On Android, my experience has been that new major versions are often unstable / involve some risk of bricking / include feature regressions (dumbing down of multi-task in Android 13 if I remember well). Waiting for a few month before installing a major update, while not optimal for security, is necessary to make sure that the most critical bugs are fixed beforehand.
Regarding applications, today there's so many applications being always updated all the time that there's no way it's good for the flash memory to constantly rewrite it every day. Plus this often leads to random application restarts while they are updated automatically. (and non-OSS applications updates can result in unwanted changes such as more ads, random changes in UI...).
It's still possible to disable automated updates on Android and I am glad that they allow it.
Major version upgrades are a different type of upgrade altogether. They are optional while the previous major is still maintained.
Minor upgrades is what should always be automatic.
> Flash wear
No, it doesn't matter.
Total write endurance (i.e., the number of bytes written the device is designed to handle under some standard load) is usually a large multiple of the chip size itself - say, 200x-400x, so e.g. 100TB of writes for a 256GB setup. A particular workload is only really meaningful to flash wear if it is in the scale of several full storage rewrites during the lifetime of the device.
The exact write endurance depends on the exact configuration (specific chip selection, allocated reserve), but even microSD cards have wear levelling these days.
Your device is going to die or be retired with a certain flash write wear, but I find it extremely unlikely that your device will die of a flash write wear. The wear endurance is dependent on the specific flash setup.
A much larger cause of wear is app caches (e.g., streaming video continously overwriting a disk cache, browsing social media). If you take pictures, those might end up written multiple times as first the original is written, then the automatically processed version, then any edits you make, then if storage saving measures is enabled maybe its deleted and a compressed version is written, if you later open the app the original is downloaded and written again, ...
> They are optional while the previous major is still maintained.
I don't think there is such a choice on Pixel phones but I'd be happy to be proven wrong. When the next major update is available the phone just asks to update to it every few days (but won't do it without user consent). I don't think there's security updates on a given phone for old major versions when a new one is available (there likely are for older phones that don't get the major update however).
Thank you for your explanations on flash wear, makes sense. Taking a low value of 13TB endurance (64GB times 200), this is still 7GB per day for five years and I don't think app updates can consume that much.
On Android, my experience has been that new major versions are often unstable / involve some risk of bricking / include feature regressions (dumbing down of multi-task in Android 13 if I remember well). Waiting for a few month before installing a major update, while not optimal for security, is necessary to make sure that the most critical bugs are fixed beforehand.
Regarding applications, today there's so many applications being always updated all the time that there's no way it's good for the flash memory to constantly rewrite it every day. Plus this often leads to random application restarts while they are updated automatically. (and non-OSS applications updates can result in unwanted changes such as more ads, random changes in UI...).
It's still possible to disable automated updates on Android and I am glad that they allow it.