5 ms·

It's a real shame that nowadays 7 year old devices are considered to be out of scope for support even though they would still be perfectly fine otherwise. Fuck

It's a real shame that nowadays 7 year old devices are considered to be out of scope for support even though they would still be perfectly fine otherwise. Fuck google etc. and this whole throw-away society.

kortilla 5y ago
Not supporting old OSes is fine. The blame is squarely on the phone manufacturer for not allowing upgrades to OSes that receive security patches.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  How do you imagine budget or mid-class 7 year old phones running a new Android release? The specs are too weak.
  - hulitu 5y ago
    I would say the bloat is too big. The difference between Android 2 and 9 is some fine grained permissions.UI is the same.
    - selfhoster11 5y ago
      I agree, the bloat is significant. To nitpick, I'd say that the UI has actually worsened between 2 and modern versions.
  - remram 5y ago
    You expect that none of Android would work but all of K-9 should work?
    - selfhoster11 5y ago
      Yes. K9 hasn't bloated much over the years, and I've been using it for the past 10 years so I'm quite certain of this.
bastawhiz 5y ago
That's not really a fair assessment. The Nexus 4 was released in 2012 and runs Android 5.1. The devices that didn't get Android 5 are pretty much a decade old. And essentially all of them can be rooted and upgraded to a more modern version of Android, if you want to. Do you want to, though? Probably not: even if the batteries in them still held a decent charge, the devices that didn't get Android 5 almost all have less than 1gb of RAM (Nexus S had 348MB non-gpu memory) and only one or two CPU cores, with a bunch of older devices shipping without 3g. Having internal storage measured in gigabytes was at the upper end of the market (Nexus One, Google's flagship device from 2010, had 190 megabytes of app storage). "Perfectly fine otherwise" really doesn't apply to the overwhelming majority of folks who use their phones more than any other device (hours each day).
- throwaway81523 5y ago
  I'm typing this on a Thinkpad X220 released in 2011, and running the current Debian.
  - bastawhiz 5y ago
    Did Lenovo push the current Debian to your device? Have the apps when you bought your laptop increased in resource use by an order of magnitude? It's not the same kind of device running with the same constraints. Phones were pushing the limits of miniaturization. The difference in the underlying technology is vastly different. Comparing a laptop from 2002 trying to run the current Debian is more apt.
    - throwaway81523 5y ago
      I don't understand what you're getting at. I bought this X220 about a year ago on Craigslist for $100 and installed Debian on it. The main app on it whose resource use has bloated a lot since 2011 is Firefox, and that's a persistent sore point for me, since it's the web that has bloated rather than just the browser. The other stuff I use (mostly Emacs, Python, and Xchat) hasn't really bloated. I have a Thinkpad X40 (from 2004) that I used for similar purposes but its hardware eventually got too flaky. I would say I keep a lot more data on the X220 (using a 0.5TB SATA SSD) than I could store on the X40 which had a 40GB PATA drive. It had USB2 and SD card ports though, so I could in principle have added a high capacity SD card or whatever. The X61 of the same era is still a viable machine and I think it had a SATA drive slot, which means it would be pretty usable with today's ssd's.
tomjen3 5y ago
Most devices I have seen gets 2-3 years of updates, so you are looking at devices that are about a decade old at that point: exactly how long do you think it is fair that the manufacturer pays for updates to your phone?
- bbarnett 5y ago
  My thought on this is, if you cannot update the device yourself, manufacturers should be mandated to support the device for 4 or 5 years past last point of sale. If they unlock it, and release full sources so you can access all the hardware in alternative builds, then fine, they can drop support when they please. It isn't an either/or, in my world they could keep it locked for 3 or 4 years, providing full updates, then provide unlock and a year later drop security updates. My point is, security updates need to come before profit, and no one should be selling phones a year before updates end. Or even, not even do updates!
  - tomjen3 5y ago
    That actually sounds pretty fair, with the proviso that I would say 4 years after the sale of the phone, rather than that phone model. But given that we are talking about Androids here, why should they be required to release full source? Shouldn't it be enough that they release driver code?
    - bbarnett 5y ago
      Sure, I think the key part is sources so you can fully support the hardware yourself.
jchw 5y ago
No, not supporting 7 year old software is not the same as not supporting 7 year old hardware. My 2012 Nexus 7 runs Android 7(!). Of course, my 2012 Nexus 7 is more obsolete than an iBook G4 by this point. Why? Because in 2012, phones and tablets were basically insecure little toys compared to what they are today. We witnessed the birth of a new computer market, and like the 90s era of computing, it generated landfills worth of eWaste. You can argue (validly!) that some of it was obsoleted quicker than necessary due to poor support or bloated software, but let’s face it; by and large, old phones and tablets are the victims of progress. The 2012 Nexus 7 is never going to be useful even with postmarketOS, because it simply runs poorly with any reasonably modern software stack, not just more modern Android. I’m not suggesting that this is a good thing, but it’s not a conspiracy. Even if vendors were forced to support devices for longer, I super sincerely doubt we’d see people running around with 7 year old phones. In 7 more years? Absolutely. Just like you now see people running around with 7 year old laptops today. A real issue is probably just that Apple and Google and other flagship phone vendors continue to pump out a new phone every year even though it is clearly wasteful and pointless. Removing features just to bring them back sometimes is a truly pointless and stupid rigmarole when we could surely just wait 3 more years so that improvements can be made that aren’t pointless tradeoffs. But that is a different story, and arguably is a lot more than just an issue for the computer industry...
- jackewiehose 5y ago
  I agree with most of what you said but ... > My 2012 Nexus 7 runs Android 7(!). why not Android 11? The Nexus is from Google as well as Android. So at some point they must have pushed some "useless" new features into Android that makes it incompatible with the older hardware. I say "useless" because besides gaming or probably video telephony there's nothing we do today with our phones that couldn't be done with those older devices so I don't see a reason why they shouldn't be able to run the newest Android. > but it’s not a conspiracy conspiracy is probably not the right term but I also don't think it's just a matter of circumstances. In the end they want us to buy new hardware every few years so I claim that the situation is brought to us intentionally.
  - Zhenya 5y ago

