

I so strongly disagree with that. The Snapdragon 7 gen 4 in the Fairphone6 is roughly on par with the Snapdragon 888 from 2020 (S21 series). You couldn’t pay me to daily drive an S21 Ultra, let alone pay 67% of an S25 (a mid cycle phone) for a phone with a 4 year old performance profile. 600$ can be a used S24 Ultra.
Android app devs just don’t optimize their apps enough that I’d be comfortable rocking this phone 3 years from now, which if I did, I’d be using a 7 year old processor at that point. No one in their right mind should have a phone that old.
This data to me didn’t show much in the way of by-field statistics. If we’re comparing software development pay at the naîssance of the field to today, it should be complicated to do so. I’d expect to look at top 5% at the very least because of how new and niche computing and coding in general was in the 90s.
You have to expect that OP, who is well established in his field, to compare accordingly, not with average pay of 1990.