I'm conflicted on this topic. on one hand carriers are acting like total trash about android security. on the other hand people aren't forced into a lease and can get a vanilla android one device from a lot of different vendors and enjoy faster upgrades from the vendor and extended upgrades from projects like lineageos.
I think the root cause is the general populace voting with their wallet in a way that doesn't align with the best practices as seen from a more security conscious mindset.
however this issue intersects weirdly with budgeting and upgrading frequency. bar consideration on used market depreciation, one iphone purchase can get you 3 midrange android phones, so for the same budget you'd be more or less on the same os "freshness" for a comparable period of time, so to say, with increasingly better hardware and fresher batteries (because if you take 5 years as a iOS device lifetime you'll be hit by battery and subsequent performance degradation, likely twice), and of course if one has the budget to change device every year the issue disappears regardless of the platform.
as long as one can avoid carriers devices, I guess.
I think of phones as a 3 year replacement cycle. Though I am in year 4 with my 6s now. I get the manufacturer's original warranty plus the additional 2 years of repair or replace from my American Express card. One upside of keeping longer is that I am personally contributing less to the e-Waste problem than if I went through an Android phone per year.
So ballpark math, a $900 iPhone XR would be covered by either Apple or American Express for 36 months and cost me $25/month to maintain. I effectively run a leasing program for myself inside my small business budget.
