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The smartphone market is controlled by hardware manufacturers. They have every incentive to obsolete your phone as soon as possible and sell you a new one ---
by jqpabc123 1y ago
The smartphone market is controlled by hardware manufacturers.
They have every incentive to obsolete your phone as soon as possible and sell you a new one --- even if the old one is still perfectly functional.
One way they do this is by limiting software updates, patches and bug fixes.
This is a money losing endeavor from their perspective. Allowing an independent OS to step in and provide updates and support does the same.
- palata 1y agoThis is not true: * More and more manufacturers already provide 5-7 years of support, e.g. the Google Pixels. * More and more regulations enforce that manufacturers provide a minimum time of support (which is most likely the reason why that number went up in the last few years). * Alternative Android OSes don't have access to the proprietary blobs and therefore rely on the hardware manufacturers providing updates. It means allowing alternative OSes does not help make the hardware secure longer. Therefore it looks similar to selling laptops: most users have Windows, so the manufacturer must make sure that Windows runs on their devices. But even if it's niche, it may be worth making sure that the laptop works with Linux if enough users are interested. A company is a profit maximising machine. If it makes more money to allow independent OSes, they should do it. So if it takes a couple of engineers 2 weeks to make sure that the latest Samsung works with GrapheneOS, it may be worth it if it means that they sell 200 000 more of those.