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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.

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
  I am sure you get Lineage OS, or something like it to run great on an old phone, just as I am sure you installed Debian yourself. Mostly when we are talking about phones getting upgrades or not getting upgrades any more it is about updates from the manufacturer, so I don't see where you are going.
  - throwaway81523 5y ago
    I think that is not so easy but I haven't looked into it too much. Only a limited set of phones work with it and I think their functionality is also limited. I do have a Nokia N900 from around 2008, but despite its coolness it has never really been usable (too slow and too small).
ThePadawan 5y ago
I'm using an Android which has seen two battery replacements in ~5 years, and it still holds a charge for 2-3 days. All apps I use in regular life (Youtube, Google Maps, Gmail, Signal, a shopping list, music player, virtual train ticket) run absolutely without issue. I'm sure they'd run at 30FPS more if I bought a new phone, but this is a tool, not a toy. In fact, the biggest issue I'm running into is exactly what parent said. Thoughtless companies (like my credit card issuer) just build apps which could run on a phone from 2012 (basically just displaying my monthly credit card bill), but then make them unavailable on devices older than 2 years.
- bastawhiz 5y ago
  > just build apps which could run on a phone from 2012 (basically just displaying my monthly credit card bill), but then make them unavailable on devices older than 2 years How is this the app developer's fault? There's plenty of Linux, macOS, and Windows software that only runs on recent kernels because they use new APIs. Why would ANY developer target OSs that the overwhelming majority of their users don't actually use, skipping out on supporting modern functionality? Edit: Really eager to hear from the folks downvoting about their great experiences bending over backwards to support SDKs from 2013 to target devices that literally can't even connect to a mobile network anymore.
csnover 5y ago
The OP said old devices, not old OS versions. In other words, the lack of software support is the problem, not the hardware. I used a smartphone that was released in 2014 until the end of 2020. It worked perfectly fine, and would have continued to work perfectly fine—except for the software. The GPS date rollover happened and there was no official update to fix it to the new epoch. VoLTE support in custom ROMs was impossible (because this feature is locked in a closed-source binary blob), so it couldn’t make phone calls once my provider turned off their 3G network. Otherwise, it was fast and worked fine. When I gave up and looked for a replacement, I found that most low- and mid-range phones sold in 2021 have slower hardware with fewer features than my 2014-era flagship phone. Lower-resolution non-OLED screens, lower benchmark scores, no wireless charging, no waterproofing, no replaceable batteries, no unlocked bootloaders. The idea that newer hardware is objectively superior is simply untrue.
- kbenson 5y ago
  I had a similar situation, where my 2015 Samsung S6 still seemed as good or better than most the mid to low range phones I saw in 2020, and open source support for the old phone through Lineage was spotty at best (one person would update new releases maybe). I eventually got a Samsung A51 which has about equivalent specs in most cases but has a slightly bigger screen. It's sad how mostly fine hardware (just one replaceable component is bad) gets left behind, but it's not entirely limited to phones. A couple years back I had to replace the main board of my son's computer because the old gateway it was that came with windows 7 or 8 and that was updated to windows 10 stopped being supported in one of the fall or spring patch rollups. Windows 10 had worked on the computer for about a year, that mainboard wasn't supported in the update, so the update never applied cleanly. I understand dropping old system support eventually (even though the Linux kernel still supports everything, that doesn't always mean you can get really old systems to boot a modern distro without problem), but I would rather it wasn't mid-way through the OS lifetime. :/
- lmns 5y ago
  Modern low- to midrange phones certainly have more RAM and storage than your 2014 phone, which matters more than the raw benchmark scores.
- 5y ago

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
I am sure you get Lineage OS, or something like it to run great on an old phone, just as I am sure you installed Debian yourself. Mostly when we are talking about phones getting upgrades or not getting upgrades any more it is about updates from the manufacturer, so I don't see where you are going.
- throwaway81523 5y ago
  I think that is not so easy but I haven't looked into it too much. Only a limited set of phones work with it and I think their functionality is also limited. I do have a Nokia N900 from around 2008, but despite its coolness it has never really been usable (too slow and too small).

ThePadawan 5y ago

I'm using an Android which has seen two battery replacements in ~5 years, and it still holds a charge for 2-3 days. All apps I use in regular life (Youtube, Google Maps, Gmail, Signal, a shopping list, music player, virtual train ticket) run absolutely without issue. I'm sure they'd run at 30FPS more if I bought a new phone, but this is a tool, not a toy. In fact, the biggest issue I'm running into is exactly what parent said. Thoughtless companies (like my credit card issuer) just build apps which could run on a phone from 2012 (basically just displaying my monthly credit card bill), but then make them unavailable on devices older than 2 years.

bastawhiz 5y ago
> just build apps which could run on a phone from 2012 (basically just displaying my monthly credit card bill), but then make them unavailable on devices older than 2 years How is this the app developer's fault? There's plenty of Linux, macOS, and Windows software that only runs on recent kernels because they use new APIs. Why would ANY developer target OSs that the overwhelming majority of their users don't actually use, skipping out on supporting modern functionality? Edit: Really eager to hear from the folks downvoting about their great experiences bending over backwards to support SDKs from 2013 to target devices that literally can't even connect to a mobile network anymore.

csnover 5y ago

The OP said old devices, not old OS versions. In other words, the lack of software support is the problem, not the hardware. I used a smartphone that was released in 2014 until the end of 2020. It worked perfectly fine, and would have continued to work perfectly fine—except for the software. The GPS date rollover happened and there was no official update to fix it to the new epoch. VoLTE support in custom ROMs was impossible (because this feature is locked in a closed-source binary blob), so it couldn’t make phone calls once my provider turned off their 3G network. Otherwise, it was fast and worked fine. When I gave up and looked for a replacement, I found that most low- and mid-range phones sold in 2021 have slower hardware with fewer features than my 2014-era flagship phone. Lower-resolution non-OLED screens, lower benchmark scores, no wireless charging, no waterproofing, no replaceable batteries, no unlocked bootloaders. The idea that newer hardware is objectively superior is simply untrue.

kbenson 5y ago
I had a similar situation, where my 2015 Samsung S6 still seemed as good or better than most the mid to low range phones I saw in 2020, and open source support for the old phone through Lineage was spotty at best (one person would update new releases maybe). I eventually got a Samsung A51 which has about equivalent specs in most cases but has a slightly bigger screen. It's sad how mostly fine hardware (just one replaceable component is bad) gets left behind, but it's not entirely limited to phones. A couple years back I had to replace the main board of my son's computer because the old gateway it was that came with windows 7 or 8 and that was updated to windows 10 stopped being supported in one of the fall or spring patch rollups. Windows 10 had worked on the computer for about a year, that mainboard wasn't supported in the update, so the update never applied cleanly. I understand dropping old system support eventually (even though the Linux kernel still supports everything, that doesn't always mean you can get really old systems to boot a modern distro without problem), but I would rather it wasn't mid-way through the OS lifetime. :/
lmns 5y ago
Modern low- to midrange phones certainly have more RAM and storage than your 2014 phone, which matters more than the raw benchmark scores.
5y ago