Technology

As much as I prefer the open core of the Android OS, it's silly to focus on Apple on this, since Apple phones generally last much longer than their Android counterparts.

Hard, fixed, unforgiving legal requirements about length of support-patches and not breaking advertised software-based functionality on internet-connected devices you sell would solve multiple problems:

• It would prevent shitty unsecured devices from corrupting the internet
• It would discourage companies from manufacturing e-waste devices that they cannot reasonably support long-term
• It would allow end-users to keep devices far longer
• It would force software teams to focus on maintainability of their older versions and backportability of bugfixes, meaning a stronger trend towards codebase-compatibility.

Basically, clarify the legal warranty concept: Hardware has whatever crappy 1-year or 2-year warranty is mandated. But software that is tightly coupled to that hardware and bundled with it has a 10-year warranty. Why? Because software does not rot. It does not decay. It is only killed. Either by external actors hacking it, or by the owners shutting down the server side of it, or by incompatible patches being deliberately installed into it that cause it to break. Which means the normal excuses of entropy and electromechanical wear do not apply here. It breaks because it was killed.

This is the compromise approach. Mobile devices are horrible for breaking old APIs. I'm not saying that they need to release the new, upgraded versions of new software for their old devices indefinitely. I'm just saying they must keep the old software running on their old device with its advertised featureset for an extremely long period. That means keeping the lights on at the server farm and keeping security running. This is only an extreme burden if you want to make new software and abandon the old software. Which, realistically, is how software works - we want to make a new enhanced mobile client that has new features, but those new features require a new API with the server, and that means breaking the old API sometimes, which means breaking the old client. That's where supporting old software is hard.

But to be clear, that's taking something that was working, and killing it.

When that is coupled to a physical device that would become e-waste, that should not be legal. At least not within the physical lifespan of the hardware. And most electronic devices will run happily for a decade if we only let them.