[mrandish]

I'm not a fan of Apple's walled garden mindset and resistance to inter-operating with other platforms, but this degree of legacy support is a case of Apple doing a good thing and deserves praise. Note: I'm not saying that Google/MSFT et al are much better than Apple, but they're not quite as bad.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I know folks that have 18-month-old flagship Android phones, that can’t get the latest Android releases.

When they ask me what Android phones to get, I always say a Pixel, because they will at least get the latest OS support in a timely fashion.

They are also excellent phones.

[nomel]

"Just jailbreak your phone and install <blank>!" they said.

I did that for a while, depending on some random guy in a forum to maintain a working image for my device. He bought a new phone, and that was the end of the updates.

[Shank]

With Play Integrity / SafetyNet this is also an uphill battle without doing even more work to spoof your Integrity status, if you want mobile banking and finance apps to work.

[estimator7292]

I bought a brand new flagship phone for $1100, couldn't jailbreak it, then the manufacturer got bored, forced an update that bricked it, then got bored and never published an update again.

[KetoManx64]

Name and shame.

[thebruce87m]

> I always say a Pixel

Given the emergency call issue that has plagued the series for years and are seemingly still unresolved I would think twice about this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37714579

[dangus]

I feel like most devices have bugs affecting a tiny subset of users and that it’s not usually a reason to choose or not choose a particular device.

From what I can tell following links on your article, this issue hasn’t been reported on after the Pixel 7, so someone buying a Pixel 10 today probably has no reason to have that as a purchase consideration.

[thebruce87m]

I only posted an older hacker news link to show even people in this community have been affected. There are plenty of recent examples.

https://www.phonearena.com/news/this-wild-bug-is-still-plagu...

> I had this problem when trying to call 999 (the UK equivalent of 911) about a year ago.

> Fortunately I managed to free myself from the situation I was in by breaking (crushing) my finger.

Ouch!

https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/1oeiqop/pixel_...

[dangus]

And you can do a search for Samsung and get a similar story: https://www.phonearena.com/news/galaxy-s24-failed-to-connect...

Like I said, not to excuse them, but these issues tend to affect an incredibly small amount of people. If you have a double digit number of users on Reddit complaining for a phone that represents 7% of all US smartphone sales, that’s not a widespread bug as a percentage of userbase.

Google currently sells more than half of the smartphone volume of Samsung in the US.

[thebruce87m]

I don’t know why you want to downplay this issue. Google should be held accountable for this. It affects multiple users over multiple models and has caused real world harm.

Imagine it was Apple. Now apply the same outrage.

[com2kid]

I've never had a pixel phone survive through its support period. The hardware always dies first.

Tbf some pixel models have proven reliable, my mom's pixel 4 lasted long enough to be out of support and then it got owned and her bank accounts got taken over.

The downside of reliable HW I guess.

[walthamstow]

Counterpoint: my Pixel 3 and 5 are both still running fine. The 3 (2018) actually gets better battery life than the 5.

[com2kid]

I managed to get 2 pixel devices in a row that have known issues of just dying. My CC company refunded one of them. :/

I also had a Nexus 5 (boot looped of course).

[AndrewDavis]

I had a perfectly functional Galaxy A71 this time last year, still had great battery life, etc.

I had to replace it because it only has 5 years of support. Samsung offers 7 years of support but only on their top tier phones.

Google offer 7 years, even on their A series phones so I chose a pixel 9a. It's fine, I don't love it or hate it, but it's not doing anything I care about better than my last phone.

[canucker2016]

After the battery problems that the Pixel 4a, 6a, and 7a have had, I'll stick to the regular Pixel phones (well - who knows far this sideloading clampdown will go).

I know people have had battery problems with non-a Pixel phones, but the number of 'a' phones with battery problems caused Google to publicly respond.

[pjmlp]

I, like most people I know, buy Android devices around the 300 euro limit, use them until they break for whatever reason, which is measured in years.

The only apps that get installed nowadays are the ones that must be for a specific service, or gaming.

Many people even turn updates off due to the way companies get creative changing the application on every update.

In the old days before the iOS/Android duopoly there were no updates at all, and the few times they happened to be supported, it required the developer SDK to update the firmware.

Outside communities like HN, regular people hardly care about updates.

[stuaxo]

Current one was 150 quid off Ebay, I've also used backmarket.

Last time I had a "flagship" phone it got stolen out my hand.

The screen was also expensive to replace.

If I drop this its no big deal (the back is plastic anyway).

It also comes in a fun colour so its not just another black rectangle.

