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After my iPhone dropped into a pool last month I commandeered and wiped a Google Pixel 4a I had used as a work phone in the past. Oopsidoopsie, it went out of s

by adeon 3y ago

After my iPhone dropped into a pool last month I commandeered and wiped a Google Pixel 4a I had used as a work phone in the past. Oopsidoopsie, it went out of support last month and no longer has guaranteed security updates. This phone was released in 2020. Mine is barely used. I was a bit WTF when I found out. From an older article I found off Internet, Google justifying this policy: """ In response to an email asking Google why it stopped supporting the Pixel 3, a Googles spokesperson said, “We find that three years of security and OS updates still provides users with a great experience for their device.” """ Mine is still usable because you still get app updates and it's not like it stops just working but it's a bit uncomfortable to use out-of-security-updates phone. Waiting until the new iPhones get out next week. Why can't companies support their products for a longer time. I've heard the best way to reduce e-waste is to keep using the stuff you have as long as possible.

Sharlin 3y ago
> I've heard the best way to reduce e-waste is to keep using the stuff you have as long as possible. Of course. It's always been "reduce, reuse, repair" before "recycle". But there's a reason corpos want you to focus on the least efficient way to reduce waste and ignore the others.
_ea1k 3y ago
The excuse has been driver and firmware support from the vendors. Google has extended security updates to 5 years for the newer Pixels. That's fairly decent, given that each one is only on the market for ~1 year. Obviously the cycle has to be longer for companies that keep older phones on the market as a lower cost option.
- ethbr1 3y ago
  In the US, at least, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a ton of pressure to limit update timeframe from the carriers. US carriers want postpaid customers, because they're more profitable and less likely to churn. Having an incentive to swap phones at the end of a (typically 2 year) phone upgrade cycle helps them sell renewals back into a new postpaid plan. Google, in typical Google fashion, probably doesn't care. It's used to end users not being its actual customers.
- tristor 3y ago
  > Google has extended security updates to 5 years for the newer Pixels. That's fairly decent, given that each one is only on the market for ~1 year. Apple has been supporting iPhone models for 6 years without any fanfare about it. iOS 15 supported the iPhone 6S, which was 6 years old at the time. iOS 17 that just got announced will only now drop support for the iPhone 8 released in 2017, 6 years ago. At certain points 7-year old phones have received all updates. Google's excuse about driver and firmware support does not and should not apply to the Pixel, which is a first-party device. I applaud Google for getting better here, but the linked article and the general reality of the Android ecosystem continuing to be a shitshow is really inexcusable in the face of their primary competitor doing the right thing for over a decade, quietly and competently.
  - Clent 3y ago
    And that's just the full iOS updates. I have an iPad Air2 (2014?) that still receives security updates.
  - CDSlice 3y ago
    Not to excuse Google but I think their main problem is that Qualcomm stops providing support for their chips pretty quickly which makes it much harder to run newer versions of Android that have newer kernels. Apple controls not just the OS but the chips as well so they don’t have to work around that problem.
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      Hardly an excuse, legal contracts exist and if Google would really care, they would enforce updates as condition to future AOSP access.
  - baby_souffle 3y ago
    > Google's excuse about driver and firmware support does not and should not apply to the Pixel, which is a first-party device. The SoC/Modem at the heart of the (pre 6) pixels is not first party, though. If qualcom says "yeah, we're not going to bother backporting $newIssueFix to the kernel fork we used during chip development/bring-up" then there's not a _lot_ that google can do about it unless there's a contractual agreement in place. Apple has been using "first party" chips for their phones since the A4 processor (~ iPhone4) which is why they're able to keep compiling new OS/Kernel for their older hardware so long as the device is performant enough to actually run it. It's not a coincidence that google has been investing _heavily_ in making most of android super composable; large chunks of the HAL and system level components can be updated even if qualcom/mediatek ... etc don't do the work to get a newer kernel working.
- shortrounddev2 3y ago
  >That's fairly decent Meanwhile, Microsoft released a security update to Windows XP in 2019
- wolpoli 3y ago
  > That's fairly decent, given that each one is only on the market for ~1 year. This makes me wonder if we instead should be counting number of years of OS updates from when it's last available new.
  - ilyt 3y ago
    We absolutely should. And it should be legally required for manufacturer to support it for at least 5-6 years. So much less e-waste...
- rlpb 3y ago
  > Google has extended security updates to 5 years for the newer Pixels. It's not really 5 years. For example, if you buy a Pixel 6a today, a product that is not yet discontinued, you'll get less than 4 years support. Unless you accept Google's misleading framing of "from when the product was first sold", rather than the more reasonable "from when a consumer bought it, unless they bought it after it was discontinued". "When the product was first sold" is a meaningless date to a consumer who chooses to buy a product and this framing needs to die.
