Earlier quoted context omitted.
> maximally desirable 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…
> Major upgrades 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,…
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.