The problem with long term support for my Android phones has actually not been the fact that Android devices have incredibly short security update windows. That issue has been somewhat mitigated with the newer Google Pixel phones which have five years of security updates.
The biggest issue for long term cell phone support is, even if we get an OS with a 10-year security update timeline like Rocky Linux, will the phone itself be able to make calls on whatever cellular networks exist 10 years from now? I have a number of 3G phones I bought as recently as 2018 which became paperweights in 2021 when all of the cellular telcos in the United States stopped supporting 3G, forcing me to update to a 5G phone. Is 5G going to still work in 10 years? Or are the telcos going to continue to convert perfectly good phones in to landfill?
As someone who has a 15-year-old laptop which is still a perfectly good Linux server (its screen went out two years ago, but it was a perfectly good desktop computer until then), it’s annoying seeing phones I bought less than six years ago be useless on today’s cellular networks.
There were a number of cheap Android devices that had LTE, but never had VoLTE enabled. Instead of allowing them to work as data only devices, most carriers just blacklisted them from their networks.
Yup, got burned by this. I had a POCO X3 (4G LTE but no VoLTE) which I'd still be using today had AT&T not labeled it as a 3G phone. Even just attempting to use it with my SIM card now automatically deactivates my plan.
Now they have a phone whitelist restricted to (mostly) mainstream brands...
The US telcos went back to whitelisting phone models for volte, so unless you bought phone that were sold by them they'll prevent your from making calls (and accessing 5G network too).
There were some burner flip phones that didn't have 4G up until around 2015, LG making a few of them. This guy was buying used pieces of crap and complaining how they weren't going to support a waste of spectrum.
Incorrect. It was a brand new Samsung Galaxy A5 Duos which I bought in early 2018 for well over $300. Yes, it was 4G, but not voice over 4G. It stopping being able to make voice calls on AT&T’s network only four years later. I think T-Mobile still supports 2G, so it would work there, but I’m not sure.
Anyway I got a Pixel 5 and now use T-Mobile’s instead of AT&T’s network (via Ting, since I use little mobile data and that gives me a phone with a low-bandwidth data plan for $15 a month + tax), since T-Mobile is better about supporting legacy phones and protocols.
In terms of the “waste of spectrum” argument, I think it’s better for the earth to “waste” some spectrum than waste millions of perfectly good phones. One takes up landfill, the other doesn’t. But, to each their own.
> The problem with long term support for my Android phones has actually not been the fact that Android devices have incredibly short security update windows. That issue has been somewhat mitigated with the newer Google Pixel phones which have five years of security updates.
The problem with long term support for Android devices is absolutely short security update windows, i.e. short term support for Android devices. Pixel comprises a tiny fraction of Android devices sold in the US, and a miniscule fraction worldwide.
Must be a US problem. Where I'm from we still have 2G and no plans to turn it off, but we also don't have any plans to introduce 5G it seems (though tbh 5G isn't much of an improvement over 4G for most people's use cases).
At least the Netherlands is phasing out 2G and 3G, although you can still use them until 2025 depending on your provider. I suppose this is the same in at least several other European countries.
This, exactly. I have two ancient Nokia N900s that came out in 2009, runs a Debian variant natively and there's the Maemo Leste project that brings mainline Linux to the device (amazing!). However, is already useless as a phone in the USA. I also hear rumors European carriers will shutter their 3G networks soon; which is a shame. The hardware, while old and slow due to memory constraints, still works. I guess I should relegate it to being a small multimedia server in my apartment.
The planned obsolescence of today's mobile phones makes me sad.
Not only mobiles, but also desktops and laptops. For example, there are lots of unibody MacBooks which are perfectly functional but no longer get updates from Apple.
However, in case of mobiles, things are particularly awful because it is often not trivial to install and maintain an OS other than the one supplied by the manfucturer.
It's incredible how much electronic waste and security issues are generated by lazy manufacturers who do not mainline drivers into the Linux kernel.
Lineage OS can often do WiFi only on old Androids.
But unless I'm mistaken, if a device only has 3G, and you want to travel with it away from WiFi, you can't even get 3G data on the device, as they shut off the 3G networks in the USA. Best you're gonna find in some rural areas may be 2G or 2.5G.
