This puts the finger on one of the main reasons that I'm very concerned about the general state of software engineering these days. It's a lack of quality and stability.
Well, that's a little unfair. It's really that the industry is making a fundamental engineering tradeoff that I think is a terrible mistake: prioritizing rapid adaptation over robustness. We as an industry have decided that software should be ephemeral and disposable.
There are arguments for why that's a good tradeoff. We've been hearing them for years, and I was reasonably on board with the notion at the start (at least for some use cases). But I think that now that we've had experience with the results, my opinion has changed. I no longer think that the tradeoff is the best one.
Now it feels like we just have the prototypes in production.
Instead, Xiaomi should release an operating system update. iOS 15 is compatible back to 6s (released in 2015), tho even 6 years of support seems short.
If you want to “BuyItForLife”, perhaps buy from a phone manufacturer committed to supporting OS updates for your phone.
What’s going on with Android ecosystem that old phone support is hard?
It's not a single thing it's a bunch of things on the list of which is.
Hardware manufacturers customised android for their handsets meaning that updates are only viable from them, they only care about 18mths after they stop making a model.
Google in wanting everyone to use their handsets let them get away with pulling stuff like above - android didn't win because it was technically better it won because it was "free" and "made" by Google.
Shitty drivers.
Once Google had the market mostly sown up they did circle back and attempt to fix this with AndroidOne https://www.android.com/intl/en_uk/one/ which attempts to establish a baseline compatibility so that you do get updates for longer.
I won't buy a phone that isn't AndroidOne at this point full stop.
It would be nice if it didn't involve the government, but I fear it's going to end up as the necessary evil.