kortilla 5y ago

Not supporting old OSes is fine. The blame is squarely on the phone manufacturer for not allowing upgrades to OSes that receive security patches.

selfhoster11 5y ago
How do you imagine budget or mid-class 7 year old phones running a new Android release? The specs are too weak.
- hulitu 5y ago
  I would say the bloat is too big. The difference between Android 2 and 9 is some fine grained permissions.UI is the same.
  - selfhoster11 5y ago
    I agree, the bloat is significant. To nitpick, I'd say that the UI has actually worsened between 2 and modern versions.
- remram 5y ago
  You expect that none of Android would work but all of K-9 should work?
  - selfhoster11 5y ago
    Yes. K9 hasn't bloated much over the years, and I've been using it for the past 10 years so I'm quite certain of this.

bastawhiz 5y ago

That's not really a fair assessment. The Nexus 4 was released in 2012 and runs Android 5.1. The devices that didn't get Android 5 are pretty much a decade old. And essentially all of them can be rooted and upgraded to a more modern version of Android, if you want to. Do you want to, though? Probably not: even if the batteries in them still held a decent charge, the devices that didn't get Android 5 almost all have less than 1gb of RAM (Nexus S had 348MB non-gpu memory) and only one or two CPU cores, with a bunch of older devices shipping without 3g. Having internal storage measured in gigabytes was at the upper end of the market (Nexus One, Google's flagship device from 2010, had 190 megabytes of app storage). "Perfectly fine otherwise" really doesn't apply to the overwhelming majority of folks who use their phones more than any other device (hours each day).

