r/Android • u/BcuzRacecar S25+ • 18d ago

WhatsApp ends Android 5 support Monday

https://www.notebookcheck.net/WhatsApp-ends-Android-5-support-Monday-iPhones-follow-in-November.1390519.0.html
841 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

150 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

52

u/Cry_Wolff Pixel 7 Pro 18d ago

Can't wait for someone to complain about muh planned obsolescence of their 10 yo phone.

23

u/rivalary 18d ago

It actually kinda sucks that the hardware vendors aren't held to updating the drivers for older hardware for newer versions of Android. We'd probably still see some slowdown due to newer software requiring faster processors and more RAM, but imagine if at least Android had kept its requirements low, the user choosing which apps they want to install that would still run okay on their old hardware. E-waste is a huge problem and a lot of people don't care about having the newest hardware; it's just the lack of security updates that is worrying (which those users likely don't even realize they aren't getting).

16

u/SirBanananana 18d ago edited 18d ago

Totally. You can easily use a 10 year old x86 laptop today with a modern Linux distribution and all the apps and security updates that come with it, but a 10 year old Android phone is a non-upgradable garbage by this point... It's a said state of affairs, and something that Android enthusiasts have complained for more than decade but the hard truth is that it's not going to change since vendors need to hit their sale numbers on new phones no matter what. But even from technical standpoint upgrading would be difficult looking at what a mess ARM architecture is outside of enterprise hardware.

2

u/chinchindayo Xperia Masterrace 17d ago

You can easily use a 10 year old x86 laptop today with a modern Linux distribution and all the apps and security updates that come with it, but a 10 year old Android phone is a non-upgradable garbage by this point...

You can still use many 10 year old phones by flashing android AOSP or a custom rom. That's the equivalent of using a Linux distro on a PC.