Old Operating Phone/OS support - Best practices - Standard Operating Procedure

[MarkusBuchman]

Was wondering what other companies policies are concerning older devices?  We have a number of devices that have older versions of the OS, for example devices that only support IOS 7, 8 etc same with Android.  I am concerned about security issues with the old devices.  Was wondering what the standard that other places use?  Do you stop support after a device becomes to old due to security risks?  Curious what other's SOP on this policy is.
Another issue I have come across is APPS that are not supported on old devices, which creates another problem.

[Bobwardt]

We decommission old devices that cannot be updated to the correct level of IOS versions, I.E. 6 has been removed, the lowest phone we allow to be ordered now is the 7, but recommend the xr as it has a better lifecycle. the phones are treated with the same view as PC's and are patch managed.

[JohnBatshon]

For iPhone we only allow devices that take current on at this time iPhone 6S is the lowest model we allow. In our company I have ended the purchasing of new androids. At this point we are just waiting for them to die off and leave our environment. Typically We try to only support the most current 2 OS's as a best practice. Android especially becomes a pain because when you document steps for one OS the steps & look are different to the next OS which made it real easy to get Androids removed from our environment.

[chengtmskcc]

John, I feel your pain! We are going through Android Migration and I was hoping Google stops supporting OS 5 and below, but they still do.

For iOS, we support whatever Apple supports with a few exceptions.

[MarkusBuchman]

Thanks for the advice.  We still have some 1st gen IPads on our system (IOS 9.3 and below)!?!  Also have some Androids that are still on Android 5.1 and 6.0.  Unfortunately getting rid of Androids are not an option for us.  Thanks again for everyone's input.

[chengtmskcc]

Same here Markus. I once had to use Apple Configurator to enroll 2 iPads with 9.3 due to budget reasons. I pretty much leave them alone.

Why would you want to get rid of Android?

[FHLB]

We do an N+1 for OS's. so you can only be 1 major OS behind otherwise your email gets blocked. We do stretch that some when new os's come out like IOS 13. It'll be probably a couple  more months before we tell users we only support 12 and up. Which then we will change the compliance policy, announce the change, upgrade devices if need be, for personal devices.....it does come down to ' security'  if your model can't update. ' Sorry, if you want email you need a new phone.'  Somehow this hasn't blown up in our face yet! 🙂

[JeoffreyBurri]

Not that big of a problem here. Our devices seem to ' break down'  before they get too old. I allow iOS 10. Only 1% of our device pool is still on iOS 10. I'm thinking about jumping up to iOS 12 next spring, since all iOS 11 devices can at least update to the latest iOS 12 version.

We don't have that many Android devices and they are at least on Android 7. I'm pretty successful at ignoring the thought about how I'm going to manage them in the future... Luckily most of the devices are quite heavily locked down. That mitigates some of the security concerns.

[Dan_McGee]

We only allow the last two major versions of iOS and the last 3 major versions of Android. We update these annually around the first of the year to allow users to upgrade the latest iOS version for the 3 months that it is available. We have not run into any complaints about our support model because it covers basically 4-5 years worth of devices.