T-Mobile Galaxy S8 App disappears from Play Store. What is the most likely reason?

[Dark Penguin]

I have two S8s, and I just switched my active service from one to the other; that might seem pointless but I had good reasons to do it. Going forward, for brevity I'll call the phone currently in active service "the new phone" and the other one "the old phone."

On the old phone, I had a couple of apps which I found very useful, especially Alpha Tools, usually styled "aTools" with the initial "a" in the shape of a Greek letter alpha. But Alpha Tools has disappeared from the Play Store. Initially I thought this must be because Alpha Tools had been dropped from Play Store for some reason. As a result I can't install it on the new phone. But now it occurs to me that perhaps it's disappeared because my version of Android, 9.0, is no longer supported for new installations, presumably because the developer isn't required to maintain backward compatibility with Pie. Since the app won't appear in any search results, it's not like I can contact the developer to ask them. I like this phone for various reasons and want to keep it as long as I can.

For a bonus question, will we ever see any more Android version updates? Or is that something which would exceed its physical capacities of storage and processing power? Years ago, I went through that when I "upgraded" my S5 from Lollipop to Marshmallow, and only through rooting (which it already was) and repartitioning the storage was I able to restore it to the full functionality of a smartphone. I don't want to have do all that again, though I would be willing to go through it if it meant extending the useful life of the phone.

I realize that the answers may be different according to the carrier. I'm listing mine above as T-Mobile but my service provider is one of its resellers, Boost Mobile. At the time when I started using them, they were reselling Sprint, but now Sprint and T-Mobile are the same.

 

[B. Diddy]

When I do a general search on the Play Store website (not the app), this is the only Alpha Tools I can find: https://forums.androidcentral.com/e...ils?id=com.alpha99.flutter_app&token=hhvh8NAn. I assume this isn't what you're looking for? If it isn't, that means the app was withdrawn or kicked out from the Play Store for whatever reason. You can try to reach out to the developer if you know their contact info.

To update phones beyond their end of life, you can always look into custom ROMs -- the forums at XDA-developers.com is the best resource for that. One of the limiting factors for official updates has historically been the duration of support that the SoC manufacturer provides for its chipsets. Qualcomm typically only supports their SoCs for 3 years, which is why the limit for updates has been a max of 3 years in the past. This has changed with Pixels, now that Google is making its own silicon, and can therefore better control its support. I'm not sure how long Samsung supports its Exynos SoCs, and how long it could potentially support them (I figure that in the past, they just followed the industry standard of about 3 years).

 

[fuzzylumpkin]

When I do a general search on the Play Store website (not the app), this is the only Alpha Tools I can find: https://forums.androidcentral.com/e...ils?id=com.alpha99.flutter_app&token=_t2jy4DM. I assume this isn't what you're looking for? If it isn't, that means the app was withdrawn or kicked out from the Play Store for whatever reason. You can try to reach out to the developer if you know their contact info.

To update phones beyond their end of life, you can always look into custom ROMs -- the forums at XDA-developers.com is the best resource for that. One of the limiting factors for official updates has historically been the duration of support that the SoC manufacturer provides for its chipsets. Qualcomm typically only supports their SoCs for 3 years, which is why the limit for updates has been a max of 3 years in the past. This has changed with Pixels, now that Google is making its own silicon, and can therefore better control its support. I'm not sure how long Samsung supports its Exynos SoCs, and how long it could potentially support them (I figure that in the past, they just followed the industry standard of about 3 years).

Samsung supports all it's recent flagships for a year longer than Google does.

That isn't me being obtuse, I've genuinely forgotten the exact numbers lol... I think it's 3 OS and 4 security for pixel and 4 OS and 5 Security for Galaxy.

 

[B. Diddy]

Samsung supports all it's recent flagships for a year longer than Google does.

That isn't me being obtuse, I've genuinely forgotten the exact numbers lol... I think it's 3 OS and 4 security for pixel and 4 OS and 5 Security for Galaxy.

Pixels will get at least 3 years of OS upgrades and 5 years of security updates: https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/4457705?hl=en#zippy=,pixel-later

Samsung's new policy is awesome, and I really commend them for it. It's so important for such a major OEM to follow suit and even exceed Google's policy, because that pressures all other OEMs to do the same. However, there is one tiny but potentially important difference in how these policies are worded. Notice that in Samsung's policy, they say "up to" 4 years of OS upgrades and 5 years of security updates (https://security.samsungmobile.com/workScope.smsb and https://news.samsung.com/global/sam...-up-to-date-and-more-secure-galaxy-experience), while Google says "at least". Samsung is likely just trying to account for all of their midrange and budget phones that won't get that many updates, but it still could potentially allow them to skimp on updates to one or more of their flagships in the future.

 

[Dark Penguin]

I was an old hand at flashing custom ROMs back in the day, but it's been so long I'll have to relearn the steps while keeping in mind that the person most likely to make a catastrophic mistake is the one who thinks they know what they're doing because they did it seven years ago.

I flashed a version of Pixel on one of my early Android devices and I really liked it.

To update phones beyond their end of life, you can always look into custom ROMs -- the forums at XDA-developers.com is the best resource for that. One of the limiting factors for official updates has historically been the duration of support that the SoC manufacturer provides for its chipsets. Qualcomm typically only supports their SoCs for 3 years, which is why the limit for updates has been a max of 3 years in the past. This has changed with Pixels, now that Google is making its own silicon, and can therefore better control its support. I'm not sure how long Samsung supports its Exynos SoCs, and how long it could potentially support them (I figure that in the past, they just followed the industry standard of about 3 years).