

Genuine question because I’ve been out of the loop on this. I had a Galaxy S5 that only got one major upgrade from Samsung (4.4 to 5.x I believe) but CyanogenMod and later LineageOS took that thing right up to Android 11.
Why can’t the same be done with modern phones today? What changed between that old S5 and the Pixel 4a I ultimately sold for going EOL on GrapheneOS?
Edit: apparently I shouldn’t compare apples to oranges without so much as quickly checking support for the Pixel 4a…
Seems that everyone else has said the same as what I mostly already do, but I’ll just make a couple comments on the student communication topic:
My university already created a Microsoft 365 account for my university user, which included Teams. For my threat profile, I don’t consider Teams a terrible option if I’m only using it for study purposes, so I’ve communicated over that for assignments before (web UI only).
Otherwise like others have suggested, some students are open to something like Signal (a fellow student got me onto it years ago) if you kindly ask and mention upfront that it just requires a phone number. I did an assignment over Signal with two other students, so it’s very doable.