I've swapped from Android to an iPhone. And I think articles like this are dumb, and missing the damned point. I don't need to justify my choice, as it's that: a choice. You're not joining a religion. So why preach?
Anyway, the difference lies here; those EOL'd phones? Yeah, well you have a much better chance of getting a community written ROM bringing you up to date, then you do have the same thing happen to your iPhone 3GS. I want to run TOR on my iPhone, but I don't trust what's in the App Store, and I've no way of putting FOSS on my phone. I give up that choice for a nice well supported handset.
But that doesn't mean anyone who makes a different choice is wrong. Sigh.
You have no idea what you are talking. The community isn't a magic unicorn that crap out software for older devices.
First of all, the radio and camera and anything that touches a hardware is proprietary and very hard to reverse engineer. So 99% of all ROMs start with the proprietary blobs being extracted from the official ROMs. So if the last kernel released for your device (e.g. let's say you gave $600 to google for a nexus one, the first phone they falsely advertised continuous upgrades) and now you want android4 there. too bad. it is pretty easy to compile android 4 and flash there. but you will probably not even have the screen working.
Lol, mate, I used to port Windows mobile updates to phones that we're never meant to have it, back when people knew what "XDA" was for.
I do know what I'm talking about: you have that choice with android. Not every device. But that's splitting hairs. You DONT have that possibility with iOS. That was an okay trade off for me.
More to the point, now that Android has decoupled core apps from the OS itself, older phones can have nice new updated core apps, even when their manufacturer had abandoned them (which I never said was a good thing).
And yes, drivers need to be ported or written. That sucks. But at least there's the option. I don't have that option with my 4S, so when Apple moves on from it, I'm stuck.
You have no idea what you're talking about either. A first generation Samsung Galaxy S (released in 2010)[1] can run Android 4.3 through a stable release of CyanogenMod 10.2 and work is under way for Android 4.4 support[2].
Anyway, the difference lies here; those EOL'd phones? Yeah, well you have a much better chance of getting a community written ROM bringing you up to date, then you do have the same thing happen to your iPhone 3GS. I want to run TOR on my iPhone, but I don't trust what's in the App Store, and I've no way of putting FOSS on my phone. I give up that choice for a nice well supported handset.
But that doesn't mean anyone who makes a different choice is wrong. Sigh.