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The update philosophies on Android and iOS are vastly different, as is mentioned in the article.
iOS bundles a vast amount of things in their updates, such as core app updates, platform capability updates and developer API updates.
Android uses the OS update to bring new platform capabilities, mostly, and not even entirely through the mechanism, with lots of things now starting to be delivered unbundled from OS version. Core apps are delivered entirely separately from the OS version. Developer API updates often are backwards compatible using the AppCompat library, meaning that older OS versions sometimes get to benefit from the updates as well.
These differences have led to some significant differences in OS version support - a common OS version support policy for iOS app developers is to support the two most recent OS versions, while android support often is afforded to versions as far back as 5.0.
This in turn leads to an interesting effect, where the useful life of an Android device can actually be longer than that of an iOS device, despite the latter having access to OS updates for a longer time. This being because of the fact that the iOS device essentially becomes unusable once it's no longer supported - you literally can't install apps from the app store anymore, because they have long since dropped support for your OS. Android in the meantime keeps on going, because of the different philosophy of backwards compatibility among Android developers.
All of that being said, I do wish that Android developers were a bit better on things like UI consistency and supporting the latest OS features. I don't know if I'd trade it for what iOS has, though.
This is so true.
I have a first-Gen iPad Air that runs fine, but is fast becoming useless, despite having received an OS update months ago.
While an old Galaxy S4 I have around runs many apps that still function fine (especially since I can find old compatible versions on apk mirror).
Pretty frustrating, because the iPad Air performance is plenty for the things I want to use it for.