Hardware problem
Recently, manufacturers of Android smartphones have begun to offer longer and longer software support for their devices. OnePlus said it has no plans to do the same.
More precisely, the company is not ready to support its smartphones by releasing Android updates for seven years, as Google and Samsung have already promised to do. But OnePlus has explained its position. The bottom line is that the company thinks it doesn't make sense.
Simply offering longer software support makes no sense at all. Not only software update policies are important to the user, but also the ease of use of the phone.
Imagine that your phone — this is a sandwich. Some manufacturers now claim that the filling of their sandwich — their phone software — will still be delicious seven years from now. But they don't tell you that the bread in the sandwich is — user experience — may become moldy after four years. Suddenly the seven year software update policy doesn't matter because the rest of your phone experience is terrible.
Kinder Liu — COO and President of OnePlus
Simply put, OnePlus believes that in seven years the hardware characteristics of the smartphone will be too outdated to fully support all the new software features. And although no one provides seven years of support yet, the example of Apple, which has long provided five years of iOS updates, shows that there are often no special problems with this.
Also, the head of OnePlus notes that seven years — This is too much for the battery of any smartphone. That is, in order to use the device for seven years, you will definitely need to replace the battery at least once, or even twice, and this does not always make sense from a cost point of view.
Recall that for its current flagship, OnePlus offers four years of Android updates, which is still more than many others.