Apple is gearing up to roll out iOS 15 later this year. The company plans to roll it out to several of its devices, going all the way back to the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus. This will make Apple the only smartphone OEM to offer seven years of software updates to its devices. That’s a remarkable feat, considering that only a couple of OEMs on the Android side promise three years of OS upgrades and four years of security updates. To bridge this gap, the EU proposed a new law earlier this year that would force all smartphone OEMs to offer up to five years of security updates for their devices and deliver reasonably priced spare parts for the same duration.
Although the EU’s new right to repair laws are yet to go into effect, the German Federal Government has now announced plans to extend the support timeline by two years. A spokesperson for Germany’s Federal Ministry of Economics recently said (via Heise Online) that the government body plans to enforce stricter rules that would require OEMs to deliver spare parts and software updates for seven years. In addition, the Federal Government wants OEMs to publish the spare part prices and not increase them over time.
That’s excellent news. With Germany being such an important part of the EU, I can only hope they will set the tone for the rest of the countries to follow. Do note, however, that it’s election season in Germany, so be on the lookout for political trial balloons.
There is no such thing as free lunch. The rules will force the providers of low cost phones out of Germany. In addition handsets will cost more to cover the cost of extended support.
True to a point but economics can be a bit none linear. It all depends what outcomes you want. One you strip out the duplication and bloat and feathering of nests a lot of this new technology is a work creation scheme with various execs and investment funds taking their percentage. That’s why governments have to look at things from a higher perspective and all the different factors which go into building a modern social democratic economy.
I also think the issue of planned obsolecence needs examining. Too much stuff is rushed through or forced which keeps people on an “upgrade” treadmill.
All those factories churning out new models every year of which a significiant percentage ends up as landfill is actually overhead. That’s what happens when you measure success by GDP.
In Japan major infrastructure projects are calculated on a 20 yearbreak even point.
Brisvegas,
Well, you’re point is logical, but updating a phone a couple of times per year isn’t a full time job, especially considering cheap manufacturers are already getting the updates from google and they just have to repackage it. Divide the work by millions of identical phones and you’re talking about extremely low marginal costs.
Although to be perfectly honest, I’d prefer the manufacturers just handed the necessary source and build tools up to the FOSS community, this way we’d stop getting excuses and the community would just get the job done without middle men to get in the way.
Alfman,
I don’t think that’s fair at all. Google don’t provide security updates to 7 year old versions of Android. Porting new operating systems to old phones really is a full time job – perhaps it shouldn’t be, but with the way things are today, it is. “Millions of identical phones” may be true globally but is unlikely to be true in Germany alone, so the manufacturer needs to weigh the cost of a handful of engineers against tens of thousands of units in Germany, and that math will not be favorable. Imagine if this was $1m/yr but there’s 100k units in Germany – that’s $10 per unit per year, so it raises the cost of each unit by ~$50 compared to today’s shelf price.
That’s unlikely to solve planned obsolescence though, because without additional changes consumers won’t be able to use that seven year old phone. That phone probably won’t run the latest-and-greatest web browser, because it won’t work well on a 7 year old CPU/GPU. But that in turn means web authors needing to not depend on the latest-and-greatest functionality. Where I live we’re about to purge 3 year old phones because networks want to drop any phone that doesn’t do VoLTE. If regulators really want to slow the rate of upgrades, they’d need to mandate carrier support, mobile apps run on seven year old systems, websites support seven year old browsers, etc.
malxau,
I think the problem has been greatly exaggerated though. Google even made things easier for manufacturers to release android updates without waiting on chipset vendors with project Treble. It was mostly in vein because the reality is that manufacturers themselves typically favor planned obsolescence. They don’t have much incentive to provide long term updates and would prefer to make excuses for why they can’t. That’s just my opinion.
Well, I think most people are thinking is that manufacturers should provide long term support across the globe. But you’re right, if their reaction to this law is just to provide updates for the German market alone it would increase the marginal costs. (What a shame that this would be their reaction though).
