[I]t's too bad that the support lifecycle of the most consistently updated Android devices is so much shorter than what Apple achieves with iOS, especially since the hardware should still be more than capable of supporting Nougat.
My 2013 Nexus 7 is perfectly fine... except for now being left behind, software-wise.
I bought once / as soon as I learned that its successor had not been worth waiting for. So, I got significantly less than 3 years out of it. Would have bought the successor, except...
Guess I'll be rooting it. And buying Apple, next time.
Android 6 is very likely to be supported for quite some time by app developers, it's not like you're missing out on much by not running the latest version of the OS.
Exactly! I own this device and still use it often...I see no reason to stop using it. It received a security patch just recently, and I don't feel that missing out on further updates will impact watching YouTube videos
Yeah. First world problem, or whatever. But, like my 2013 Moto X, it's irritating to get less than 2 years out of a multiple hundred dollar product that otherwise is fine.
And I would have bought the successor to the Nexus 7, except there was none, really -- nothing comparable and problem free (in addition to the price bump and larger size, the 9 had issues, initially, IIRC).
And... after the Moto X, and observing how quickly my parents' Samsung tablet on Verizon was abandoned, I wasn't willing to get a tablet other than a Nexus, i.e. one receiving support and updates directly from Google.
My point, finally, is that even going Nexus is no longer a way to get reasonable support for a product, it seems. I've gotten pretty tired of Google and company's game of musical chairs, with respect to hardware.
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P.S. I post these comments, occasionally, here on HN also because I know Googlers still swing by and read them.
The only means of feedback I've ever found to Google.
Enough people push enough negativity through Google's version of the reality distortion field, and at least an initiative gets launched. Thing is, Google, you need to stick with it -- one of them -- sooner or later.
> First world problem, or whatever. But, like my 2013 Moto X, it's irritating to get less than 2 years out of a multiple hundred dollar product that otherwise is fine.
I have a Nexus S, a Nexus 4, and a Nexus 5. The 5 is dead; I don't think it's recoverable. The 4 is dying; it runs fine but the battery is expanding. The S, to this day, has no hardware problems. But despite the availability of up-to-date cyanogenmod builds for it, it can't run modern android at acceptable speeds.
If specs are stabilizing (?), I'd really like to see a return to the replaceable-battery/robust hardware school of phones. :/
Shame on Google. iPhone 5 was released a year before it (September 2012) and is going to receive iOS 10 in a few weeks. This is just laziness on Google's side.
But it's not quite a bit longer, but much longer. The last major update for the Nexus 5 was Marshmallow. Mashmallow was released in October 2015, the Nexus 5 was released in October 2013. So, one got major updates for 24 months iff you bought it on release day and you were lucky to be in a region where it was available in in October 2013.
The iPhone 5s was released in approximately the same timeframe (September 2013). It gets iOS 10 and will probably receive iOS 11 as well (since the 5 gets 10 and they now seem to drop one generation per release). So, that will give major updates at least until 2017, or four years.
I am not sure why we find this acceptable anyway. When we buy a $300-400 Windows x86 laptop, we also expect it to be upgradable for a decade or so (which is usually possible).
The Nexus 5 was released in October 2013 and was on the most up to date version of Android through August 2016. It will continue to get security updates. Plus it will continue to get updates to Google Services (a chunk of what we think of as Android) and the core apps including the default browser. Unlike Apple, Google doesn't really do the 'you get the next version but a bunch of new features are disabled' thing. The fact that Google Services, core apps, Chrome, and other things will continue to get updates does feel vaguely reminiscent of it, though.
> I am not sure why we find this acceptable anyway. When we buy a $300-400 Windows x86 laptop, we also expect it to be upgradable for a decade or so (which is usually possible).
We didn't used to. Not so long ago, keeping the same computer for 10 years would have been a ludicrous idea.
Heck, I got a Dell laptop for considerably more than $400 in 2003, less than 13 years ago. Its screen died 3 years later. I still have it around, but it's not much good without a display.
Not really surprising given the device's age, but still disappointing given the presumably rather large number of Nexus 5 still in use.
The bigger story may be the inability to come up with a compelling reason for N5 users to upgrade, other than getting the latest OS revision. The N5's compactness in particular makes the 5X (and the impending successor, codenamed "Sailfish") a tough sell.
Not entirely fair comparison since the 4S didn't get every feature; it was a paired down version. AFAIK, Google doesn't cherrypick features for older hardware - it's all our nothing. Also, the 4S ran terribly on ios9, to the point that two of my friends with 4S's just gave in and bought new iphones instead.
I ran it myself as a secondary device for phone app testing and didn't have that problem. Maybe as a daily driver I would have had more trouble?
In my experience, the bigger issue was designers assuming everyone has the taller iPhone 5 screen size (or worse, iPhone 6) and burning up 95% of the screen with keyboard + giant fixed header + fixed footer. Some apps would give you space for maybe two lines of content in between all that.
More of a complaint with 3rd party devs on that though.
Comments like this are ridiculous. It wasn't a pared down operating system by any definition. Features just weren't available if you didn't have the requisite hardware.
Not everything was hardware related, or at least not obviously hardware related. My friends both really wanted public transit directions in maps and airdrop but neither feature shipped on the 4S. I also seem to remember that predictive Siri (Google Now-ish competitor, don't remember what they called that) didn't make it to the 4S.
