Conversation

This is excellent by Apple. A ~6 year old phone still getting patches. It's great for security and great for those of us who see an upgrade as wasteful if the old device is functional. Still annoyed about loss of patches for my Pixel 2 after ~3 years.

Quote Tweet

Mr. Stark

@Mr_Stark_

Jun 8, 2021

*Apple announces that iPhone 6s is also compatible for iOS15 update* iPhone 6 users right now : #WWDC21

206

Chris Evans

@scarybeasts

Jun 20, 2021

Fortunately (??), I accidentally scooted down some stairs shortly after my Pixel 2 phone stopped getting patches, and it did not survive, making the upgrade decision easy. I hope I don't have to scoot down some more stairs in a couple years time to execute my Pixel 4a.

Replying to

I don't think the Pixel 4a will get much longer than 3 years of updates. It predates Qualcomm committing to providing 4 years of updates for newer generations. It's also a bit unclear how that maps to devices launched after the SoC. Pixels aren't well aligned to SoC releases.

Replying to

Hmm. A phone maker should make sure they're empowered to patch anything indefinitely. Via open source, or contractual escrow for code transfer upon upstream support fail, etc.

Daniel Micay

@DanielMicay

Replying to

@scarybeasts

Well, they definitely don't do that. Apple definitely isn't doing that either. They're able to get longer support than 4 years from the vendors for those components though, and most of it is vertically integrated. As long as Pixels use Snapdragon, they can now do at most 4 years.

12:57 AM · Jun 20, 2021Twitter Web App

Replying to

and

Unless Google actually moves to their own SoC (rumored, not clear if it will actually happen any time soon though), which doesn't make things any better for the rest of the mobile ecosystem and if anything probably takes a lot of pressure off Qualcomm to offer longer support.