it’s worth noting that while on android you can be like 4-5 major versions behind and still receive first class app support, on ios apple decides your phone no longer sparks joy and refuses you the next ios version, you’re slowly but surely going to lose all your apps. on the developer side, apple is extremely hostile to the practice of using older versions of their apis, they constantly push you toward newer apis that only work with the latest os and discourage using the older ones. some apps, like vlc, still manage to support older iphones, but it’s an ordeal and a half, so on the user side, not being on the latest ios isn’t really a proper experience.
the iphone 6s was actually the longest supported iphone, receiving the latest ios for 83 months after release. that’s just one month shy of fairphone’s 7 years. however, the average iphone only gets five years of real-world viability*, which is, yes, better than the 2-3 years android gets (usually with way more transparently planned obsolescence than apple does), but it’s not better than the 7 years of true viability that fairphone offers. they upgraded to android 13, that alone would last you until 2026 because of the way android apps are written.
*yes, you can use your iphone past that, hell, you can even use it after you stop getting security fixes, which tends to happen about 3 years later. but how is that different than using an old android device that’s also not receiving support?
Eh, you’re discounting the different development targets that the android and ios ecosystems use. From the jump almost all android developers are shooting for ancient versions of the api because no phone gets more than a few major versions. Ios developers are targeting the latest supported api so from the start it’s the latest thing.
But what’s in that api? It’s hard to develop optimized code for the gpu of android devices because it could be anything. Qualcomm stops sending out blobs after a few versions so there’s a big transition from first party blob bin libs to third party reverse engineered ones. iOS stuff is all just metal 1,2 or 3. So even the five year old phone is getting some level of gpu support. The metal api even has a fallback layer so if you wrote for 3 and the device only has a 2 gpu it’ll split the work and there’ll be some amount of acceleration. It’s like that one version of directx that broke hardware compatibility and had to be patched.
It’s also worth addressing what you said about apple pushing the latest api. It’s true, they do. They also encourage app developers to use the old apis to target security updates at platforms that aren’t getting major versions anymore.
That system is a lot more like Debian stable than some evil empire (although I’ve met ppl who think Debian stable is the evil empire).
Apple isn’t good. They’re out to get money just like everyone else. I think of em like Lexus. The users are pieces of shit, but the cars are prime rib Toyotas which is honestly pretty nice.
it’s worth noting that while on android you can be like 4-5 major versions behind and still receive first class app support, on ios apple decides your phone no longer sparks joy and refuses you the next ios version, you’re slowly but surely going to lose all your apps. on the developer side, apple is extremely hostile to the practice of using older versions of their apis, they constantly push you toward newer apis that only work with the latest os and discourage using the older ones. some apps, like vlc, still manage to support older iphones, but it’s an ordeal and a half, so on the user side, not being on the latest ios isn’t really a proper experience.
the iphone 6s was actually the longest supported iphone, receiving the latest ios for 83 months after release. that’s just one month shy of fairphone’s 7 years. however, the average iphone only gets five years of real-world viability*, which is, yes, better than the 2-3 years android gets (usually with way more transparently planned obsolescence than apple does), but it’s not better than the 7 years of true viability that fairphone offers. they upgraded to android 13, that alone would last you until 2026 because of the way android apps are written.
*yes, you can use your iphone past that, hell, you can even use it after you stop getting security fixes, which tends to happen about 3 years later. but how is that different than using an old android device that’s also not receiving support?
Eh, you’re discounting the different development targets that the android and ios ecosystems use. From the jump almost all android developers are shooting for ancient versions of the api because no phone gets more than a few major versions. Ios developers are targeting the latest supported api so from the start it’s the latest thing.
But what’s in that api? It’s hard to develop optimized code for the gpu of android devices because it could be anything. Qualcomm stops sending out blobs after a few versions so there’s a big transition from first party blob bin libs to third party reverse engineered ones. iOS stuff is all just metal 1,2 or 3. So even the five year old phone is getting some level of gpu support. The metal api even has a fallback layer so if you wrote for 3 and the device only has a 2 gpu it’ll split the work and there’ll be some amount of acceleration. It’s like that one version of directx that broke hardware compatibility and had to be patched.
It’s also worth addressing what you said about apple pushing the latest api. It’s true, they do. They also encourage app developers to use the old apis to target security updates at platforms that aren’t getting major versions anymore.
That system is a lot more like Debian stable than some evil empire (although I’ve met ppl who think Debian stable is the evil empire).
Apple isn’t good. They’re out to get money just like everyone else. I think of em like Lexus. The users are pieces of shit, but the cars are prime rib Toyotas which is honestly pretty nice.