So I do commend apple for getting updates to that device for 4 years, but at least in their experience, it made the phone worse and didn't bring all the features that they wanted.
> My friends both really wanted public transit directions in maps and airdrop but neither feature shipped on the 4S. I also seem to remember that predictive Siri (Google Now-ish competitor, don't remember what they called that) didn't make it to the 4S.
As I recall all those features were built only for 64bit CPUs which the 4s/mini didn't have.
You're getting more than two years of updates. There's another year of security updates, plus at least two years (probably more given historical trends) of system-level app updates ( Google Play Services, Chrome, WebView, Play Store, ...) that only come via OS updates on iOS. Not to mention Google providing compatibility libraries so that third-party apps are significantly less likely to leave you behind.
>Really not buying the "two years is plenty of updates" excuse, especially from the Nexus line.
I'm not impressed with two years of updates either, but I don't think people have any right to complain when that's exactly what they were promised when they bought their phones.
If people are disappointed because they chose to believe, against all evidence, that Google would exceed the promised two years of updates, that's nobody's problem but their own.
The Nexus 5 was about 1/2 the price of the equivalent iPhone, so the iPhone should be support quite a lot longer. A Nexus 5 purchased in 2013 ($349 for 16GB) plus a Nexus 5x purchased today ($299 for 16GB at BestBuy right now) is the same total cost as the purchase price of an iPhone 5s ($649 for 16GB when the Nexus 5 launched).
It'll be a bummer not using latest android for the first time in many years (HTC G2 -> Nexus 4 -> Nexus 5), but I really can't imagine anything compelling me to pay hundreds of dollars for a new phone for a couple more years. The Nexus 5 has been practically the perfect phone for me.
I'd agree - however after nearly 3 years the speakers on my N5 are nigh on unusable (phonecalls are only really possible with a headset or loudspeaker), the power cable refuses to stay put and tries to make a break for it every 5 minutes, and there's still an annoying bug where the screen is flaky/unresponsive when it is finally plugged in. Not sad about missing out on Nougat at the moment, but the sheer number of N5s I see in the wild it's annoying that a popular phone is being left behind.
Same problem, except that my loudspeaker is also busted. Headphones only right now.
The damage is possibly my fault as I opened the phone to change the battery (which died in two years), but the lack of an user accessible battery and it's poor battery life are a problem.
Do you have the fun issues where the power button sticks, resulting in an endless boot loop? I've resorted to percussive maintenance, which oddly fixes the problem for months at a time.
I had that issue. When I tried whacking the phone to unstick the power button, it instead entered a state where it can't mount its internal storage and just stays in the (same) booting animation indefinitely because it can't boot. I don't view this as an improvement.
The biggest feature I'm looking for that the newer Nexuses don't have over my N5/N7 is Qi wireless charging. My Nexus 7's USB port has been broken for over a year now, and I've been using a wireless charger all this time. It just seems like a good idea to reduce the wear and tear on the USB ports if I want to continue using the phone for years.
This is the same reason why I haven't bothered to upgrade yet also.
Wireless charging is the killer feature for wireless devices in my opinion. I can't wait for the day when every one of my devices and wireless peripherals supports wireless charging, so I can just lay them down on a large charging pad when I'm not using them and never have to worry about not having a full battery when I pick it up for use, or have to fumble with plugging wire into every single device.
Plus there are charging tables in some Starbucks; it's so handy to just lay your device on the table and top it off. Why did they take that feature away? :(
There's a way to add wireless charging to your 5X if you're handy with a soldering iron, though.
That is a really cool and simple hack. Take a wireless charging coil + support circuitry and simply tap that into the USB +5V and ground? It all sounds too easy!
> Not really surprising given the device's age, but still disappointing given the presumably rather large number of Nexus 5 still in use.
My Nexus 5 was in use up until a couple of weeks ago. Then it entered a state where, when plugged in, it rebooted in an eternal loop and, when not plugged in, it shut off. Judging by the internet, this is a common problem for them.
I followed the advice I found in multiple places of trying to dislodge the Nexus 5's stuck power button by whacking it against a soft object. That worked -- it will now try to boot, fail to mount the hard drive, and just keep displaying the booting animation forever. It can boot into the bootloader and recovery mode, and I can flash a new recovery image in fastboot, or at least I can issue the command and see a report of success, but on reboot I just get the old recovery mode.
So... I guess I do have a compelling reason to upgrade, although the N5 was satisfactory in every other way. My Nexus 4 still works fine, but it's gotten much puffier than it should be, and apparently it's impossible to get a new battery for it.
I think it is 2 years for major updates (from release), 3 years for security updates (from release), or 18 months for security updates from end of life.
Unless you are unlucky enough to get a device that they can't update due to drivers (Texas Instruments CPU).
Let's get closer to comparing apples to apples. Every one of my laptops has lost manufacturer support 1-3 years after I got them...but even my 13 year old laptop will run a current Linux build.
Every one of my phones has lost manufacturer support 1-3 years after I got them...but my 5 year old Galaxy Nexus still has Cyanogenmod builds being released for it (based on Marshmallow).
With the timelines of when these different markets began, I think that's a fair comparison. Manufacturers want to maintain as few models as possible, but the community often does the work to provide extended support time.
Not in the past couple years though, there is really nothing significantly different in the hardware of a Samsung Galaxy s3 and a Nexus 6.
Also, one of those laptops was manufactured in the late 90s.