chrisfosterelli 3y ago
FWIW, they've changed their policy a bit here for new devices as everything Pixel 6 and newer will have five years of guaranteed updates.
- paulmd 3y ago
  It’d be better to require this by law so it was uniform throughout the ecosystem.
maximinus_thrax 3y ago
> “We find that three years of security and OS updates still provides users with a great experience for their device.” This attitude is why I will never ever buy a Google product.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- thebruce87m 3y ago
  It’s a great reason, but the even better reason is that multiple generations of pixels have emergency call issues that at this point they must be refusing to fix on purpose.
panax 3y ago
I got a 4A recently (2 yrs ago now?) since it is supported by grapheneOS. My previous phone lasted 13 years, I intend to use this almost as long, or until there is a major hardware failure(failure with mainboard - not battery or screen or fixable issue). Next one might be a pinephone or fairphone if it is any good by then.
josefresco 3y ago
Pixel 4 or Pixel 3? Your comment mentions both.
- adeon 3y ago
  Mine is a Pixel 4a. The Google comment from the article was talking about Pixel 3. Both phones had the same 3 year support, so it applied to my case too. This is the article: https://www.vice.com/en/article/dypxpx/google-is-forcing-me-to-dump-a-perfectly-good-phone https://www.vice.com/en/article/dypxpx/google-is-forcing-me-...
paulddraper 3y ago
Geez, how long do electronics last? Only 3 years?
- syntheticnature 3y ago
  My experience with Pixels has had them last about two years, plus or minus a few months. Always used a case, and the phones did not expire from direct accidents but thinks like the charging port failing (yes, I used a non-conducting tool to try to clean lint out). I loved the stock Android on my OG Pixel and Pixel 3 but the only thing worse than the phone needing replacement was it needing replacement after the extended warranty was past.
yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
Well it might be too hard for Google, but lineage still supports it just fine: https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/sunfish/ https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/sunfish/
throwaway54_56 3y ago
> “We find that three years of security and OS updates still provides users with a great experience for their device.” Terrible non-answer. It's a great experience for the first three years and then the experience becomes much less great, which was the whole point of the question.
aeturnum 3y ago
It's particularly interesting because I feel like Google's biggest competition is Samsung, who now say they support phones for 4 major version updates after release. So if you had a Galaxy S20 instead you'd still be in support with, I think, one more update in the pipe. Lots to dislike about Samsung's efforts to wring a little extra money out of their phones, but it's amusing that their platform support is better than the people who make the platform.
- spondylosaurus 3y ago
  The Galaxy Note 10 that I bought in 2020 still gets regular security updates.
ilyt 3y ago
> Why can't companies support their products for a longer time. I've heard the best way to reduce e-waste is to keep using the stuff you have as long as possible. Because they are not legally required to. If law was "support it for 6 years since last sold device or open source everything including vendor drivers" then we'd get that support.
anonuser123456 3y ago
>Why can't companies support their products for a longer time. I work for a semiconductor company on Android. The answer is simple; money. There is no revenue from the consumer market to support software updates on Android for longer than the required period and it costs money to perform this support. Android changes rapidly, and it takes reasonably skilled, hard to find people to perform software support for security sensitive systems. The work is not sexy and is thankless. I can guarantee you if someone figures out a way to charge the user a fee for security updates, vendors and OEMs would jump on it. But Google has no such program that I am aware of and OEM's/vendors aren't in the position to market one.
matthewaveryusa 3y ago
Try lineageos, I have two pixels from 2016 as backups just like you and they are up-to-date with the latest security patches. I know absolutely nothing about phones/android and was able to get lineage to work in a few hours, and now it's 15 minute every couple of months to keep everything up-to-date. https://wiki.lineageos.org/ https://wiki.lineageos.org/
Moomoomoo309 3y ago
Back up everything on it, wipe it, install LineageOS, boom, android 13. If Google won't update it, the community will.
- paulmd 3y ago
  But you’ve got vendors like Sony who put key functionality of the phone behind an erasable firmware block, so if you ever unlock the boot loader your $1600 android cameraphone takes pictures like a 2010 budget POS. And they’re not the only ones who do stuff like that. Yes, you can simply not buy Sony because of this behavior, and you can simply not buy samsung because of their spyware, and can not buy huawei or other chinese vendors. And by the time you count up all the android vendors you shouldn’t buy from the conclusion is obvious: it’s simply a better support model to just buy an Apple if you care about device longevity. But since we all live on this same planet together, we need to do something about e-waste, and android is just fountaining devices into landfills with planned-obsolecence 1-2 year device cycles. This is something that - if you really do care about e-waste - needs to simply be outlawed. You sell the device, you support it for 5 years from the last year it's sold.

