I used my OnePlus One (2014) until 2020. Ultimately what made me move away from it was that software support wasn’t there anymore, and having to manually find images, and flash them myself was just too much hassle. I just want something that works.
Here in Sweden, having a phone is almost a necessity. Lots of daily-life infrastructure goes through it. We have a service called BankID which is essentially a digital identification method (where your bank steps in and strengthens your identity) allowing you to do various things on the web.
- Medical services
- Making appointments
- Viewing journals
- Renewing prescriptions
- Transferring money
- Purchasing items
- Managing my account
- at my ISP
- Electricity provider
- Landlord
- Paying bills
- Managing my insurances
Everything here uses bank ID. Up until recently if I wanted to pick up a parcel at the nearby post office, I’d give the clerk a code, and show them my ID. That changed so I can verify my ID using BankID in the app, and they can scan a QR code. Now I just show the QR code to a machine and a robot fetches my parcel for me.
A while ago I called my ISP to cancel a service, and I had to validate my ID using bank ID.
And that’s just one of the online services. My municipal public transport doesn’t let you pay for tickets on the buses anymore. It started with them removing cash (to prevent robberies) to them now just not letting you pay at all. You either buy a card at a store (which you can then add money to either online, using bank ID, or at a store) and pay with that, or you use their app to buy a ticket.
Because of the safety requirements for BankID to work, if your OS drops out of support, and the phone manufacturer doesn’t update it, you’ll need to get a new phone. I work as a software developer and do not want to screw around with tech stuff in my free time, so going with an iPhone was really the way to go for me. It “just works” and Apple provides updates basically forever. The iPhone 6S (2015) received its last major OS update recently, and will likely continue to receive security updates for a while yet. I’ll be surprised if any Android OEM has provided a 12.0 update to any of their phones from 2015.