When you look at the global market the marginal costs approach $0. But the real reason manufacturers are loath to do it is that if a significant number of consumers were to upgrade half as frequently, the drop in lost sales would be far greater than marginal support costs.
The same holds for most appliances, washers/dryers/dishwashers that were user serviceable and used to last a lifetime are much better for reducing waste, companies are only interested in their bottom lines and if that means making products that don’t last long and are harder to repair, well then they may find it to be an acceptable social cost for their business. So the question is at what point, if ever, do we do something about this through regulation?
Should we force companies to have longer warranties and support?
Should we force companies to internalize the costs of their own waste?
Should we just ignore it and let the planet go to hell?
I disagree. PCs show that even old hardware can keep chugging for a very long time. This is large part because there we’ve taken manufacturers out of the loop. I think being dependent on manufacturers is the biggest culprit when it comes to mobile updates. They are failing because their incentives are maligned with long term support.
The difference between phones and PCs is the rate of evolution. Compare the specs of a 7 year old PC to today vs a 7 year old phone to today.
Obviously it’s possible that this will correct itself as the smartphone market matures, it’s just that 7 years of looking backwards in phones is a very long way.
It wouldn’t concern me at all if PC manufacturers are required to support devices for 7 years, where support really is already provided from upstream operating systems, and all the manufacturer needs to do is maintain whatever crap they choose to bundle, making the proposition as expensive or as cheap as they choose to make it.
malxau,
Yes but you are looking backwards. Policies need to be forwards looking. 7 years ago desktop computers were already generally mature and they haven’t changed very much other than superficially and incremental spec bumps. Cell phones sold today should last 7 years much like computers sold 7 years ago have. To combat e-waste, we need to make sure consumers aren’t being forced to replace devices that would still work if it weren’t for planned obsolescence.
For better or worse, PC manufacturers aren’t really required to provide long term support, it just so happens that the PC ecosystem evolved that way with responsibility for updates going to a corporation that benefited from software sales instead of hardware sales. One of microsoft’s biggest advantages has been backwards compatibility and they’ve had relatively few incentives to deliberately block owners from upgrading the OS (unlike mobile manufacturers). But it could be naive to assume things will stay this way forever. We’ve been watching microsoft change it’s business model and pushing for new hardware that better serves their walled garden agenda. Instead of mobile phones become more serviceable like PCs, we could potentially be on the verge of computers becoming less serviceable and more disposable like their mobile counterparts, which would be regressive indeed.
It’s a big problem that we are at the whims of corporate interests. They will seek profits even if it harms our planet.
My iPhone 6s will get an update this year, so I think that makes around 6 years, and it will have made it to year 7 even if it is dropped next year. I still use it as my main/only personal phone. There’s nothing wrong with it. I don’t see why Google and Android phone makers can’t do the same.
My iPhone 6 is stuck with iOS 12 but still receives security updates. (Support for the iPhone 5s ended in June and the iPhone 5 back in 2019.) I had the battery replaced after three years and the new one still lasts a full day. The screen has started acting up though so I need to get a new one soon.
I think the life-expectancy of smartphones is a very important discussion to have. Our phones last longer and longer and at the same time become more and more important. My iPhone 6 still does everything I need it to. If not for the screen slowly dying, there’d be no reason to replace it.
The Swedish Covid-19 vaccination relied heavily on smartphone apps which in turn relied on electronic ID. Booking an appointment became quite difficult if you had an older and/or unsupported phone (or worse, no smartphone or computer at all). Unfortunately, the reactions to such complaint were usually “get a new phone!” and “you’ve got to keep up!”. Sometimes it feels like people are totally in on the whole planned obsolescence thing and just want an excuse to go and buy the latest hottest thing.
