I got my pair of Nexus 6 dev phones a month after my iPhone 6 Plus.
The Nexus 6 reached it final OS update with N but the 6+ is about to get iOS 11.
The iPhone 5s is about to get iOS 11. If it weren't for the 64-bit transition I wouldn't be surprised if it had gotten on the iPhone 5 as well.
Apple gives about 5 years of iOS updates, which makes keeping the same phone a lot more feasible. Meanwhile my Google sourced Nexus barely makes it two without landing on security patches-only.
I got my iPhone 5S (The 5S replaced my 3GS) when it was released and I'm still using it. The only problems I have are a little bit of yellow tint on the screen and the battery not having full capacity.
Maybe I got really lucky with both of my iPhones but even though I hate to pay this ridiculous premium price for iPhones it kinda evens out in the end considering I use the phone for 4-5 years.
That's still an 6 year old phone, do you consider this long or short? Generally Apple are extremely good at keeping their devices usable.
I used an iPhone 4 up until late last year, my dad is still using it. Now I upgraded to an iPhone 5s.
The annoying part is generally apps that require a higher OS, which is the app developers fault. But even then you don't always necessarily /need/ the absolute newest version of an app.
Up until November last year my youngest daughter was using my old 3GS. She loved that phone and could even still download apps from the App Store. I know this because I installed Lemonade Stand for her last summer. You can't get that now because it only worked on the older OS versions, but there it was in the App Store for her 6 years after I bought it. I'd try and boot it now to check it, but I'm not sure where it is.
The 6 Plus will be 3 years old in a month. The fact that its still a powerful phone, and will receive OS updates for another couple years speaks volumes about iPhone longevity vs. Android.
I have an original ipad and netflix is pretty much the only thing that still works fine on that. You can't use it to browse the web anymore because web pages have gotten so heavy it runs out of memory trying to render them. The app store is also broken to the degree of being unusable, even if you could find apps. If it wasn't so locked down it would still make an excellent linux device, but as it stands it's basically a dedicated netflix viewer.
So in my view it's a bit of both. These devices could have a longer life with manufacturer support, but the app developers are the ones driving the obsolescence.
App developer here. It is impossible to build an app for the original iPad. Apple tools will not allow you to compile backwards compatibility to iOS 6 (or is it 5?).
App developers are only a piece of this equation, though.
From (solo) developing an sms based app in 2017 there was little incentive to target an API level lower than 19 (KitKat), which provided a standard API for SMS.
The majority of devices support it so what's the incentive to support legacy software?
Now if there are breaking changes introduced to telephony in the future I'll probably maintain 4.4 support and add a check for API level. That isn't feasible for every app, though...
The Nexus 6 reached it final OS update with N but the 6+ is about to get iOS 11.
The iPhone 5s is about to get iOS 11. If it weren't for the 64-bit transition I wouldn't be surprised if it had gotten on the iPhone 5 as well.
Apple gives about 5 years of iOS updates, which makes keeping the same phone a lot more feasible. Meanwhile my Google sourced Nexus barely makes it two without landing on security patches-only.