Sony bravia 2015 tv's don't get updates anymore and Google has nothing to do with it. Sony won't update them.

Same here, Sony Bravia Android TV's .. Sony just stopped supporting them . Bought them in 2016 (so the hardware was mostly made in 2015) and now they are slow as hell.

85 inch , it is a good screen but it comes with Sony and partners spyware operating system junk with totally closed user unfriendly environment.

Best is to buy a good Android-tv box every three years. Use any TV you buy just for the screen.

I hope one day some company starts just selling tv_ screens. Without OS And without the extremely costly advertising stands and demos in every store. And a TV without clumsy menu's and connected speakers and bling bling facade.

Just the latest ultraflat screen technology sold at a bottom price.

That way you can choose your OS . A screen would also become a better investment because it would hold it's value a bit better so you could , like with houses, sell the old one to a starter and buy a larger better one. Screens could rapidly grow in size each year and still be sold more likely..

Sorry , I got carried away, I don't understand why TV's are developing so slowly compared to other technology.

This is my gripe with buying a smarttv and it being so damn hard to find one that isn't smart. Instead of replacing a small black box when you need to, you're stuck buying a whole TV.

purposely slow down

This won't happen.

It' s very easy to speed up a slow Sony Android TV and there are lots of tips and tricks on the web about how to do it. These are the settings I've personally changed which help the most.

Go to settings\about\build and press ok 10 times. This will enable the developer function.

Go to settings, scroll down to and click on Developer options.

In the developer menu, scroll down to Window animation scale and turn it off. Do the same for Transition animation scale and Animator scale. This will noticeably speed up Android.

Next scroll all the way down to Apps, Background process limit and change it to 4 to begin with and try that. Background processes obviously slow down Android but you'll probably want to keep a few running depending on which apps you have installed. (Note however that you will have to re-select this everytime after you've powered off the TV because it doesn't remember your choice)

So my concern is that will Google purposely slow down our Android TVs (supposedly) to make us force update the TVs because we can't handle the lag?

I would say the opposite for the OS - but if Apps are badly coded and slow to a crawl that is the App developers own fault.

The Google Android Oreo OS 8.x has a bunch of optimisations under the hood vs the older Nougat OS 7.x.

There is a push by Google from Oreo onwards to further optimise the OS so it runs better on low resource devices.

Not sure about Sony and the extra stuff they load up their Android TV's with but the AMLogic company have gone all in on Android TV and are further optimising it for the next wave of their cheap low RAM, 4K HDR capable Chipset devices:

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/amlogic-achieves-android-9-pie-ready-with-its-set-top-box-platform-300712755.html

If a TV running Android TV gets too slow simply buy an external media player and use the TV as a display, such mediaplayers will be dirt cheap and really powerful "10 years from now!" the way ARM based tech is going.