Android support: the right way

Imagine that the court in The Hague on May 23 gives the Consumers Union the right in the lawsuit against Samsung. The association wants the judge to require Samsung to support phones with updates for at least four years. That would be nice for us as users; you buy a phone now and you are sure that you will be well for the coming years. It would mean a small revolution. Only Apple now sells telephones where you can rely on four-year patches and upgrades, but on Android that is not a habit. In fact, in the past there have been Android phones that received little to no updates after their release.

In the aftermath of the Stagefright leak, which exposed the danger of not patching Android phones, we wrote a background story about how bad it was with updates on phones with Googles mobile operating system. At the request of many readers, two years later, we are once again diving into “the suffering that is called Android updates.”
Two years is quite a long time in the world of mobile phones and compared to then there is a lot of reason to to be optimistic. Google has developed initiatives to persuade manufacturers to continue to provide Android devices with updates. It does so on the one hand by making updates easier and on the other by making it attractive to promise updates up to three years after release.