[Proven]

The duration and quality of security updates/fixes is roughly commesurate with the price users paid for the s/w part of their mobile devices.

That's pretty cool - you can pay almost nothing for the s/w and still get a phone that works.

[lambda_obrien]

Alternatively, i bought my Google phone for 1000 dollars 3 years ago and get zero updates now. That's pretty sorry.

[sumtechguy]

What is even more sorry is if you had bought a 100 dollar phone you could have bought a new phone every year for 10 years and had better protection. Which is totally wasteful.

[ryanmarsh]

Kind of ironic that 3 year old chrome books cost less and still get updates.

[dmitrygr]

I worked in both Android and ChromeOS orgs at Google. They way the leadership in each treated updates was very different.

ChromeOS devices are expected to be supported for 7 (or so) years. This is true even at the planning stage, which is why certain vendors are avoided as they cannot be reliably expected to provide support for that. There used to be a policy even that only upstreamed kernels can be shipped, as in: if the vendor does not upstream their kernel patches, no part of theirs can be in a ChromeOS device.

Very little thought about updateability was given in Android until about 2018(?)-ish, when project Treble started happening. And even then, that idea had existed for a while before it was implemented, and it took a long time to sell android leadership on it.