not a downward trend of good support then bad support, but rather mediocre/bad support to improving and increasingly good support).

Another fun one:

iPhone XS was released in September 2018, it is on the current iOS 17 release. In the absolute worst case of it losing iOS 18 support in September, it will have received 6 full years of support in both security and OS updates. It'll still hit 7 years (comfortably) of security updates. If it does get iOS 18 support in September, then Apple will hit the Samsung/Google pledge 5 years before Samsung/Google can even demonstrate their ability to follow through (Samsung has a chance, but Google has no history of commitment).

I have time to kill before training for a century ride:

Let's ignore everything before iPhone 4S, they had short support periods that's just a fact and hardly worth investigating. This is an analysis of devices released in 2011 and later, when the phones had, mostly, matured as a device so we should be expecting longer support periods. These are the support periods when the phones were able to run the still-current iOS versions, not counting later security updates or minor updates but after the major iOS version had been deprecated. As an example, for the iPhone 4S it had support from 2011-2016. In 2016 its OS, iOS 9, was replaced by iOS 10. Here are the numbers:

  4S       - 5 years
  5        - 5 years
  5C       - 4 years (decreased, 5 hardware but released a year later in a different case)
  5S       - 6 years
  6        - 5 years (decreased, not sure why)
  6S       - 7 years (hey, Apple did it! 2015 release, lost iOS upgrades in 2022)
  SE(1st)  - 5 years (like 5C, 6S hardware but released later)
  7        - 6 years (decreased over 6S, not sure why)
  8        - 6 years
  X        - 6 years

The 6S is a bit of an outlier, hitting 7 years of full support running the current iOS. 5C and SE(1st) both got less total support, but their internals were the same as prior phones and they lost support at the same time as them (this is reasonable, if annoying, and does drag down the average). So Apple has clearly trended towards 6 years of full support, the XS (as noted above) will get at least 6 years of support as of this coming September. We'll have to see if they can get it past the 7 year mark, I know they haven't promised anything but the trend suggests they can.

Sure. They also pledged to support Chromebooks for 10 years. My point being is that I don't think they'll be clawing back their new hardware support windows anytime soon. Their data indicates that these devices were used well beyond their initial support window metrics so it was in their, and their users, best interest to keep them updated as long as they possibly could. 3 years of OS updates and 4 years of security updates was always the weak link in their commitment to security. And this applies to all of their devices including the A series - something I don't see other Android OEM's even matching.

BTW, my daily driver is an iPhone 13 and I was coming from an iPhone X. So I'm well aware of the incredible support Apple provides its phones. Although, I would still like to see an 8+ year promise from them.