@TasnuAraknu
There’s a lot of that about and things like Microsoft’s “Insider” thing just fuels it. On the on side you have fanboi’s in it for the buzz. On the other side you have devs and IT support whose livelihoods depend on reselling the same junk year after year. It’s subtle but will infest public discussion on social media and what mainstream media will pick up. If sensible discussion from experts and general customers is neutered it prevents it being a politicial issue so politicians take their eye off the ball.
Thanfully not every politician falls for it.
It’s because they usually rely on Qualcomm to update drivers for new OS versions, and they seem to like providing new drivers as much as getting their teeth pulled.
Low cost phones are not low cost. They become obsolete sooner, break sooner and cost the planet big time. Skimming the cheap stuff off the bottom end of the range will be a good thing.
The advent of the smartphone caused a massive jump in the cost of phones and folks figured it out. Same with smartwatches. Folks will figure it out again when we up the price and lengthen the service time of everything.
It’s the same economic footprint but with workers spending more time maintaining than building. However, the eco footprint is a lot lower, i.e. exactly what we need. Also it spreads production (maintenance) back to the market and rebalances the global supply chain. OMG – who would have thought such a simple move as enforced appliance longevity could have such an impact. Like when they reintrodued wolves to Yellowstone – https://earthjustice.org/blog/2015-july/how-wolves-saved-the-foxes-mice-and-rivers-of-yellowstone-national-park
Alternatively this could open the door for Sailfish enabled phones or a new level of “clever feature phone” to enter the market in a bigger way. Those have the same update problem but given its a lower performance OS it might be more feasible to extend it to 7 years on cheaper hardware. Probably out of my depth there.
It might also drive modularity whereby you can easily replace screens and SOC boards. That won’t start with phones however. More likely to be laptops or a Pi400 type home PC.
There’s nothing stopping using hardware until it falls apart. I really don’t see anything in the baseline functionality which means phones should go obsolete in 10-20 or even 30-50 years. If you want a phone to do the basics that’s all you need. Portability and legacy support as well as looking after your entire user base is not a new thing and the cost can effectively be zero as some have observed.
There’s no need for all the bloated frameworks to load in or take up space or use the latest OS revision which pulls all this nonsense in. As an example my oldest Android phone is 10+ years old and the original Maps is quite snappy. The latest version of maps is sluggish and packed full of things I don’t use as well as using new UI elements which pull in more bloat. “Here” (Nokia Maps) was pretty good and even did offline directions as well as storing entire maps for countries. Sadly it no longer runs on this phone. Why? Developers being addicted to latest API’s and gimmicks even where they add no value and with no graceful fallback.
It’s funny going back and reading the original reviews for this phone. It’s full of the exact same language you read in reviews of new flagship phones. “Blazingly fast”. “The display is buttery smooth”. “Amazing camera”.
But what does a new phone do? Not a lot and anything else is more than I need or want.
HollyB,
As a user, if it works it works and we should be able to keep using it. But as we become more dependent on remote services, remote activation, etc, way may find things become increasingly difficult to use even if the hardware runs fine after support gets dropped.
https://www.republicworld.com/technology-news/mobile/google-to-end-sign-in-support-for-devices-running-on-old-android-versions.html
Some users may find their devices locked out of mandatory activation by google after a factory reset. I’ve been forced to create google accounts for my phones before I could even install lineageOS on them.
Obviously you and I know that things don’t have to be engineered this way, but as end users there isn’t always much we can do about it, especially with proprietary hardware. Remote dependencies are increasingly the status quo whether we like it or not and it’s likely to keep getting worse.
@Alfman
In their wisdom Google are trying to backdoor GMail with a comms app. I’m already looking around for a none bloated email app to replace GMail across all my phones and this is only going to encourage me. I’m very picky about comms apps and don’t currently have any loaded on any of my smartphones as I almost exclusively use my desktop for stuff like this. I just want one standard which works not fragmentation or feudalism.
Microsoft just joined some open cloud architecture board. Oh here we go. OpenGL ARB all over again.
