Apple is making you use a new phone by dropping support for it in their OS updates.
The fact that this happens at all anywhere at any time at any place for any reason, and can't just install an update yourself should be unacceptable and legislated against
Apple supports the phones for 7 years, the current proposals floating around the EU are to mandate 4 years. They also don’t break anything, the apple services all continue to work forever, it’s 3rd party devs who drop support for older api versions. Nothing makes them do this.
I'm not talking about a mandate for operating system support, I'm talking about a mandate to allow the user to install operating systems if they want to.
It's not third party devs fault that the perfectly good hardware and an old iPhone is denied the ability to operate to a version of the operating system with the latest API support.
You don't see this on Windows. You see it on Android, and it shouldn't happen there either.
This wasn't a thing until mobile phones became a thing, and companies to seized the opportunity to be able to force all their hardware to be obsolete.
I seriously doubt this will make any difference to the average consumer. Every iPhone that has been dropped from api updates is so old that people have worked out how to completely bypass the security on them. You can install full Linux on most of these old iPhones. But absolutely no one has time to maintain an alternate OS for 7+ year old phones.
And even if they did, no commercial apps would be ported to it. I'm all for mandating ability to flash custom firmware and OSs, but I'm under no delusion that some free labor will spring up and an alternate mobile ecosystem will flourish based on users with 7+ year old iphones.
Android also has this issue but there are so many android phones that no one is really paying attention. Try using a 7+ year old Android and you'll notice many apps don't show up in the Play store. Sometimes it's because they only target the newer Android API versions, sometimes it's because your SoC doesn't have some instruction available, etc.
Windows is probably the worst offender of the lot. My brand new gaming desktop is currently flagged as not supported by Windows 11. Apple does 7 years support while Microsoft does as little as 0.
Lol. I’ve had Samsung and Pixel phones that never received updates to newer Android versions, not even to the next version that came out while the phone was still being sold.
The fact that this happens at all anywhere at any time at any place for any reason, and can't just install an update yourself should be unacceptable and legislated against