2023-01-12
It can be done. Android manufacturers can actually support a phone for a sizable amount of time. Fairphone has announced the end of life for the Fairphone 2, which will be March 2023. That phone was released in October 2015, so that's almost seven-and-a-half years of updates.
While it's pretty cool that Fairphone 2 has been supported for so long it's still not enough. I can't find it now but I read somewhere that the average smartphone should be used for at least 25 years to be sustainable, because the production of electronics is so resource and energy intensive.
At the next event where an electronics company reveals a new product I want someone in the audience to ask "How many decades will you be supporting it?"
-- CC0 Björn Wärmedal