Agreed. Updating the phone being easier won't solve the problem. The problem is a mismatch in incentives.
Manufacturers don't have an incentive to update older devices because (1) they don't want to put any resources into last year's phone and (2) they want their customers to upgrade to their newly released phone.
You know, one part of the Apple ecosystem dynamic I find interesting is the used market. Some people I know upgrade yearly, and because the used market for a 1 year old iPhone is pretty strong, they can sell their old one to recoup some of the cost. It's still a spendy endeavor, but a used iphone 6 goes for like $180 bucks, which isn't bad for a phone released nearly 3 years ago.
I'll let others do the math on depriciation rates, as the point is that Apple supports their phones. Hell, iPhone 5's got an iOS update last month, and that phone was released in 2012. If you buy an iPhone, you know that a) it will be supported for a good long while, and b) as a result, its resale value will be high.
Apple's trick is to realize that high resale values help sales, not harm it. It likely helps that they get a good slice of profit on app sales, but it's not clear to me that cheaper handsets would lead to proportionally more app sales. And it helps that no manufacturer can swoop in and release a cheaper iOS device to challenge the market for used iPhones. So it might not be enough to persuade rando Android handset manufacturers to support devices, but this might explain why the Nexus lineup was replaced with Pixels.
"Apple's trick is to realize that high resale values help sales"
I think that's only an extra. Their real trick is that they realized that, as long as each new generation of phone is a lot better than the previous one, they don't need to design mid-end phones, but can instead sell last year's phones as this year's mid-end phones.
Apart from the "don't need to design" part, that means they don't need to market those mid-end phones as much, as millions of people already walk around advertising them. Also, customers who buy such a phone do not look like mid-end device buyers; they look like premium device buyers who bought a new phone last year.
Closed SOC BSPs that are tied to android are the real problem! If google had stuck with the standard Linux APIs or added appropriate new one when they needed them and where more strict about open software we wouldn't be in this mess.
Good idea. It fits now more than ever. I have said this before. Right now SoC's are passed the threshold performance wise. For e.g if you are not into playing high end games your phone cpu is enough for 5 year if you only doing web browsing watching movies and reading mails.
If consumers actually cared about this the manufactuers would. However aproximately no one actually checks support cycle as a feature of the phone.
I do, and unfortunately that leaves me (and my family because I have convinced them) with Nexus, Pixel or iOS devieces. I can't find another device with any sort of update promise at all.
Until a significat number of poeple start to care about, and demand a well defined update policy this will not change. We need to create the incentive for the manufacturers.
Find something that's supported by LineageOS (or similar). That won't give you warranty, but it will give you updates beyond what the original vendor offers (or Google (or Qualcomm)).
Removing the burden of updates for OEMs makes it practical for an OEM to differentiate on update support. If any of them does that, it creates competitive pressure on others; and if users care enough to purchase based on support commitments, some OEM will have a strong incentive to be the first to differentiate that way.
And (1) is in part because they deliberately put in extraordinary effort to customize and break Android, increasing the costs of merging from upstream.
And Google doesn't really have a real incentive to fix the situation either. It's not really a "we need to fix this by next year or people will stop buying Android phones!" type of situation. They still make money on ads on Android, whether they are secure or not.
At least if you could adblock mobile ads to stop malvertising, as some already do on the desktop, Google may have had a bigger incentive to fix it. But they removed that incentive a long time ago when they decided adblockers aren't allowed in the store.
Manufacturers don't have an incentive to update older devices because (1) they don't want to put any resources into last year's phone and (2) they want their customers to upgrade to their newly released phone.