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"The entire mobile phone industry [...] puts buyers on an upgrade treadmill that requires roughly biennial purchases"

I still use a 12 year old IP65 feature phone with real buttons. The battery is a little tired now, but the phone still works fine. The modern equivalent is half a grand, so I'll be seeking out a replacement battery .

It looks like Huawei are having any form of update pulled because of Trump and his idiotic US centric policies.

The industry is a mess.

I would suggest that the industry is doing fine, it's Politics and greedy businessmen that are a mess..

Having finally gotten on top of the monthly security updates, this isn't really a hard decision for Samsung. It boosts the image which provides justfication for the premium prices: notice which models are covered. Also, since Google did the work on Project Treble, it's not that hard to do.

And their screens do not pop and go purple.

It used to be received wisdom that new car sales were largely to companies that would keep the cars for only a few years before selling them. Therefore it didn't matter if cars rusted because it didn't affect sales of new cars - and of course scrapping cars kept the market going. Until a few manufacturers, I think they were Japanese, started giving long no-rust guarantees. Quite quickly it became impossible to sell a car that rusted.

Of course the difference is that rust is obvious and susceptibility to malware isn't. So it's up to Samsung to buck the trend by making adverts that are actually tell you about the product rather than hitching the brand to an exciting lifestyle.

And while you're at it, Sammy, how about an easily replaceable battery?

I'll share the usual moan: why do I need a 2018-vintage kit to "pack a punch", when my 8year old, positively ancient phone still makes and receives calls (stronger signal, by the way), plays music and radio, all without junk/spyware hard-baked into it?

I'll go one beyond this, I'm still using a 5-year-old LG G4 as my main phone. I honestly don't really see what "features" I'm missing from newer phones. Yes, it runs quite an old version of Android and I'm careful what I use it for as a result (certainly no online banking or anything), but which OS features from newer versions of Android are "must-haves"? Mine deals with calls/texts, has a great camera, Play store still works and pretty much all apps on there still support the phone (so Firefox, WhatsApp etc. are up-to-date). On top of that, phone performance is still silky smooth and a new battery last year means I still get good battery life as well.

Laptops now last for years, I really don't get this fad with replacing perfectly serviceable and functional hardware every couple of years just because it is a phone.

Now, if they could just allow the phone to be updated over mobile data instead of mandating wifi then i could actually install their updates.....

I wonder if Samsung knows of some impending changes which would have mandated they do this in the future?

Maybe Google changing their Android licensing T&Cs or even some government proposing to pass legislation.

Of course it could just be Samsung doing a marketing campaign to encourage people to continue buy their phones as opposed to some of the cheaper priced Chinese competition from Oppo and Xiaomi.

Great. Now all the phone manufacturers need to do is end the planned-obsolescence cycle by reintroducing things like user-replaceable batteries and the like.

I won't be holding my breath, mind you.

But not enough to make me change for a new phone.

My A3 suits me fine for what I do with it.

With my failing S7 dropping out of support for patches I decided to replace it.

Even looked at an iPhone for the longevity of the support but just couldn't bring myself to pay the Apple tax...

....so went with a Xiaomi Note 9S.

Still has the issue with upgrade cycles but at least I'm not paying through the nose for the 'privilege'.

My 2016 vintage Oneplus 3T shipped with Android Marshmallow, and has had OEM upgrades to Nougat, Oreo and Pie while I've had it, and all reasonably soon after Google launched them.

The updates stopped with Pie, but that's 4 major OS versions it's had support for.

As it stands, I'm just going to keep using it until it dies, because I've yet to find anything that a new model would do significantly better.

I even sent it back to Oneplus last year for a screen replacement and new battery, and only paid about £80 for the privilege.

One of Apple's key appeals is that you can still get the latest OS on a four year old phone. Samsung needs to compete on that feature. Longevity is important when you're dropping £1,000+ on a new phone.

Apple is updating phones as old as the 5S which came out in fall 2013. Samsung has a ways to go to match them.

iOS 14 will run on iPhone 6S which will be 5 years old when the OS is released, although it can often be optimistic to try and use it on the lowest supported device.

On iPad they are going back to the iPad Air 2 from 2014 for iPadOS 14l

This years macOS drops support for most 2013 machines.

Until the OS has some underlying feature upgrade it's probably relatively easy to keep a device with a reasonable amount of RAM supported.

Next on the list of features every phone manufacturer should implement: Easily replaceable batteries, a 35mm headphone jack, microSD card support, and the ability to remove unwanted pre-installed junk. And if you really want to make me happy, give me the ability to permanently remove Bixby, Ok Google, Siri, Cortana, Alexa, or anything like it.

Forced by market forces, else why would they not keep their factories chruning and charging premium money? The 2 year upgrade cycle has worked wonders so far, with the faithful doing their bit in emptying their pockets. The chinese competition is hurting, and about time too !

They are just making a virtue out of necessity !

I'm still waiting for a reasonably specced phone that you can use comfortably with one hand.