I have an Android phone. The phone is 5 years old, functions perfectly for me, and is now E-Waste.

I can tell by the pictures on the phone that I bought it just after conf.kde.in in 2020 because it’s full of pictures of my visit to Colombia (where I met Maui Toolkit developer Camilo). It’s a Motorola G7 Power. It came with Android 9. It was updated to Android 10. It’s been a fine phone for 5 years, the battery life is still measured in days, it makes calls and does Matrix and Mastodon and whatnot. I personally have no reason to replace it at all.

I do have a banking app on it, which is now telling me that I need Android 11 to keep using the banking app. I presume the bank has a good reason for requiring the newer version. There’s no question of “just don’t use the app” since, well, Dutch banks are nearly inaccessible except via their phone app.

Motorola has a lousy record of providing Android updates for its phones, if I recall, and so the phone is now E-Waste.

Exactly the same thing happened with my mom’s phone. Slightly newer, no updates, E-Waste. The only upside I can think of here is that postmarketOS has two more devices for testing available (there are instructions for the G7 Power which are just as inscrutible as how-to-configure-XOrg instructions used to be in the ’90s. Assuming non-zero energy and some pent-up annoyance in the future, I can improve on that situation.