>Both Google and Samsung promise 5 years of security updates for their phones.
But Apple has, for the last 10 years, provided about 7 years of feature updates. Google and Samsung top out at 3 because their phones are designed to be replaced every 2-3 years with a new one when your contract expires.
Since manufacturers of Android devices have been behind the 8-ball for the past 10 years, it stands to reason that this is a logical choice- the best Android devices perform like a last-gen 200-dollar iPhone SE. So it's natural that that level of performance would only be supported for the same number of years regardless of it being new or used, and as such Android devices don't get support because they're just not fast enough to bother maintaining.
The iPhone SE is arguably the best you can do for a low-end phone and one of the better phones for minimizing TCO. Sure, you could just buy 3 Samsung phones for 180 bucks each (since those phones will, at this point in the cycle, receive one new Android version), but they're also all bargain basement junk whereas the SE actually has hardware strong enough to support those upgrades and even with the obligatory battery replacement will still come out breaking even here (at $550).
I'm sure Qualcomm will eventually (with its Nuvia purchase) have hardware that outperforms Apple's stuff, but their highest-end chips will never make it into the cheapest phones so it really doesn't matter all that much. Guess it's just a question of incentives- there's no reason Google couldn't update the Android driver model such that the drivers and the kernel was separate allowing them to be easily baked into newer Android versions but it's clearly just not a priority for them.
But Apple has, for the last 10 years, provided about 7 years of feature updates. Google and Samsung top out at 3 because their phones are designed to be replaced every 2-3 years with a new one when your contract expires.
Since manufacturers of Android devices have been behind the 8-ball for the past 10 years, it stands to reason that this is a logical choice- the best Android devices perform like a last-gen 200-dollar iPhone SE. So it's natural that that level of performance would only be supported for the same number of years regardless of it being new or used, and as such Android devices don't get support because they're just not fast enough to bother maintaining.
The iPhone SE is arguably the best you can do for a low-end phone and one of the better phones for minimizing TCO. Sure, you could just buy 3 Samsung phones for 180 bucks each (since those phones will, at this point in the cycle, receive one new Android version), but they're also all bargain basement junk whereas the SE actually has hardware strong enough to support those upgrades and even with the obligatory battery replacement will still come out breaking even here (at $550).
I'm sure Qualcomm will eventually (with its Nuvia purchase) have hardware that outperforms Apple's stuff, but their highest-end chips will never make it into the cheapest phones so it really doesn't matter all that much. Guess it's just a question of incentives- there's no reason Google couldn't update the Android driver model such that the drivers and the kernel was separate allowing them to be easily baked into newer Android versions but it's clearly just not a priority for them.