There should be a minimum supported period of 6 years for all software on smart TVs, the consequences of which are full refund of the initial purchase price of the TV. That'd kill this shit overnight.
I'm inclined to agree, I'm on my second flagship TV in 7 years, the first, A Samsung OLED 3D Smart TV had most of its apps killed within 2-3 years, I'm now on an LG, WebOS so not many apps to start with, but I see this going the same way soon.
I'd love to be able to just not have all of the "smart" features that they kill well within the lifespan of the TV and instead offload them to an external box.
At least the Samsung didn't have huge Netflix, Amazon etc buttons on the remote, like the LG, which will end up doing nothing some day.
The problem is if you want a 4K tv from Sony, Samsung, LG, or Vizio you'd be hard pressed to find any that are not some variation of a "smart" tv. You could go back to 1080 and find some dumb TVs still but then you're losing out on the HDR support.
First of all, it's not obvious to most lay people. Second, I wouldn't have a problem if that was the reason stuff stopped working, but if Smart TV makers / sellers explicitly advertise certain apps, those apps damn well better have a decent life. I bought mine and days later my favorite Roku app (Spotify) decided to shut down that app for something like a year. Nothing to do with hardware advancements, they just made an intentional decision to de-prioritize a device I had already been sold and it didn't keep up.
There should be a minimum supported period of 6 years for all software on smart TVs, the consequences of which are full refund of the initial purchase price of the TV. That'd kill this shit overnight.