That's not strictly an android thing, though it's common across a fair few android phone manufacturers. Google's own phones get several years of guaranteed upda

That's not strictly an android thing, though it's common across a fair few android phone manufacturers. Google's own phones get several years of guaranteed updates - at least 3, I think? My Pixel 3XL still gets updates, anyway. My previous Samsung phones, on the other hand, barely got anything. That doesn't beat Apple, but it's semi-comparable - Google arguably just doesn't have its phones out in the wild as long. It's arguably more a benefit of unifying hardware and software under one company than it is an Android vs. iOS issue. Regarding developer targeting, I've only dabbled in android dev, but I believe most new android features end up supported by what basically amount to shim libraries to provide the features on top of older APIs... questionable, but possibly effective? Then you just build multiple versions of the apk to target the various OS versions, or something like that.