throwaway81523 5y ago
I'm typing this on a Thinkpad X220 released in 2011, and running the current Debian.
- bastawhiz 5y ago
  Did Lenovo push the current Debian to your device? Have the apps when you bought your laptop increased in resource use by an order of magnitude? It's not the same kind of device running with the same constraints. Phones were pushing the limits of miniaturization. The difference in the underlying technology is vastly different. Comparing a laptop from 2002 trying to run the current Debian is more apt.
  - throwaway81523 5y ago
    I don't understand what you're getting at. I bought this X220 about a year ago on Craigslist for $100 and installed Debian on it. The main app on it whose resource use has bloated a lot since 2011 is Firefox, and that's a persistent sore point for me, since it's the web that has bloated rather than just the browser. The other stuff I use (mostly Emacs, Python, and Xchat) hasn't really bloated. I have a Thinkpad X40 (from 2004) that I used for similar purposes but its hardware eventually got too flaky. I would say I keep a lot more data on the X220 (using a 0.5TB SATA SSD) than I could store on the X40 which had a 40GB PATA drive. It had USB2 and SD card ports though, so I could in principle have added a high capacity SD card or whatever. The X61 of the same era is still a viable machine and I think it had a SATA drive slot, which means it would be pretty usable with today's ssd's.

tomjen3 5y ago

Most devices I have seen gets 2-3 years of updates, so you are looking at devices that are about a decade old at that point: exactly how long do you think it is fair that the manufacturer pays for updates to your phone?

bbarnett 5y ago
My thought on this is, if you cannot update the device yourself, manufacturers should be mandated to support the device for 4 or 5 years past last point of sale. If they unlock it, and release full sources so you can access all the hardware in alternative builds, then fine, they can drop support when they please. It isn't an either/or, in my world they could keep it locked for 3 or 4 years, providing full updates, then provide unlock and a year later drop security updates. My point is, security updates need to come before profit, and no one should be selling phones a year before updates end. Or even, not even do updates!
- tomjen3 5y ago
  That actually sounds pretty fair, with the proviso that I would say 4 years after the sale of the phone, rather than that phone model. But given that we are talking about Androids here, why should they be required to release full source? Shouldn't it be enough that they release driver code?
  - bbarnett 5y ago
    Sure, I think the key part is sources so you can fully support the hardware yourself.

jchw 5y ago

No, not supporting 7 year old software is not the same as not supporting 7 year old hardware. My 2012 Nexus 7 runs Android 7(!). Of course, my 2012 Nexus 7 is more obsolete than an iBook G4 by this point. Why? Because in 2012, phones and tablets were basically insecure little toys compared to what they are today. We witnessed the birth of a new computer market, and like the 90s era of computing, it generated landfills worth of eWaste. You can argue (validly!) that some of it was obsoleted quicker than necessary due to poor support or bloated software, but let’s face it; by and large, old phones and tablets are the victims of progress. The 2012 Nexus 7 is never going to be useful even with postmarketOS, because it simply runs poorly with any reasonably modern software stack, not just more modern Android. I’m not suggesting that this is a good thing, but it’s not a conspiracy. Even if vendors were forced to support devices for longer, I super sincerely doubt we’d see people running around with 7 year old phones. In 7 more years? Absolutely. Just like you now see people running around with 7 year old laptops today. A real issue is probably just that Apple and Google and other flagship phone vendors continue to pump out a new phone every year even though it is clearly wasteful and pointless. Removing features just to bring them back sometimes is a truly pointless and stupid rigmarole when we could surely just wait 3 more years so that improvements can be made that aren’t pointless tradeoffs. But that is a different story, and arguably is a lot more than just an issue for the computer industry...

jackewiehose 5y ago
I agree with most of what you said but ... > My 2012 Nexus 7 runs Android 7(!). why not Android 11? The Nexus is from Google as well as Android. So at some point they must have pushed some "useless" new features into Android that makes it incompatible with the older hardware. I say "useless" because besides gaming or probably video telephony there's nothing we do today with our phones that couldn't be done with those older devices so I don't see a reason why they shouldn't be able to run the newest Android. > but it’s not a conspiracy conspiracy is probably not the right term but I also don't think it's just a matter of circumstances. In the end they want us to buy new hardware every few years so I claim that the situation is brought to us intentionally.
- Zhenya 5y ago