Enlarge (credit: Fairphone)
It can be done. Android manufacturers can actually support a phone for a sizable amount of time. Fairphone has announced the end of life for the Fairphone 2, which will be March 2023. That phone was released in October 2015, so that's almost seven-and-a-half years of updates.
Fairphone is a very small Dutch company with nowhere near as many resources as Google, Samsung, BBK, and the other Big-Tech juggernauts, yet it managed to outlast them with its support program. The whole goal of the company is sustainability, with easily repairable phones, available spare parts, and long update promises. The Fairphone 4 has a five-year hardware warranty and six years of updates, and the company's reputation says it can provide that. Sadly, the phones only ship in the UK and Europe. The Fairphone 2 only promised "three to five years" of updates, and it blew that out of the water.
Updating the Fairphone 2 has been a huge undertaking for Fairphone, since it has mostly been doing it without Qualcomm's help. Usually, the Android update process has a chain of custody, where Google updates the Android source code, your chip vendor takes that code and adds drivers and other binary blobs to it, then the phone manufacturer takes the chip vendor code and makes it work on a particular device. For Qualcomm, a short support cycle means it sells more chips, so it bowed out of the process pretty quickly, greatly complicating updates for Fairphone.
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