[AlotOfReading]

Because these devices are usually being supported by teams of only a few people. Eventually someone decides that a new project needs all hands on deck to meet deadlines and people get reallocated internally from the "least important" projects.

The fixes are simple, but they all share one problem: they cost money. Hardware orgs are almost universally run by the most penny-wise pound foolish people imaginable, so that problem is completely insurmountable to them.

There's other issues too (e.g. upstream vendors don't like upgrading and charge absurd amounts of money for it), but the main problem is simply a lack of institutional priority to do the work.

[xrd]

Well, nothing you say is wrong, and it isn't simply that they are foolish. Hardware companies just can't figure out a way to give us free OS upgrades and make money. They generally stop making money the second the check clears. Apple has that one figured out, the longer you are a customer the more Apple services you buy. Google has a fundamental different model with Android where they are trying to make money and coerce their integrator partners to keep upgrading, but the money is way different.

[AlotOfReading]

Xiaomi doesn't make money from HW sales either, they rely on services revenue. They also have the same same 3yr support life every other Android OEM commits to.

It's not foolish, it's shortsided. At the scale major OEMs operate, even a dozen engineers per device generation would be a rounding error.

[manderley]

Seems 5 years are now the standard.

[_aavaa_]

Except in most cases one of those years hardly counts since many non-top-of-the-line android phones ship with an already outdated OS (though this too has been slowly improving, as has the time it takes to get them up to the newest version).

[karteum]

> Hardware companies just can't figure out a way to give us free OS upgrades and make money

The biggest question is : why does it take so much efforts to design an upgrade ? Unfortunately Google never made it mandatory for chipset/hardware designers to have an abstraction layer (similar to BIOS/UEFI/ACPI/system tables) that would make a single Android kernel and OS install and work on every devices... (And I have criticized Microsoft a lot for many things, but I have to acknoledge that they have an amazing backward-compatibility track record, even for device drivers, while Linux has its stable_api_nonsense policy...)