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Survey reveals most people are holding onto their phones for a long time, and it makes sense (www.androidauthority.com)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/android@lemdro.id
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A new survey reveals users are waiting longer to upgrade. Over 49% of readers now wait three years for a new smartphone.

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[–] 61 points 10 months ago (12 children)

A modern cell phone at this point has no reason not to work for decades.

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  • [–] 25 points 10 months ago (9 children)

    It doesn't because you run out of security updates after 5 to 6 years. Which I hate. But nowadays switching to android alternatives is an option once a phone is no longer supported.

    Or Apple which is surprisingly good in that department, my sister's iphone 11 is still receiving updates.

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  • [–] 7 points 10 months ago

    As much as I detest Apple, they do work really well as work phones. My work phone is an iPhone 12. Outside of the somewhat degraded battery life because it's 5 years old, it still works flawlessly.

    That said, I haven't updated it to iOS 26 yet, even though it's available. My wife's 16PM is running iOS 26 and she is not happy with the "upgrade".

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  • [–] 12 points 10 months ago (5 children)

    It didn't have to be this way. I can run modern Linux on 20+ year old PCs.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    Enshittification, they code poorly on purpose so people need to upgrade their hardware for ever increasingly bloated software. Linux doesn't play those games.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago

    Proprietary drivers and the lack of a hardware abstraction layer seem to be the main problems. The big, popular desktop environments on Linux have also grown pretty heavy, but there are plenty of alternatives.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago (2 children)

    If you actually tried to do anything useful on a 2004 machine, you wouldn't post that.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago

    It really depends on what you want to do. Word processing it can handle, scientific analysis it'll be slow at, 3d modelling it'll end up in power point mode quicker than newer machines. Coding would be fine, though compiling would take longer and testing may or may not be viable.

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago

    My last phone upgrade was in part because my previous phone didn't have NFC, which is a significant technology nowadays. I wonder what's going to motivate my next one, if it's gonna be general performance, software support, or some hardware feature (like wifi... was it 7? That allocates a separate band for each device, so it doesn't shit itself when you use more than 1 device in a large area).

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago*

    They need to have a working spare parts program first. If your phone is busted you should have an option other than "overpay and wait a week for it to be shipped to the repair factory where it might be data wiped" or "hope the repair shop guy isn't lying about original parts and is competent enough to install them/know if they are original"

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