This month is the final month of guaranteed major and security updates, and we already know Android 14 won’t land in the Pixel 4a (though it will in the Pixel 4a 5G as it has guaranteed updates until November).
So for those of you who own that phone, what do you plan to do with it? Are you going to keep using it for a couple more years without the updates? Install a custom ROM (which one?)? Or are you maybe planning to get a new phone (a Pixel?)?
If you still own an older Pixel phone, how are you keeping it alive?
Meanwhile desktop OSes can easily support 10+ years old hardware. So maybe Google should be putting some effort into standardizing mobile hardware and firmware enough to allow the same instead of ripping off their users. Maybe new laws that demand longer support time will force them to do that, but unfortunately I don’t think the 5 years demanded by the EU will be enough.
That’s actually exactly what they did and the reason that the new pixels (starting at 6) get 5 years of support.
It’s not much but it’s a start.
The whole effort is called project treble and has been underway for a loooong time. But it’s really hard because it affects every single Android vendor.