Pixel 8 to have seven years of Android updates

simple@lemm.ee to Android@lemdro.id – 399 points – Google says it’ll support Pixel 8 series with seven years of Android updates
theverge.com

Now this is nice. Hopefully 3rd party manufacturers can also provide a longer life span for the device.

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7 years updates plus 2 battery swaps will take a flagship phone right to the edge of how long you'd want to use it anyway.

I think, 7 years would be amazing, but also good enough. Or to put it differently, after 7 years you get into heavy diminishing returns, since almost all users will be moving on/have severely broken their phone before that.

I've had most of my phones until they where 5-6 years old (I used to buy used, so I had older phones even though I didn't have them for quite that long). After that time, they usually fall apart anyway. (Two of my phones developed frequent random reboots around that time, one wore through the cable connecting both halves of the slider, and one killed died when I tried replacing the battery and accidentally cut through the screen cable).

I think you hit the nail on the head with diminishing returns. I'm usually on a 5-6 year usage period too. I can understand the battery swap helping out but my last few phones have felt so sluggish after 4+ years so I start looking at new phones around year 5. I have a Pixel 7 now and I'm going to wait until end of support and then we'll see what the offerings are then!

battery swap helps a lot with sluggish phones if a factory reset doesnt help, phones will supposedly throttle down to save battery when it starts getting bad

Yeah, I notice this on my smartphone. Above 60% its super smooth. Below that there's a dip in performance and smoothness.

What 11 year old phone is still getting manufacturer updates?

That's the secret, it's not.

If you're not getting security updates then any savings may well be a false economy

If you've got a device with zero vulnerabilities which will never have any discovered then whoever made it is in need of a Nobel prize