Numbers of new Android devices from various manufacturers flood the market every year. Older devices running the operating system cannot survive much longer in this highly dynamic mobile phone market. In a Bankmycell report, it was found that Android devices lose their value almost twice as fast as iOS devices.
Bankmycell is a mobile phone exchange website and during the entire 2019-2020 period, this website tracked the resale values of 300 phones. Android devices lose value twice as fast as iOS devices.
In its report, the website analyzed data acquired from a diverse group of vendors on hourly change in device resale values. Wow, that's some interesting information!
Not so iconic depreciation rate for Android
Now, this detailed report establishes that flagship Android devices depreciate in value much faster than iOS devices. According to the report, on average, an iPhone loses 23,45% of its value after the first year. In your second year, that loss becomes 45.46%. However, this is not the case for Android's flagship category ($700+).
The website tracked devices for 4 years and found that the average Android flagship loses 71.41% of its resale value in two years. This is a lot! The average Android device loses 45.18% in its first year and 47.85% in its second.
Thinking about the budget of Android devices?
Budget Android devices suffer a far worse fate than flagships. Most of them lose almost half of their value in the first year alone. Therefore, its half-life would be just over two and a half years.
If you're lucky, maybe three. According to Bankmycell, the Motorola One, which was released in October 2018, lost a whopping 87,68% of its original resale value in just 14 months. This essentially means that Android devices that were released in 2017 will be worthless at the end of this year.. However, the iOS scenario is very different.
One manufacturer, complete control
According to the report, the value of iPhones depreciate at a much slower rate than Android devices. The iPhones that came out in 2018, the iPhone XR and the iPhone XS series, lost much less of their original price in the following year, compared to the loss of the S10e and iPhone series. Samsung S10.
The Galaxy S10+ lost 45.26% of its original value in just 9 months, while the iPhone XS, which came before it, lost just 25.51% of its value in all of 2019. Galaxy devices lost much more of their value. and in fact, the S10 series lost even more in 2019 than the S9 series lost in 2018.
So what we can learn from this report is that the sheer number of Android devices coming out each year negatively affects the market value of older devices.
Android devices are made by numerous companies while iOS devices are made by a single company. Now using the iPhone X that came out in 2017, we're betting you'll get software support for this device for at least another two years.
However, Galaxy S9 users could not say for sure whether they will get Android 13 or not. They recently started getting Android 10While Android 11 it is already in beta version.