Not only that, but the number of spare smartphones is steadily increasing. Barring impact damage, the hardware generally lasts longer than the period of time a consumer is satisfied before wanting something newer.
But older devices are also increasingly left out in the cold with software updates. Anything that can't run the latest OS release will miss out on a portion of apps. Anything that's more than one OS release old will miss out on most of the apps. Three OS releases? You'll be able to run what came with the OS and a bare handful of carefully backward compatible (or all but abandoned) apps, maybe.
So... there's an increasing amount of old devices that could really use something else to run on them.
Not only that, but the number of spare smartphones is steadily increasing. Barring impact damage, the hardware generally lasts longer than the period of time a consumer is satisfied before wanting something newer.
But older devices are also increasingly left out in the cold with software updates. Anything that can't run the latest OS release will miss out on a portion of apps. Anything that's more than one OS release old will miss out on most of the apps. Three OS releases? You'll be able to run what came with the OS and a bare handful of carefully backward compatible (or all but abandoned) apps, maybe.
So... there's an increasing amount of old devices that could really use something else to run on them.