I'll replace it with the Jolla phone when that arrives.

[jen20]

> In the old days before the iOS/Android duopoly there were no updates at all, and the few times they happened to be supported, it required the developer SDK to update the firmware.

Not quite. The phones I had for the four years before the iPhone came out were Treo devices running PalmOS, which got software updates installable via the host computer without any developer tools.

[pjmlp]

I don't know about those, given that they were not that relevant in my circles, so I never cared that much about their offerings.

[trelane]

> I always say a Pixel, because they will at least get the latest OS support in a timely fashion.

You can also install e.g. GrapheneOS after Google stops supporting them. https://grapheneos.org/faq#supported-devices

[garciansmith]

GrapheneOS only updates Pixels for as long as Google does. All their supported devices currently receive the stock OS updates from Google. LineageOS is different in that regard.

[tasn]

Pixels are pretty weak hardware wise in the areas people care about (heavy, relatively slow charging, big, etc.); I'd probably recommend people buy Samsungs which also get long term software updates nowadays.

[youngtaff]

Google have burnt me twice by abandoning phones… first was Nexus 4, next was Pixel 4a

Both were abandoned within two years of me buying… never buying a phone from Google again

[Grazester]

As power user, didn't you do your homework before buying the device?

[youngtaff]

???

[tombert]

> They are also excellent phones.

I'm glad you had a good experience with it, but I had the Pixel 7 Pro and it was the single worst phone I have ever used. Utterly dogshit, to a point where I swore a blood oath to never purchase another Pixel ever again. I've heard that the later Pixels are better but I guess I'll never know.

It's possible that I had a defective unit, but regardless of the reason it was a laggy mess, that got terrible battery life, and sometimes simply wouldn't finish turning on (it would just stay on a black screen indefinitely). I bought it in July of 2023 and I ended up giving it to a family member and buying a refurb iPhone 13 Pro Max, which I still have and it has been considerably better.

It's not like I'm this huge Apple fanboy (feel free to look at my history complaining about my time working there), but if the Pixel 7 was 2023's flagship Android phone, then I have very little interest in using Android anymore.

[jmaker]

Same here with a Pixel 10 Pro. Having seen issues that others have been struggling with, I’m shocked at the poor quality controls. It’s not only hardware, the software breaks every now and then. Looks like every patch introduces some bugs or bricks some Pixels. According to Gemini, it’s all known and has been discussed for a long time. I checked Pixel bug reports, some of them closed with wont-implement states, while users still struggling.

This was the first time in two decades that my smartphone broke, and it could only be replaced.

In the end, to me it’s really too much maintenance with Pixels and Android devices in general. Really don’t get it why people prefer Android. It’s like desktop Linux. Not there yet.

[tombert]

I think desktop Linux is “there” more than Windows is “there” right now, considering that at least shutting down Linux actually works.

[jmaker]

Depends on your Linux distribution. Hibernation had also been a long standing issue last I checked, especially on laptops.

[tombert]

Sure, it just annoys me that people seem to have amnesia with all the bullshit associated with desktop Windows, I guess because they’re used to it.

The recent updates breaking Notepad and Calculator and Outlook and the Shutdown feature are rare in that they have gotten press, but there are hundreds of other bits of bullshit associated with Windows, like the fact that Windows Update just routinely breaks your computer and the Windows recovery and repair tools do not work, and as far as I can tell they have never worked for anyone.

Linux has its share of bullshit, but at least the backup and recovery tools actually work.

I haven’t had an issue with hibernate in a few years on the more normy-friendly distros like Mint or Ubuntu or Suse, but I acknowledge that some people still do. I still don’t accept that it’s less ready that desktop Windows.

[duxup]

Performance and hardware longevity has really been solid from Apple.

I busted my wife's old iPhone 8 out when I found it digging for other things ... still runs nice.

My android devices over the year I use for development, most just up and die or performance just degrades over time until it is unusable.

[eviks]

It doesn't deserve praise because the "degree" is very low, and it's undercut by all the other measures like "forcing" min OS version updates, meaning that your phone won't be able to use apps even when OS is updated.

[bastawhiz]

I'll never argue that updates like this are a bad thing, but arguably the best thing Apple could have done is offered a jailbreak for phones after so many years. If you're still using the same ten year old phone, the risks to you opting into the ability to flash a new OS maintained by someone who cares are pretty small. It's not as though those folks are more than a rounding error in sales numbers anyway. Someone buying a new phone every 20 years instead of 15 isn't going to cause anyone to lose their Christmas bonus.