[NathanCollins]

Great point! I have a "cheap" Samsung M32 that I bought for about $170. One reason I chose this Samsung phone over a similarly priced phone from a competitor was that I wrongly believed that Samsung provided several years more OS and security updates. After buying the phone I realized that longer support only applied to flagship models :/

[FirmwareBurner]

Devil's advocate question: How did you expect Samsung could fund SW dev costs to support 7 years of updates on the margins of a $170 phone while still turning a profit?

Not sure how much you were expecting at $170 but you might have been penny wise and pound foolish here trying to scrape the bottom of the barrel as nobody else gives you more than 2 years of updates at those rock bottom prices. Sometimes it pays to spend a bit more and get something worthwile.

Samsung's other budget phones from last year in the ~300 Euro range, like the A54 have 5 years of guaranteed support. Maybe the mid rangers of 2024 will also get 7 years of updates which would be killer value.

[davidzweig]

"In 2022 alone, the South Korean company sold almost 260 million smartphones worldwide."

Say there's a model that sold 10m total. I think it's fair to say Samsung could reasonably increase the price by $1 (~0.75c minus tax) for 10 years of support instead of ~3 years.

That's $7.5m. I used to flash Cyanogenmod on my phones (motorola defy etc.), IIRC it was often a single guy making the roms, I guess part time, doing a decent job of it. $1m/year for years 4-10 should cover a team of 5.

I think difficulties arose when newer kernals wouldn't work with the older hardware drivers that were available. But there's fewer SOCs than smartphone models.. I guess maybe $0.10 to Qualcomm for every SOC sale should cover updating drivers.

Not sure I'd want to be using a 10yo (2013) phone now, but a 5yo (2018) phone with fresh software would be fine. Todays higher-end phones should still be usuable beyond 5 years.

Here's Android 12 on Samsung S4 (2013), looks okay but probably marginal once you put a few chonky apps: https://youtu.be/lySu841rNgg?si=LyONyyUP8mcCa67L&t=783

[Zuiii]

> I think difficulties arose when newer kernals wouldn't work with the older hardware drivers that were available.

That's a problem of Samsungs own doing. They can mainline their drivers and force their subcontractors to do the same if they want to sell to them. They're definitely big enough to be able to do it if they wanted to.

Samsung doesn't see this as a problem.

[wmf]

The HN answer is probably "don't make cheap phones".

[AnthonyMouse]

> How did you expect Samsung could fund SW dev costs to support 7 years of updates on the margins of a $170 phone while still turning a profit?

Release the source code and accept patches. Nobody even cares if you provide further updates at all if you release enough code or documentation to begin with that third parties can feasibly get up to date versions of stock Android running on it.

[kramerger]

So the SAMsung tiers are like this:

S: flagship

A: mid range

M: mostly garbage

I can absolutely use an A as my daily driver, but M I will not touch. And you paid way too much for an M series phone, I would say they are worth $80-100.

Based on that, I can see why they can't give you 7 years of support. Besides, most M series use some unknown Chinese CPU that will never receive any kernel updates after release.

[wmf]

Another way to look at it is that you could buy a new $170 phone every two years and it would still be cheaper than an S24.

[Yujf]

But you would also be stuck with a $170 phone, which depending on how you use the thing can be a slight inconvenience or a total disaster.