Google forced me to give up a perfectly good smartphone

When buying a smartphone, some people only use it for a year and then switch to a new life, but there are also many people who want to use their phone as long as possible. However, sometimes you have to change to a new phone even if you don’t want to.

Except in cases of damage, software is one of the reasons that force users to change devices, and that is the story of Aaron Gordon, a veteran writer of Motherboard technology site.

Here is the whole thing he went through when using the Pixel 3 and was “forced” by Google to switch to a new device:

About 3 years ago, I bought a Pixel 3, Google’s flagship at the time. It’s a good phone, I like its not-so-big size. I dropped it several times but it didn’t break and the battery life hasn’t changed significantly since the day I used it.

To me, the phone is like a refrigerator or a stove. It’s a practical device, a necessity but I don’t feel passionate about it, as long as it meets the need, I don’t want to spend money on replacement without a really good reason. The Pixel 3 meets my needs, so I don’t want to spend $600 on the Pixel 6, which is just a smartphone that does all the work of a normal smartphone.

But in the end I had to ditch the Pixel 3 because Google stopped supporting all Pixel 3 series. Even though it’s only 3 years old, the Pixel 3 will never receive another official security update. .

Security updates are a basic thing everyone needs to protect their digital lives. If you don’t receive security updates, you’ll be vulnerable to any vulnerabilities discovered since the last patch you received on your phone.

Responding to an email asking why support for the Pixel 3 was discontinued, a Google spokesperson said: ” We’ve found that three years of security and OS updates still provide users with a great experience for the device. their equipment.”

This has been a problem with Android since its inception. In 2015, my colleague Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai parted ways with Android because of poor software support and meager upgrade releases.

This Android problem has long been blamed by Google on updates that need to go through carriers and phone manufacturers before they reach users. At the time, Google didn’t make any Android phones; The Nexus line is the closest thing to a Google smartphone, it’s a partnership with other manufacturers like Motorola and HTC.

But for the past six years, Google has been making Pixel phones. They’re Google’s own phones, not through another carrier, which means Google can’t blame security updates on other manufacturers for stopping. But even so, their update time is also very short.

This plan to put a product on this obsolete list is very confusing and I am annoyed to have to spend hundreds of dollars on a new phone when I do not really need to do so.

I still find it very confusing to think that we could gather a bunch of precious metals together to form a phone that sends instant messaging to people all over the world. Over millions of years, these metals formed underground, and then those metals were mined, transported, and sold as the wonderful and necessary technology that made Google incredibly rich.

And Google has decided it will only use them for three years before turning the precious metals into trash.

I recycle my phone when it’s no longer in use, but I don’t think it’ll do anything useful either.

Maybe one day we’ll do a better job of recycling phones, but because companies like Google want phones to be as energy efficient and as beautiful as possible, they’re bundled together in a way that makes them difficult to disassemble for recycling when Google decides they will no longer function reliably as a phone. Again, they did this in just three years.

One thing that Apple does better than most other consumer electronics companies is supporting their devices for a long time. The most recent version of iOS can be installed on phones from as long ago as the iPhone 6S. It was a smartphone more than six years ago. During that time, I had to replace two obsolete Pixel phones because Google no longer supports them.

So I’m doing what Lorenzo did in 2015. I switched to iPhone for the first time. Unless you regularly break your phone within two or three years, there is no reason from a sustainability point of view to continue using an Android phone. Of course, Apple is only good when compared to Google, as they also make devices that are difficult to repair.

Every time I look at my Pixel 3 now, I just go crazy. Pixel 3 still works. It’s perfectly fine. I want to keep using it, but I can’t, because one of the richest companies in the history of the world doesn’t bother rolling out some more security updates.

If I wanted to stay in the Android ecosystem, Google is now selling Pixel 6, which they guarantee will get security updates for “at least 5 years”, better than Pixel 3 by two years and the first time they offer grant a promise higher than the standard three years. I appreciate that. But it’s still not as good as what Apple has always offered.

Over the years, I’ve bought too many Android phones because I trusted Google when they said they had found a way to improve updates, from the promise of the Google Play Store, to the promise of Android One or “Project Treble”. But that’s too little, too late from Google.

Reference: Motherboard