The model lifetime is too short. You can't get any idea of medium term reliability (as a proxy for long term reliability) until when the phones are discontinued.
The Pixel 6/6 Pro are rumored to have a 5-year support lifetime (in exchange for costing a grand). If true, I'm getting one. The Pixel 2 XL has been a great phone, despite spending all of Android 10 with most of the sensors not working due to some widespread corruption issue that would have necessitated a hard reset.
Supported means many different things. Ideally, I want to know if the device is going to last, or if it's going to end up bootlooping and being a big PITA like the Nexus 5X, before I buy it. That requires that it be on the market for a considerable amount of time. In this case, the 4a 5G is discontinued after less than a year in the market; it may continue to be sold, but likely not for very long.
Free repair if that happens is nice, but also not that helpful unless being out a phone for a week is fine, and losing your on device data is fine.
Assuming you bought one on launch day, that's just-under 4 years of support. That only looks good by the awful standards of Android -- you can expect 50%+ more for Apple's phones, which you'd think Google could at least equal.
Technically they didn't lose it -- that's a settlement. This might sound like I'm being pedantic -- and I am -- but it's an important distinction! It means there was never some official legal determination that they did something wrong.
The specific thing they were sued over was "we slowed down your phone when the battery got old, because the alternative was it crashing, and we didn't tell you we were doing it". Not explaining it was bad, but they've since fixed that, and the underlying technical thing they did seems reasonable and, to the point of this discussion, actually prolonged the usable life of the phone.
Those are real issues but that misses the point that iPhones have seven years of support which also decreases the TCO of the iPhone to around 62% less than the competition.
Yes turns out dropping support entirely is less risky than bad updates tanking performances, because you’re not immediately and personally causing issues.
Looks like external dimensions are different, so they’re mechanically incompatible. With iPhones, mechanical dimensions are so close together that cases are 1-2 generations backwards compatible.
The issue is that every new Google phone is available in less and less countries. 5a looks like a good option to replace my current 3a, but it is impossible to officially buy it here in Europe.
I'm considering the Fairphone as well, but could someone give me a reasonable idea of what to expect with running de-googled vs googled? Unfortunately I still need access to Gmail and Drive from my phone on occasion. Is that still available when de-Googled?
I'd love to have a full Android VM running on a de-Googled phone where I could sandbox all of the Google stuff.
I've run Android Degoogled for many years. Gmail can be accessed via K-9 Mail or another mail client via IMAP. Google Drive can be accessed via a browser such as Kiwi or Firefox.
Specs like a 2013 smartphone, and an OS without any commercial app support to speak of. Can't read my work e-mail, can't access my bank...a computer without useful software is only a toy, and the same goes for a phone.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/17/22627253/google-pixel-5a-...