A bit less than two years ago, shortly after arriving in Singapore and with the perspective of a life of intense work-related traveling, I purchased a phone from a local telco company.
I picked a device in the premium segment expecting that this way I would be covered in terms of frequent security updates at least for the duration of my contract.
Phone life was pretty much uneventful with me accepting updates as soon as offered and quickly forgetting the matter afterward.

Until a few weeks ago when, one sunny morning, I got an email stating my smartphone was no longer authorized to access corporate resources because it was on a security patch older than 3 months.
The first though was I had somehow missed the patch, but I checked and the phone said I was on the latest. Which indeed was more than 3 months old as per the email message.
As I added fruitless calls to fruitless calls and chats and forum reading I grew more and more unhappy and the only silver lining was that being unable to travel freely made the problem an annoyance rather than a disruptive event.

Since then I had the opportunity to think about two things:
1) how software maintenance plays a key role in sustainability and saving natural resources
2) how different markets are treated differently by the same vendor.

If Covid-19 hadn’t grounded pretty much everyone in Singapore how would I have coped with the crippled communication functionalities of the smartphone?
Because using the smartphone as an hotspot for the computer is often inconvenient and sometimes is not viable at all.
I’m pretty sure I would have ended up purchasing a new device in a rush while the old one was perfectly working except for the lack of the security patch and of an estimated release date for it to help me plan my next course of action.
The end result of that would have been an unhappy customer, wasted resources and no guarantee that the problem wouldn’t resurface again in a couple of years on the new device.

While trying to find how to solve my problem I discovered that my phone model in other countries, for example Italy, hadn’t moved from monthly to quarterly security patch releases.
The temptation to download a foreign firmware was strong, but the risk of bricking the phone or, even worse, ending up with a hacked firmware containing a backdoor was too high.

Now I wonder: maybe the market in Singapore is too small to keep investing on frequent patches even for premium phones?
I’d rather not have to pick and choose between the risk of not getting security patches and the risk of not having a local warranty.

After a couple of weeks a patch was released in Singapore and corporate access was back as before, but a regular traveler could really afford the risk of being back to the same situation in 3 months time?
What the vendor is teaching me, and every one of their customers, is that cheaper, more frequent purchases are a better money allocation strategy to remain covered by the security patches.
And if this is a bad strategy for our planet… is not really their problem, just bad luck for the environment and the future generations.