by adeon 3y ago

Sharlin 3y ago

> I've heard the best way to reduce e-waste is to keep using the stuff you have as long as possible. Of course. It's always been "reduce, reuse, repair" before "recycle". But there's a reason corpos want you to focus on the least efficient way to reduce waste and ignore the others.

_ea1k 3y ago

The excuse has been driver and firmware support from the vendors. Google has extended security updates to 5 years for the newer Pixels. That's fairly decent, given that each one is only on the market for ~1 year. Obviously the cycle has to be longer for companies that keep older phones on the market as a lower cost option.

ethbr1 3y ago
In the US, at least, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a ton of pressure to limit update timeframe from the carriers. US carriers want postpaid customers, because they're more profitable and less likely to churn. Having an incentive to swap phones at the end of a (typically 2 year) phone upgrade cycle helps them sell renewals back into a new postpaid plan. Google, in typical Google fashion, probably doesn't care. It's used to end users not being its actual customers.
tristor 3y ago
> Google has extended security updates to 5 years for the newer Pixels. That's fairly decent, given that each one is only on the market for ~1 year. Apple has been supporting iPhone models for 6 years without any fanfare about it. iOS 15 supported the iPhone 6S, which was 6 years old at the time. iOS 17 that just got announced will only now drop support for the iPhone 8 released in 2017, 6 years ago. At certain points 7-year old phones have received all updates. Google's excuse about driver and firmware support does not and should not apply to the Pixel, which is a first-party device. I applaud Google for getting better here, but the linked article and the general reality of the Android ecosystem continuing to be a shitshow is really inexcusable in the face of their primary competitor doing the right thing for over a decade, quietly and competently.
- Clent 3y ago
  And that's just the full iOS updates. I have an iPad Air2 (2014?) that still receives security updates.
- CDSlice 3y ago
  Not to excuse Google but I think their main problem is that Qualcomm stops providing support for their chips pretty quickly which makes it much harder to run newer versions of Android that have newer kernels. Apple controls not just the OS but the chips as well so they don’t have to work around that problem.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    Hardly an excuse, legal contracts exist and if Google would really care, they would enforce updates as condition to future AOSP access.
- baby_souffle 3y ago
  > Google's excuse about driver and firmware support does not and should not apply to the Pixel, which is a first-party device. The SoC/Modem at the heart of the (pre 6) pixels is not first party, though. If qualcom says "yeah, we're not going to bother backporting $newIssueFix to the kernel fork we used during chip development/bring-up" then there's not a _lot_ that google can do about it unless there's a contractual agreement in place. Apple has been using "first party" chips for their phones since the A4 processor (~ iPhone4) which is why they're able to keep compiling new OS/Kernel for their older hardware so long as the device is performant enough to actually run it. It's not a coincidence that google has been investing _heavily_ in making most of android super composable; large chunks of the HAL and system level components can be updated even if qualcom/mediatek ... etc don't do the work to get a newer kernel working.
shortrounddev2 3y ago
>That's fairly decent Meanwhile, Microsoft released a security update to Windows XP in 2019
wolpoli 3y ago
> That's fairly decent, given that each one is only on the market for ~1 year. This makes me wonder if we instead should be counting number of years of OS updates from when it's last available new.
- ilyt 3y ago
  We absolutely should. And it should be legally required for manufacturer to support it for at least 5-6 years. So much less e-waste...
rlpb 3y ago
> Google has extended security updates to 5 years for the newer Pixels. It's not really 5 years. For example, if you buy a Pixel 6a today, a product that is not yet discontinued, you'll get less than 4 years support. Unless you accept Google's misleading framing of "from when the product was first sold", rather than the more reasonable "from when a consumer bought it, unless they bought it after it was discontinued". "When the product was first sold" is a meaningless date to a consumer who chooses to buy a product and this framing needs to die.

chrisfosterelli 3y ago

FWIW, they've changed their policy a bit here for new devices as everything Pixel 6 and newer will have five years of guaranteed updates.

