On Wednesday, October 5, 2016, Ken Hohhof wrote: > The other thing I’ve found, since I’m using a 2+ year old Android phone, > is they develop bugs, glitches and crashes over time. It seems like once > the hardware is 2 years old, it doesn’t matter if you get an Android update, > it’s not going to work like when it was new, and they are going to push you > to buy new hardware. Whereas it seems Apple is more dedicated to the idea > of no phone left behind. They want you to upgrade, but they won’t turn your > iPhone 5 into a useless piece of crap to force you to upgrade.
Not so, my friend, not so. People in the Apple camp make the same complaints. The "grass is greener" proverb was never more true...just Google "iPhone 4" + "iOS 7" to see for yourself... In fact, the opposite complaint -- that a particular Android phone vendor decided to prematurely stop doing software updates for a particular model -- is more likely to come from within the Android camp. There has certainly been plenty of ink spilled about that problem. The key difference in my mind between the two platforms is that at least when an Android OS update craps up your phone, *you have the option to downgrade*. So you can go back to the way things were before, when things were at least working. At that point, you can decide if you want to buy a new phone so that you can use the new software, or wait to see if another to-be-released update performs better once it is released. But in the meantime, while you mull over the decision in front of you, you aren't left with a phone that barely works. Apple *actively prevents iOS downgrades* using their code-signing mechanism in the bootloader. So assuming they even fix your problem -- performance or otherwise -- in a later version, while you are waiting for them to release that version, you are stuck using the buggy one. And if your phone's manufacturer does decide to stop supporting your model (at which point the hardware is probably out of warranty anyway), and you want to load new software on it, then you're likely not out of options: grab one of the AOSP-based releases for your model and flash that instead. It's likely to work better than the vendor's stock firmware anyway. -- Nathan
