We have reached a point in which huge steps in hardware improvements is not a thing, hence my question. Or maybe they can but companies want us to pay money to get the latest OS and new features?
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The answers are _kinda right_, but not really.
Turns out, most hardware don’t change that much; it’s not like _every Samsumg phone_ will have a different camera driver, a different “system on a chip” driver, etc; in fact, if you look at LineageOS website (an Android distribution that allows to upgrade some old phones) you’ll see some info about the hardware of the supported devices; an example, I got some random Samsung phones, and F62 and Node 10+ have almost the same hardware, but the Galaxy 10+ only have official upgrades to Android 12, and the F62, to 13.
Drivers are not an issue – it’s hard to think that Samsung, that produces their own hardware, will not make the drivers _very close_ to the point that porting is really easy; it’s naïve to think that they don’t reuse 80% or more of the drivers between devices (first, because it lowers costs, but more specifically because of bugs – if you fix a bug in a single driver, you fixed for multiple devices with different hardware).
The issue is – if you have a perfectly capable device that works, and you can upgrade to the newest Android… why should you buy a new device? Speaking from the point of someone that installed multiple unofficial Android systems on at least four cellphones, they work fine, don’t drain battery faster, and most of the time the performance hit is minimal – so why change? So what they do is, they don’t offer updates, overcharge repairs, etc… that is their way of “phasing out” older models.
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