Android

It could fall on the chipmakers also. I'm only familiar with Qualcomm, but they provide the kernel and blobs to manufacturers.

The work required to extend the life of an abandoned platform can grow very fast once up stream drops support.

My wife keeps telling me she's feeling unsupported.

Same with my pixel 2, it was stuck back on android 11, LineageOS has given it a new lease of life.

There's a huge difference between brands when it comes to android. Samsung now provides four os upgrades and then security patches for a bit after that so that's 4+ years of support.

Fairphone has an even longer support time. I think it's 5 years? Maybe more, not quite sure.

Afaik it does, but only if you use the official Google Camera aoo

They could keep it alive past five years if they really wanted, but that goes against the goal of the project: namely security. But five years is already longer than most manufacturers do, so it's nothing to turn your nose up at.

"GrapheneOS aims to provide reasonably private and secure devices. It cannot do that once device support code like firmware, kernel and vendor code is no longer actively maintained. Even if the community was prepared to take over maintenance of the open source code and to replace the rest, firmware would present a major issue, and the community has never been active or interested enough in device support to consider attempting this. Unlike many other platforms, GrapheneOS has a much higher minimum standard than simply having devices fully functional, as they also need to provide the expected level of security."

https://grapheneos.org/faq#legacy-devices

32 bit app support is missing on the Pixel 7, so some older apps will NOT run. Like, at all. No recourse of action other than checking a different app.

I miss the Google employees spying through my camera to see how I'm doing

The biggest thing for folks these days is there's no Android Auto support.

I don't miss Android Auto as I never used it on stock, but I get others do. I miss Google Wallet's tap-and-pay on the off chance I forget my wallet or not wanting to pull it out, but that's a convenience thing and it's not hard to pay with a physical card instead. That's really it for me, to be honest.

iPhones are still better when it comes to updates, but things have been slowly improving. A new Samsung flagship get's you 5 years of support (4 major upgrades + 1 of security updates). A Google Pixel it's also 5 years, but 3 major updates + 2 of security updates. Not as good, but not terrible either.

It's still a problem for old phones, but at least from now on it should be better.

We should also keep in mind that when we talk about iOS/iPhones, we're talking about one company. When we talk about Android updates, there's Samsung (now good), but also Xiaomi and OnePlus (meh), and brands that release phones with already outdated software (really bad). [edit: not to mention different price ranges.] If we're looking at $/€/£500+ iPhones, maybe we should compare them to a $/€/£500+ Samsung Galaxy or Google Pixel?

And iPhones from 2015 are still getting security patches.

The iPhone from 2015 running an old iOS version is not secure. Apple will release an update to WebKit or something like that to fix something being exploited, but most bugs are not fixed. The equivalent on Android would be receiving an update to WebView via the Play Store, which the user wouldn't even notice. And this is even more true on newer Android versions that have critical system modules and features backported via Play Store updates

Apple is better than most Android brands at updating their phones and tablets, but don't make the mistake to assume you're safe using an old iOS version that was recently updated.

They do the same thing on Macs by the way. A machine gets ~7 years of support and they release a security update to old macOS versions from time to time... they get the headlines, people think they're using a secure OS, but even Apple admits that most security fixes are not backported.

Once iOS gets side loading and Foss app stores pop up I will probably jump ship.