[pacaro]

I've always thought of this as being equivalent to "work hardening"

My concern with it is more about legitimately old code (android is 20ish years old, so reasonably falls into this category) which was written using standards and tools of the time (necessarily)

It requires a constant engineering effort to keep such code up to date. And the older code is, typically, less well understood.

In addition older code (particularly in systems programming) is often associated with older requirements, some of which may have become niche over time.

That long tail of old, less frequently exercised, code feels like it may well have a sting in its tail.

The halflife/work-hardening model depends on the code being stressed to find bugs

[kernal]

Android was released on September 23, 2008, so it just had its sweet 16.

[pacaro]

I believe that they started writing it in 2003. It's hard to precisely age code unless you cut it down and count the number of rings