Welcome to Brown’s Bytes! Your weekly insight from Mobliciti’s CTO Andy Brown. Follow #brownsbytes
4th March 2022
With the situation in the world being as dark as it is at present, it’s been a struggle to create content that doesn’t mention it and it almost seems crass to try to write about anything else at present.
But the fact remains that I doubt you tuned in to hear my views on the current geopolitical situation, and so I guess we continue with our focus on the world of Mobile and Cloud.
So, let’s start by looking at the news that Apple has started to restrict services within Russia. Apple isn’t alone as a number of tech companies start to impose restrictions either on whole-services or on features within services.
In addition to restricting sales of their goods, this is an interesting development in terms of the way they are also restricting features for goods already sold, and it did raise the question to me about just how much of the cost of your phone is effectively for renting services on the device vs the cost of the hardware itself.
And it’s relevant if we think back to my previous bytes about making phones greener, which pretty much inevitably must mean using them for a lot longer.
Not too long ago BlackBerry made the news briefly due to the demise of their services that supported the old BlackBerry OS and BB10 devices. In this instance, the media scrambled to find a disgruntled user whose device was about to die. And it wasn’t a massive surprise that they struggled to find too many! To be fair, even the latest BlackBerry 10 device (the BlackBerry Leap) was launched way back in 2015. So any person still using a device impacted by the shutdown of services was actually being very green!
As a result, the news ended up being more of a nostalgia moment, more than anything else…. mainly for the keyboard devices that preceded the Leap. But the point is this… even if you were perfectly happy with your old BlackBerry (and putting security updates to one side for a minute), it’s now effectively a brick even if the hardware is working fine.
This digital obsolescence is like a fuse in any piece of tech. It’s so common in the IT world that we simply accept that a piece of hardware has a finite lifespan of support, and it will then be junk, but in the consumer world this is less acceptable…. people have been more used to using something for as long as they choose. E.g., Sonos made the news back in 2020 for precisely this reason, when they ended support for their older devices.
I’ve banged on for ages about the need to patch your devices to stay secure, but even if you decide to run un-patched, the risk is also that services will stop functioning over time due to a lack of feature updates. The news that Apple, Google & Microsoft are also limiting features is a new arena where the ability to blow this ‘fuse’ can be used at any time…
For the record, I’m completely behind the reasons why they’re doing it in this instance, but it does raise the question again about the long term lifespan of devices. What guarantees of service do you actually get when you purchase a device? Have you ever even looked??
As stated before, the world has got to get better at dealing with e-waste, and ‘greener’ phones will have to be a part of this story, but it’s not as simple as just making hardware that lasts longer or that is more serviceable. The software & services are just as important…
The logical conclusion to this may be that people actually have to start paying for the services & updates on the device rather than them being priced into the initial purchase price. A Netflix subscription for updates and features if you will, may seem far fetched, but someone has to be paid in the end to keep things up to date.
In this world, you’ll either pay in cash, or maybe with your data (arguably you already do anyway on a Smartphone), but I think it has to come to enable longer life hardware….
One to watch – even if just as a distraction at present.
In the meantime, as always, please do get in touch if you’d like help with sorting out your ESG issues with mobile.
