Project Treble

There are two major factors going on here:

1. Apple customers spend significantly more on their devices, on average, and have a history of hanging on to devices longer then their PC counterparts. So they have a expectation that Apple supports their older stuff.

2. Every OS update degrades the performance of the phone.

So because Apple only supports a small handful of devices, forces users to use the same version of the software, and OS updates incentive their customer base to purchase newer products... then it's pretty obvious why they have a good track record.

This is the sort of reason why people buy Apple and it is something that Linux or Android will never be able to reproduce due to the 'freedom factor'. Many companies produce Android phones for all sorts of different economic classes and nobody is forcing anybody that buys a Android phone to use the same OS version as everybody else.

To illustrate the issue:

With Android I can go out and get a smart phone for _no cost_.

Looking at Straightalk in my area there are no less then 22 different models of Android phones I can get for less then 50 dollars. 9 of those smart phones I can get for $0 dollars, mailed to my house, with a single month of pre-paid phone service. No contracts. No payment plans. Nothing. The service plans are cheap for this setup as they would be if I brought in my own device. They are literally giving smart phones away for free to get you to purchase a month of service.

And the phones that do cost more then $0 but less $50.. most of them don't even require you to purchase a single month of service. Some of them give you a 50% discount if you do, but many do not even offer that.

With smart phones that are now cheaper then the flip phones and feature phones that they replaced... they are essentially disposable items. The profit margins that need to exist only to be consumed in order to keep these sorts of things up to date are practically non-existent.

The size and scope of the problem attempted to be solved here is something that Apple has avoided entirely by focusing on a small number of devices and a specific class of customer.

I would really love if people do end up solving this issue, however. The idea of taking zero-cost or almost-zero-cost off the shelf Android devices and being able to get rid of the crapware and obsolete OS with the latest open source version is extremely attractive.