With older hardware the trick is to not upgrade the OS.

Apple's strategy is actually to make people auto-upgrade to make their work of maintaining older OS/software cheaper and make people who don't have recent enough hardware suffer.

It's funny that one argument for Apple was that you got updates for free. But in practice, Android doesn't need to upgrade the OS to access recent apps and ship security updates for old versions of Android. You just lose access to new OS functionalities, but it has been a while since there was much to care about.