paulmd 3y ago
It’d be better to require this by law so it was uniform throughout the ecosystem.

maximinus_thrax 3y ago

> “We find that three years of security and OS updates still provides users with a great experience for their device.” This attitude is why I will never ever buy a Google product.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
thebruce87m 3y ago
It’s a great reason, but the even better reason is that multiple generations of pixels have emergency call issues that at this point they must be refusing to fix on purpose.

panax 3y ago

I got a 4A recently (2 yrs ago now?) since it is supported by grapheneOS. My previous phone lasted 13 years, I intend to use this almost as long, or until there is a major hardware failure(failure with mainboard - not battery or screen or fixable issue). Next one might be a pinephone or fairphone if it is any good by then.

josefresco 3y ago

Pixel 4 or Pixel 3? Your comment mentions both.

adeon 3y ago
Mine is a Pixel 4a. The Google comment from the article was talking about Pixel 3. Both phones had the same 3 year support, so it applied to my case too. This is the article: https://www.vice.com/en/article/dypxpx/google-is-forcing-me-to-dump-a-perfectly-good-phone https://www.vice.com/en/article/dypxpx/google-is-forcing-me-...

paulddraper 3y ago

Geez, how long do electronics last? Only 3 years?

syntheticnature 3y ago
My experience with Pixels has had them last about two years, plus or minus a few months. Always used a case, and the phones did not expire from direct accidents but thinks like the charging port failing (yes, I used a non-conducting tool to try to clean lint out). I loved the stock Android on my OG Pixel and Pixel 3 but the only thing worse than the phone needing replacement was it needing replacement after the extended warranty was past.

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago

Well it might be too hard for Google, but lineage still supports it just fine: https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/sunfish/ https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/sunfish/

throwaway54_56 3y ago

> “We find that three years of security and OS updates still provides users with a great experience for their device.” Terrible non-answer. It's a great experience for the first three years and then the experience becomes much less great, which was the whole point of the question.

aeturnum 3y ago

It's particularly interesting because I feel like Google's biggest competition is Samsung, who now say they support phones for 4 major version updates after release. So if you had a Galaxy S20 instead you'd still be in support with, I think, one more update in the pipe. Lots to dislike about Samsung's efforts to wring a little extra money out of their phones, but it's amusing that their platform support is better than the people who make the platform.

spondylosaurus 3y ago
The Galaxy Note 10 that I bought in 2020 still gets regular security updates.

ilyt 3y ago

> Why can't companies support their products for a longer time. I've heard the best way to reduce e-waste is to keep using the stuff you have as long as possible. Because they are not legally required to. If law was "support it for 6 years since last sold device or open source everything including vendor drivers" then we'd get that support.

anonuser123456 3y ago

>Why can't companies support their products for a longer time. I work for a semiconductor company on Android. The answer is simple; money. There is no revenue from the consumer market to support software updates on Android for longer than the required period and it costs money to perform this support. Android changes rapidly, and it takes reasonably skilled, hard to find people to perform software support for security sensitive systems. The work is not sexy and is thankless. I can guarantee you if someone figures out a way to charge the user a fee for security updates, vendors and OEMs would jump on it. But Google has no such program that I am aware of and OEM's/vendors aren't in the position to market one.

matthewaveryusa 3y ago

Try lineageos, I have two pixels from 2016 as backups just like you and they are up-to-date with the latest security patches. I know absolutely nothing about phones/android and was able to get lineage to work in a few hours, and now it's 15 minute every couple of months to keep everything up-to-date. https://wiki.lineageos.org/ https://wiki.lineageos.org/

Moomoomoo309 3y ago

Back up everything on it, wipe it, install LineageOS, boom, android 13. If Google won't update it, the community will.

paulmd 3y ago
But you’ve got vendors like Sony who put key functionality of the phone behind an erasable firmware block, so if you ever unlock the boot loader your $1600 android cameraphone takes pictures like a 2010 budget POS. And they’re not the only ones who do stuff like that. Yes, you can simply not buy Sony because of this behavior, and you can simply not buy samsung because of their spyware, and can not buy huawei or other chinese vendors. And by the time you count up all the android vendors you shouldn’t buy from the conclusion is obvious: it’s simply a better support model to just buy an Apple if you care about device longevity. But since we all live on this same planet together, we need to do something about e-waste, and android is just fountaining devices into landfills with planned-obsolecence 1-2 year device cycles. This is something that - if you really do care about e-waste - needs to simply be outlawed. You sell the device, you support it for 5 years from the last year it's sold.