To my mind the planned obsolescence comes from Google. Each release of Android seems to depend on a new level of hardware, and drops support for older stuff. All software suppliers only support their recent releases, for practical reasons, so if your hardware is not supported by the latest software update, it becomes obsolete.
This issue is far worse for mobile phones than, say, PCs, which are built on a much more stable hardware platform. I run PCs for years, I use Ubuntu Linux, and new releases always continue to support old hardware, even while adding support for new. So I can have the latest supported software (and long-term-support versions are only updated every 2 years!) and still keep using a laptop that’s now 6 years old and doing fine.
The phone industry is still hooked on getting customers to throw away perfectly good hardware after a couple of years, and with Google supporting that model makes it very hard for a company like Fairphone to swim against the tide.
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