Show HN: DivestOS – Long-term support for end-of-life Android devices
The problem with long term support for my Android phones has actually <i>not</i> been the fact that Android devices have incredibly short security update windows.  That issue has been somewhat mitigated with the newer Google Pixel phones which have five years of security updates.<p>The biggest issue for long term cell phone support is, even if we get an OS with a 10-year security update timeline like Rocky Linux, will the phone itself be able to make calls on whatever cellular networks exist 10 years from now?  I have a number of 3G phones I bought as recently as 2018 which became paperweights in 2021 when all of the cellular telcos in the United States stopped supporting 3G, forcing me to update to a 5G phone.  Is 5G going to still work in 10 years?  Or are the telcos going to continue to convert perfectly good phones in to landfill?<p>As someone who has a 15-year-old laptop which is still a perfectly good Linux server (its screen went out two years ago, but it was a perfectly good desktop computer until then), it’s annoying seeing phones I bought less than six years ago be useless on today’s cellular networks.