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As long as smartphone device drivers are proprietary there will be an upper limit of how much a phone can be updated. Not to mention that Android and iOS get mo

As long as smartphone device drivers are proprietary there will be an upper limit of how much a phone can be updated. Not to mention that Android and iOS get more computationally intensive each version way quicker than Desktop OSs do. Windows 10 from 2012 and Windows 10 today basically run the same. Sure, if most drivers were open source like on desktop linux we could tweak them to work with newer and newer Android versions, but what happens when AOSP gets a computationally expensive update (i.e. embedded ML voice recognition or realistic TTS)? then you would have to create custom versions of AOSP that only have the stuff a particular phone model can handle and this would create and unbareable ecosystem of poorly maintained distributions

ryukafalz 3y ago
> what happens when AOSP gets a computationally expensive update (i.e. embedded ML voice recognition or realistic TTS)? You disable those features on lower-spec phones or fall back to a low-resource alternative. If I'm on an older device that can only run eSpeak instead of a more realistic but expensive TTS engine? Fine, I'll run eSpeak! You don't have to bundle everything together into an image for each device. If you want to disable stuff, do it at runtime. Or if you really need to remove stuff due to storage limitations, have a small manifest that can be used to build an image with unused things excluded. This doesn't have to be "oh we need to make completely custom versions of the OS for each device", this is basically "install these packages, don't install these ones". Modularity!