Washing machine, television, fridge, sure, 5 years minimum should be mandatory I think.
For smartphones I would stay at the current 2 years requirement though. A phone stays most of the time on a person, which is one of the most harsh conditions if you think about it.
If you ask me there should be a 5 year minimum on security software patches for smartphones. As it is now, it's as if a huge portion of the mobile world is still running "windows 98".
I would say there should be a lifetime security warranty on all software. If you have a machine running Windows 98 Microsoft should still be providing security fixes. Note that this is just security, all other bugs are on you, as are device drivers.
I'm fine with saying that Windows 3.1 wasn't designed to be connected to the internet (it wasn't) so they are doing nothing. I recently got a recall notice from GM for a 13 year old car - they found a safety problem and it needs to be fixed even though the rest of the warranty ran out about 10 years ago.
That's not fair to the manufacturer. No company on Earth can fix security holes in every version of their software that's ever been released. It would take a small nation's GDP to do that. Even Linux doesn't fix security holes in old versions of the kernel.
What this would cause is for there to be one "product" such as "Windows" that Microsoft keeps up to date forever. They release patches and you apply them. The version never changes and everyone's machine is running the same product, but some of them are out of date and could be updated easily via Windows Update.
> That's not fair to the manufacturer. No company on Earth can fix security holes in every version of their software that's ever been released. It would take a small nation's GDP to do that. Even Linux doesn't fix security holes in old versions of the kernel.
That’s their problem then.
EDIT: It’s not acceptable for consumers, especially in an age of "smart things" where their toilet, car, or in the next few years, even their house/apartment might fail, stop working, be infected by ransomware, etc due to missing security updates. At least if you sell software for Smart Things, you should have to put the source code in an escrow, and it would be published as soon as you stop supporting it.
For smartphones I would stay at the current 2 years requirement though. A phone stays most of the time on a person, which is one of the most harsh conditions if you think about it.