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Reflect for a moment; what was the 'new' price of the Nexus 4 vs the 'new' price of the iPhone at the time?

A Nexus 4 was a 2012 phone with 2GB ram, and 8GB storage (entry model) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexus_4

An iPhone 5 is the comparable year device. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_5 It had entry specs of only 1GB of RAM, but 16GB of storage. The apps would also be native binaries instead of 'java' apps, meaning less storage was needed.

IMO what killed support on the older Nexus phones was /mostly/ the insufficient entry level storage.



IMO what killed support on the older Nexus phones was /mostly/ the insufficient entry level storage.

This is provably false. The Nexus 6 plenty of storage space (32GB or 64GB) and does not get Oreo. Google's Nexus policy is to provide security updates for 3 years (or 18 months after the device stops selling, whichever is longer):

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/01/google_eol_for_nexu...

Also, the average Android app size is smaller:

https://sweetpricing.com/blog/2017/02/average-app-file-size/


I thought the reason is Qualcomm not giving what it takes to support a newer firmware on their soc. I have a Nexus 5 on lineage and I'm on Linux kernel 3.4.0.


Yes but Lineage OS can indefinitely support a fair chunk of Android 7.x on an old kernel without official help from Qualcomm.

Google chooses not to with AOSP past a timeframe.


The iPhone 5C with 8GB storage is still supported by Apple. Although not for much longer as it won't support iOS 11, and the OS takes up almost half the space on the phone.


not to diminish the rest of your argument, but my understanding is that java apps should be smaller than native apps (not significantly, since a huge part of apps' storage requirement is for assets, not code)


My experience around this time was that Android apps where much much smaller than similar iOS apps. Somewhere on the order of a 10x difference for apps without a lot of assets.


I'm sure 1GB for iOS is comparable to 2GB of RAM for Android.




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