still deciding to fully degoogle with GOS or muddling through with what I have (proprietary, data grabbing and bloated).
To understand the question, compare with my main hardware with debian on it: a regular notebook I bought in 2016 and I’ve used heavily for all kinds of stuff: working, writing papers, downloading and playing media including AV1, editing audio, torrenting…
One of the best investments I ever made, considering what I paid and how prices nowadays are. Debian offers regular upgrades and I don’t have to check if my hardware is going to support the software on a level comparable with android devices (GOS only runs on pixels, other open-source, privacy focused Android operating systems have similar hardware restrictions).
I want this kind of ROI for the device I buy and the software I use, but I don’t know if that’s possible:
GOS drops support for older pixels but I don’t know how many years any particular device is supported by GOS: 3 years? not enough. There’s no way I’m buying a new pixel every 3 years. I’d even consider 6 years restrictive.
This has not been my experience, at least on a 4G device. My internet/data still work fine on a 5 year old device.
Its very carrier dependant for how much gets invested in infrastructure, but in the US carriers seem to be updating frequency bands almost every generation model of phone.
Go look at a few models of the same phone for instance pixel 6 vs 7 vs 8 vs 9. Carriers are phasing out antiquated cellular bands. They try to keep the most widely used bands like n71 or other most common 4 or 5 bands but then tweak or change another 10 bands inside the phone sometimes 20 bands in all.
But I assure you this is the case. Cellular bands change as towers get serviced and replaced.
*source phone repair tech for the past few years.