> The problem with long term support for my Android phones has actually not been the fact that Android devices have incredibly short security update windows. That issue has been somewhat mitigated with the newer Google Pixel phones which have five years of security updates
5 years of updates is still a short time. We only have one planet...
> The biggest issue for long term cell phone support is, even if we get an OS with a 10-year security update timeline like Rocky Linux, will the phone itself be able to make calls on whatever cellular networks exist 10 years from now?
I don't think this is the biggest issue : operators usually maintain a certain type of carrier for at least 20-30 years (in France, we are only talking about shutting down 2G - which still raises a lot of issue because of the many IoT devices using GSM...)
The biggest issues are IMO
- lack of parts to repair old phones
- no possibility to manage bootloader keys / relock the bootloader (not even mentioning devices with locked bootloaders)
- "stable-api-nonsense" ideology and no BIOS/UEFI/ACPI for smartphone => no way to have "one firmware to rule them all"
Not sure if smartphones will last 10 years. I have 2 early Google phones die on me with strange boot loops (different series), my trusted hardware guy says the flash died. They are just not made for 10 years usage.
Your laptop may be good, but it will probably only support some ancient insecure slow WiFi profiles.
Distributions start to drop old hardware. And there are always new CPU and other chip security bugs discovered, how do you get fixes for that into your system?
802.11g will be 20 years old in a few months - that's up to 54 Mbps, which is plenty for most things short of streaming video. Similarly, 802.11n (up to 600 Mbps) is almost 15 years old.
> Not sure if smartphones will last 10 years. ... They are just not made for 10 years usage.
I'm fairly certain that some phone models out there are probably better in this regard, especially if you can swap out the battery, the components are of decent quality and they're built in a rugged way. Also, somehow the idea of repairing your phone has gone out of the window, since you can just buy a new one.
> Your laptop may be good, but it will probably only support some ancient insecure slow WiFi profiles.
For many, slow Wi-Fi is acceptable. Same with a dated and slow CPU/RAM, which many will still consider better than their devices becoming e-waste. If the OS wasn't so locked down, many would enjoy having a stand-in for a Raspberry Pi for all I care, since the small form factor of a phone would lend itself nicely to DIY hacking, especially because of included camera and networking. Even if the hardware is lacking, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't or couldn't support the software for longer amounts of time.
Your point about the hardware itself and what it supports becoming insecure is a good one, but there's no guarantee that the amount of time for something like that to happen would be much shorter than any improved OS EOL period. Of course, if it's some non-critical functionality that's insecure, it might as well be turned off in software, like older versions of TLS in web servers.
> Distributions start to drop old hardware. And there are always new CPU and other chip security bugs discovered, how do you get fixes for that into your system?
We could cross that bridge when we actually get to it, and try to figure out the things that are easier to do first and foremost: notably software support. If something like Ubuntu LTS has an EOL of 5 years and AlmaLinux has security updates for 10, I don't see why Android versions should be any different, unless governed by a profit oriented corporation.
Aside from that, it's surprising that 3G can just be tossed away like that on a national level, since the amounts of e-waste this would generate is kind of staggering, even more odd is the fact that in many places 2G is still in operation. I guess at least that is a bit of a silver lining, if the claims were to be true (citation is needed, but it sounds like a sane argument): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3G#Decline_and_decommissions
> Technology that depends on 3G for usage will soon become inoperable in many places. For example, the European Union plans to ensure that member countries maintain 2G networks as a fallback[citation needed], so 3G devices that are backwards compatible with 2G frequencies can continue to be used.
The biggest issue for long term cell phone support is, even if we get an OS with a 10-year security update timeline like Rocky Linux, will the phone itself be able to make calls on whatever cellular networks exist 10 years from now? I have a number of 3G phones I bought as recently as 2018 which became paperweights in 2021 when all of the cellular telcos in the United States stopped supporting 3G, forcing me to update to a 5G phone. Is 5G going to still work in 10 years? Or are the telcos going to continue to convert perfectly good phones in to landfill?
As someone who has a 15-year-old laptop which is still a perfectly good Linux server (its screen went out two years ago, but it was a perfectly good desktop computer until then), it’s annoying seeing phones I bought less than six years ago be useless on today’s cellular networks.