One of the new battles in over-the-top phone services involves years of updates. This has been Android’s main weakness for years. Most manufacturers did not offer updates for more than two or three years, making the lifecycle of their products particularly short.

This is something that manufacturers like Samsung started to reverse with five years of updates, which Google and its seven years later left behind. Samsung promises seven years of updates on the Galaxy S24 generation, leaving manufacturers with simpler and “cleaner” ROMs behind.

In an interview with Tom’s Guide, the OnePlus president made it pretty clear why its phones haven’t been updated in seven years: “Imagine your phone was a sandwich.”

Updating seven years sounds nice, but maybe not that nice

Considered OnePlus for years The main criterion of performance in Android. Their phones are particularly smooth thanks to their clean system and cutting-edge hardware, but they’ve always lagged behind Google in support.

New OnePlus comes with four years of updatesBoth in terms of operating system and security patches. It’s reasonable to ask why the company hasn’t committed to seven years of updates; A question Tom’s Guide asked OnePlus president Kinder Liu. The answer was very interesting.

Liu argues that “not only software update policies are important, but also the smoothness of the phone user experience.” The metaphor he uses to finish the statement is very intriguing.

“Imagine your phone is a sandwich. Some manufacturers are now saying that the filling in your sandwich, the software on your phone, will still be edible after seven years. But what they don’t tell you is that the bread in your sandwich, the software on your phone sandwich, user experience, may become moldy after four years. All of a sudden, A seven-year software update policy won’t matter because the rest of your phone experience sucks.”

The point to be emphasized here is the great doubt that plagues phones when all these years of updates are offered: Will the hardware be able to support so many system versions? In the case of high-end technology with the latest generation processors and high base RAM, it makes sense to be optimistic. However, Android is not a system that stands out especially in terms of being lightweight or managing resources in the best way. Despite this, the competition to deliver the maximum number of updates still continues.

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