In a funny sort of way the EU is the largest standards body in the world. Some of the directives which get passed are actually very good pieces of work and the EU can be surprisingly quick for a pan national body. Myself I find a lot of Americans are very receptive to the idea of reigning corporations in and a sane healthcare and welfare system. I think it would go a long way to removing some of the geo-politicial stresses.
This is just my personal view but I do not see a future for American tech in Europe “as is”. The corporate made law, cartels, and stamping all over the European economy is not on. The Russian plan on network independence and the Chinese plan of manufacturing independence are rational decisions. Of course they have issues of their own especially with human rights but long term I think we’re all going to have to sit around the table and work something out.
I’m not going to say “It gets better” because that can be a lie in a subjective personal sense but it’s true things don’t always stay this way.
Given we are in a climate crisis, ewaste really is going under the radar … this should be adopted globally and be a minimum.
I can understand their intentions, however I do not think the legislators have any idea exactly what they’re asking most OEMs to do. Note that I completely agree with the goal and certainly wouldn’t mind seeing some of these irresponsible OEMs get what they richly deserve. I just don’t see this particular avenue working with the Android ecosystem as it is currently. To be able to make a top-down push like that you have to either be Google, or have a very limited pool of devices for which you mandate support. I can see a law that says phones approved for government or public sector use must have seven years of support, and that pool then being a small selection of certified models. That would be workable. Mandating seven years for all phones is, I suspect, a pipedream and OEMs will just limit or stop selling in Germany if it becomes too difficult. Meanwhile consumers will import whatever phone they want anyway if they have the money, so it won’t be the security cure they want it to be.
darknexus,
Obviously the ideal would be manufactures provide long term updates globally, but it remains to be seen whether & how they’ll resist this. You may have manufacturers pulling out because they don’t want to comply like you say. Although you suggest that German consumers may turn to foreign markets to buy phones that don’t comply, curiously the opposite might actually happen too: Non=German consumers could line up to get their hands on German phones because German phones could end up providing better support than domestic ones. Although it becomes an open question whether a manufacturer would track users doing this in order to deny updates in jurisdictions that don’t have these laws. It will be interesting to see what happens.
The EU is arguably the largest single market in the world. If any vendor wants to stop selling in that market I susepct the EU will give a long Gallic shrug. You think factories wouldn’t be built overnight to fulfill EU market demand? By and large Americans talk a tough game but they’re bullshitters. When push comes to shove they settle. As an example the UK world poker championship is winner takes all. In the US which has a similar poker tournament in reality before the game starts they almost always agree to split the winnings. The Americans utterly wrecked the European computer industry and phone and IC industries. What do I care if they vacate the market? It’s not as if we can’t make our own stuff.
@Alfman
I have a spare Windows 10 licence bought from a reputable German supplier. It is legally valid throughout the EU (and UK). If any vendor wants to go against the EU single market they are welcome to try in the ECJ. They won’t get very far. And as you know they will pretty much have to follow suit whereever they sell in the world. It’s just not going to make commercial or political sense to sell tat elsewhere.
Please do educate yourself about the EU. I don’t want to spend my life going around mopping up American’s mistakes or irritating “devil’s advocate” nonsense.
HollyB,
I am unclear how a windows 10 license fits into a discussion about regional phone support legislation?
I am not from Europe and will never know as much about Europe as Europeans like you do, so please say exactly what it is you have a problem with so that I can learn. FYI I am not an American and even if I were I’d suggest that cultural stereotyping is usually rooted in ignorance. I’m a big fan of treating people with respect regardless of where they come from. I admit sometimes that’s hard, but I’d say a good place to start is culling stereotypes. Fair enough?
I’m not explaining things twice.
HollyB
No, because you’d have to explain it once first, haha.
I don’t expect there was much substance behind the “do educate yourself” statement anyways. That It’s just one of your mannerisms, like stopping the discussion when asked to provide details. I don’t know why you do it, but who am I to judge, everybody’s got quirks and differing opinions