The catch is that you can buy an Apple phone everywhere, but for instance Google decided simply to not offer the Pixel in my country.
Also, they stopped updating my Nexus 4 long time ago, something that Apple does not with their devices.
Hence, I am not "succumbing to Google marketing" again. I have now updated to a Moto, which used to be a Google company. Let's see how long it takes to update...
Yes, the limited availability of Google Store and Google hardware in general is a huge failing of the company.
I really don't understand why they so commonly fail to bring best Android devices to markets with most Android penetration - they're practically giving the market share away to Apple's aggressive price cuts lately.
The reason is they simply cannot do it. It's very different shipping a high end phone in units of 100 million vs shipping a high end phone in units of 500,000.
This is why most android high end devices are really tiny market share.
They can't compete with Apple-- AT VOLUME. Apple's supply chain is where they are hugely competitive. This goes for Samsung etc.
So on android, genuinely high end phones are prestige items to make android look good, but the mass of android phones are low end cheap phones that can easily be mass produced.
Apple has been known to buy 10,000 prototype modeling machines and put them into production because they were the only ones on the market that could do a particularly manufacturing step that was needed for that model... google is never going to do that.
In fact, I don't think google has ever made any phones (excluding Motorola) themselves-- all the Pixels are rebrands of other makers devices.
My understanding is that it is not enough to ship the device to a country, you also need an very large ad push and deals with local operators in order to actually sell it.
However, it should be mentioned that the pixel was sold in even less countries than the previous generation ..
Not having an ad campaign is an extremely poor reason to refuse to ship EU-wide when they ship to Germany. The operator excuse is not valid in the EU. The EU is supposed to be a single market.
That's a pretty unreasonable desire. Technology changes so much in 10 years that it wouldn't be feasible to support a generation of phones for that long.
10 years ago was the original iPhone. How much of a money sink would it have been for Apple to support the original iPhone until now?
10 is almost certainly high. However, the rate of innovation does seem to have slowed down. To the point that all of my other devices from 5 years ago still act like new. My phone? Meh.
What will really kill this is lack of user servicable batteries.
Demonstrating how much Microsoft bends over to maintain backwards compatibility. Something that for all their other flaws they should be applauded for.
You mean the APIs. But I wasn't talking about those, but rather the hardware - the only thing that you need there is ABI (or at least API) stability for drivers. So you can pull the same thing off with Linux, as well. Basically, modern desktop OSes can run on decade-old hardware, although they will have reduced functionality due to some missing features.
There's no rocket science in maintenance support (eg security patches) for 10 years. That's the only thing that is necessary to keep the device usable.
What ecosystem becomes mature after just 10 years? A hard drive 10 years after the first one was invented in 1956 looked like this[0]. Is that mature? Phones are mature compared to 10 years ago, but whatever they evolve to in the next 10 will dwarf them.
The smartphone was invented long before the iPhone. This is 10 years after it went mainstream.
And in ten years that iPhone has not changed much, except that the CPU/GPU rapidly caught up to current standards. The only other dealbreaker toward using it today is 3G support, and that's a 9 year old feature. If the iPhone 3G had the same relative performance to 2008 desktops as the current iPhone has to 2017 desktops, it would probably still be viable.
Maybe 10 years is a bit too high, but we're talking about high end phones here. I'd be surprised if the actual hardware wasn't acceptable 7 years down the line.
My Moto G3 (2015) came with Android 5.1.1, and got an Android 6.0 upgrade. That's it. It has had two or three security updates since then, but it's still Android 6.0.
Despite that, it's been overwhelmingly the best phone I've had: cheap even unlocked, stable, no bloatware, waterproof.
My Moto G1.5 came with KitKat and was starting to suck on Lollipop after an update caused incurable excessive battery drain and constant app crashes. LineageOS Nougat restored the old hardware to its former glory. You would do well to do the same. Lollipop/Marshmallow is a liability.
An iPhone 5 is the comparable year device. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_5 It had entry specs of only 1GB of RAM, but 16GB of storage. The apps would also be native binaries instead of 'java' apps, meaning less storage was needed.
IMO what killed support on the older Nexus phones was /mostly/ the insufficient entry level storage.
IMO what killed support on the older Nexus phones was /mostly/ the insufficient entry level storage.
This is provably false. The Nexus 6 plenty of storage space (32GB or 64GB) and does not get Oreo. Google's Nexus policy is to provide security updates for 3 years (or 18 months after the device stops selling, whichever is longer):
I thought the reason is Qualcomm not giving what it takes to support a newer firmware on their soc. I have a Nexus 5 on lineage and I'm on Linux kernel 3.4.0.
The iPhone 5C with 8GB storage is still supported by Apple. Although not for much longer as it won't support iOS 11, and the OS takes up almost half the space on the phone.
not to diminish the rest of your argument, but my understanding is that java apps should be smaller than native apps (not significantly, since a huge part of apps' storage requirement is for assets, not code)
My experience around this time was that Android apps where much much smaller than similar iOS apps. Somewhere on the order of a 10x difference for apps without a lot of assets.
This round of updates for Moto will be interesting, as it has a light skin. Completely dependent on Lenovo ownership, and they haven't been making the best choices lately.
Also, they stopped updating my Nexus 4 long time ago, something that Apple does not with their devices.
Hence, I am not "succumbing to Google marketing" again. I have now updated to a Moto, which used to be a Google company. Let's see how long it takes to update...