Android
DROID DOES
Welcome to the droidymcdroidface-iest, Lemmyest (Lemmiest), test, bestest, phoniest, pluckiest, snarkiest, and spiciest Android community on Lemmy (Do not respond)! Here you can participate in amazing discussions and events relating to all things Android.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules
1. All posts must be relevant to Android devices/operating system.
2. Posts cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
3. No spam, self promotion, or upvote farming. Sources engaging in these behavior will be added to the Blacklist.
4. Non-whitelisted bots will be banned.
5. Engage respectfully: Harassment, flamebaiting, bad faith engagement, or agenda posting will result in your posts being removed. Excessive violations will result in temporary or permanent ban, depending on severity.
6. Memes are not allowed to be posts, but are allowed in the comments.
7. Posts from clickbait sources are heavily discouraged. Please de-clickbait titles if it needs to be submitted.
8. Submission statements of any length composed of your own thoughts inside the post text field are mandatory for any microblog posts, and are optional but recommended for article/image/video posts.
Community Resources:
We are Android girls*,
In our Lemmy.world.
The back is plastic,
It's fantastic.
*Well, not just girls: people of all gender identities are welcomed here.
Our Partner Communities:
view the rest of the comments
Although this is obviously a step in the right direction it needs to be followed up with security updates, no point increasing the life of the hardware without doing the same for the software.
Making it illegal to lock bootloaders would make each device community-maintainable.
Yes! That would be the best. We should have access to our hardware. And just like most things you want to keep around for a long time (e.g. cars) you will have to tinker with it to keep it running smoothly into old age.
I hope you mean, always make it possible to unlock the bootloader offline (to not be dependent on them). There are good security reasons to have it locked by default.
Yes. No more of that unlock code nonsense. Even Fairphone has an online bootloader unlocking process. I hate it.
While it is certainly nice to have continued support, I think I'd disagree that forcing companies to maintain software on legacy/outdated hardware is something that should be legislated. I think that would greatly stifle innovation in a lot of cases.
I'd be a supporter of something like @[email protected]'s suggestion, though. If they are no longer able to support security updates, then they should open it up to be able to maintain it yourself/community-maintainable. Expecting a company to maintain support through continued development on a 10 or 20 year old device that in some cases may not even be physically able to handle the updates is a big ask.
I don't think the market has been very innovative over the last few years anyway, slow iterative upgrades that do not necessitate modern hardware for security. It's not like the latest phone attacks are thwarted by a macro and wide angle lens. The older phone are perfectly capable of handling further security updates.
If they want to sell phones they should be breaking new ground.
I mean, Apple does it for 10 years old devices and it's not stopping them from churning out phones every year
I'm not saying I think it would be a bad thing for support to continue. I just don't think it should be legally required. If a small company decided to develop and produce a device, knowing they'd have to perpetually support it, legally, makes it exponentially cumbersome to continue further development. Newer software may not be able to run on older hardware, meaning they'd have to develop and maintain multiple versions of any security fix. For Apple, it'd hardly be a problem (financially) to continue support.
On the other hand, I understand that this creates a situation where new phones keep being churned out that are hardly different hardware-wise. It'd be lame to stop supporting the older devices just to push people to buy another one (Apple). There's probably some middle ground to be found here.
At a minimum, stuff should be put in place to allow for people to update legacy hardware to be maintained by individuals.