<story><title>There are over a billion outdated Android devices in use</title><url>https://danluu.com/android-updates/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>opportune</author><text>The flipside of this is that developers are forced to support versions of their apps that are compatible with previous operating systems. That&amp;#x27;s bad for developers, but good for consumers.&lt;p&gt;iPhones shove updates down your throat as a user. They&amp;#x27;re so persistent that inevitably most people will accept the new update - and even if you&amp;#x27;re stubborn like me, eventually your apps will no longer be supported under the newer OS&amp;#x27;s, and you are forced to update to keep using them. The problem is that the OS upgrades invariably slow down older phones, so even if you&amp;#x27;re perfectly happy with your iPhone to begin with, it starts to act slow as it gets the newer OS&amp;#x27;s. It&amp;#x27;s good that Android users can at least avoid this particular kind of planned obsolescence</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>urda</author><text>&amp;gt; iPhones shove updates down your throat as a user.&lt;p&gt;And we have the monster that was Windows XP because of users thinking &amp;quot;updates&amp;quot; are &amp;quot;forced&amp;quot; down throats.&lt;p&gt;iOS is correctly celebrated for having such a high adoption of the &amp;quot;latest and greatest&amp;quot;, and certainly hasn&amp;#x27;t become the demon that is the unpatched Android landscape.&lt;p&gt;So thankfully, from NetSec to the end user, it&amp;#x27;s a &lt;i&gt;fantastic&lt;/i&gt; thing that iOS keeps devices more up to date than android.</text></comment>
<story><title>There are over a billion outdated Android devices in use</title><url>https://danluu.com/android-updates/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>opportune</author><text>The flipside of this is that developers are forced to support versions of their apps that are compatible with previous operating systems. That&amp;#x27;s bad for developers, but good for consumers.&lt;p&gt;iPhones shove updates down your throat as a user. They&amp;#x27;re so persistent that inevitably most people will accept the new update - and even if you&amp;#x27;re stubborn like me, eventually your apps will no longer be supported under the newer OS&amp;#x27;s, and you are forced to update to keep using them. The problem is that the OS upgrades invariably slow down older phones, so even if you&amp;#x27;re perfectly happy with your iPhone to begin with, it starts to act slow as it gets the newer OS&amp;#x27;s. It&amp;#x27;s good that Android users can at least avoid this particular kind of planned obsolescence</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>userbinator</author><text>&lt;i&gt;That&amp;#x27;s bad for developers, but good for consumers.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is it? I&amp;#x27;m a developer --- &lt;i&gt;and&lt;/i&gt; a consumer, as are most --- and have always kept to the principle of as much compatibility as possible, mostly by not gorging on new features for the sake of new features, and a &amp;quot;do what you can with what you have&amp;quot; approach. To me, spending a little extra effort to get much more compatibility is well worth it, since I&amp;#x27;ve been on &amp;quot;the other side&amp;quot; and know the horrible experience of not being able to use something just because the developer didn&amp;#x27;t bother to think about anything but the &amp;quot;new and shiny&amp;quot;; that seems to be something a lot of developers completely ignore or even oppose.</text></comment>