sfx2000
Part of the Furniture
I hope that something good will come out of this, and manufacturers will become legally forced to provide a required minimum of support for products that are still fully usable. A three years old phone is NOT an unusable product, it should still be covered by security updates.
Wholeheartedly agree here - in many areas (incl here in Cali) - HW is required to be supported for a period of time, but that doesn't apply to software/firmware - and it should.
Apple is a good example of this with iPad/iPhone - once SW is deprecated (e.g. moving to 64 bit only, which stopped support for the A5/A6 chips), they stopped rolling any patches - the one exception that I recall is they did an update for the A4 based devices that supported facetime, but that was a one-off...
an iPhone 4s or iPhone 5 is still a very useful device, but from SW perspective, they're no longer supported... same would go for iPad 2/3/4 and iPad Mini - not asking for new features, but security updates would be very much appreciated.
Android isn't much better at this for factory supported firmware - Cyanogen/Lineage helps a bit here, but only for devices that they support directly.