[benzor]

FWIW, I've deliberately kept my Nexus 5 on Android 4.4.4 and it runs as well as the first day I bought it 2.5 years ago. Multi-day battery life, no compatibility issues (because no OS updates), all the latest apps still run on it, etc. Not to mention it was an affordable phone even when it was brand new. Very happy with it overall; I can easily see it lasting me another few years.

[Maultasche]

There has to be some nasty security vulnerabilities lurking on that phone. There have been a lot of security patches to Android over the past 2.5 years to fix various exploits. I'm sure it does run great, but I would personally be uncomfortable missing out on so many security fixes.

I don't pay a lot of attention to the Android OS, but I do recall there was a nasty exploit discovered about a year ago (called Stagefright) where a specially-crafted text message with a picture or image can cause malicious code to be run on the phone the moment the phone receives the message.

[pjmlp]

And almost no one got those updates other than Nexus and a few high cost mobiles.

I can still buy 4.4 phones as new on my city.

[david-given]

I have an Android ADP1 --- one of the original development phones, the HTC Dream with the custom paint job. It's got 192MB of RAM and a single-core 528MB ARM11. It ran Cupcake, aka Android 1.5 (although I've since upgraded it to,

If you ignore the hilarious security bugs --- like the fact that, as shipped, they forgot to disconnect the keyboard from a root shell, so that if you typed 'reboot' into an email hilarious things happened --- it actually runs rather well; it's smooth and perfectly satisfactory to use.

...holy crap Cupcake would run well on a modern phone.

[vetinari]

I also had ADP1 - and I think that the latest official update was to Donut, aka Android 1.6.

Not that it matters much today...

[david-given]

Yeah, I've got Donut on it now.

Unfortunately its https library uses some obsolete crypto technique --- TLS 2? --- and as a result it can't connect to anything on the internet, not even to fetch updates from the App Market (not the Play Store!). I can't even log in to Google.

I did have Gingerbread on it at one point but it was very unhappy.

I found a partial Debian port but there's still not really enough RAM for that. I wonder if there's a NetBSD port...

[vetinari]

Yeah, I also tried Cyanogenmod Eclair and Froyo on it, but it was an excelent way to waste a lot of time watching things happen in slow motion. So I flashed it back to Donut and few weeks later got another phone, that ran Froyo properly.

I didn't know that the App Market doesn't work anymore - about 18 months back, my brother was still using it (as a backup phone, obviously).

[tdkl]

Classic "don't fix it if it ain't broken". How have you manage to disable the System update annoyance ?

Shitty Lollipop made me sell the Nexus 5 last year with its bad battery life and memory leak (and they still didn't fix the mobile radio wakelock), but when downgrading to 4.4 it was next to impossible to block the notification. I remember methods used at time just caused the Google Play Services to hold the wakelock, since the update checker became a part of it.

[infinityplus1]

Press and hold the notification, select App Info, disable notifications. That has worked for me very well.

[tdkl]

On the Nexus? I remember that checkmark being disabled for the update notification.

[jdc0589]

That phone was eons better than my 5x, and cheaper. Only got rid of it due to physical damage.

I'm really not impressed with the Nexus 5x at all compared to every other Nexus phone Ive had (2 others), both from a price and general performance perspective.