LineageOS will be a continuation of what CyanogenMod was

One thing I wish there was more visibility of is "is this device still getting security updates", because there's often almost no visibility about that (and while you obviously can't say the vendor won't fix future vulnerabilities, you can say whether the vendor has fixed all known vulnerabilities), even online, yet alone anything pushed to the device to let its user know it is no longer secure.

e.g., http://web.archive.org/web/20161224231459/https://wiki.cyano... is the old CyanogenMod wiki page for the Galaxy S2: the last "development channel" (i.e., unstable) build is 2016-12-18, the last "release channel" (i.e., stable) build is 2015-11-16. There is nothing on the device page to suggest the stable build is known to be insecure (though given the number of Android bugs found in the last year unquestionably is!), yet alone anything about upstream vendors dropping support for the device and the unstable build being known to be insecure too. How is LineageOS going to do better than that? That's a damn low bar.

Definitely agreed - I've thought about making such a list to give visibility of this before, but it would be more of a user-submitted list (perhaps with link-up to screen scraping of OEM web pages for the ones that list the latest version).

What held me back was the sheer complexity of working out whether a device still gets updates - take Samsung as an example; the user says "I have a Galaxy S6". Depending on their geographical location this might be a carrier-free G920I or G920F. If they are in the US, it could then be one of about 5 or 6 variants, and there's even a G920W8 for Canada.

User wants to know if "Galaxy S6" is safe and secure, but even different regional firmwares of the same SKU might not be getting pushed security updates. And some US carriers (Verizon, ATT) are notorious for not pushing out updates to users. And then finally when you figure out the version on a given phone, you need to try to decide if the fact the device is still on October 2016 security patch means it's unsupported or not.

Often Samsung are lagging 2 to 3 months behind on some SKUs, making it even harder to tell. The same is true for many other OEMs - Sony have a pretty complex system of ROMs for each region, meaning you have carrier and non-carrier ones, and they can be on different versions.

To make this happen, we'd ideally need a single worldwide firmware without carrier changes/tweaks/influence. Until then, I suspect it would be too complex to help users work out if their device was being supported.

Heck, until stagefright, Google didn't even release security bulletins. It was nigh-on impossible to keep track of all the vulnerabilities They only released security patches in new version releases. That wasn't good for vendors.

Now Google has pushed forward, and it's the turn of OEMs. They shipped patches to StageFright due to the massive bad PR (headline news in many countries, was a talking point amongst even the vaguely tech savvy).

Unless regulated or they feel they will lose money by not doing so, I don't imagine anything changing soon unfortunately. Qcom and other SoC makers are part of the problem too, since they try to drive chipset sales by only supporting older chipsets for a short time.