Heya!
In the past me and many other Samsung costumers have been quite critical about Samsung's update policy. It is now a few years later so have decided to see how well Samsung has improved it and my answer is, it actually surprised me how much the policy has been improved. 
To understand the update policy its important to know a bit of background how updates are being handled in android and Galaxy Devices. In general there are three type of updates that are important when it comes to software maintenance:
- Security Patches of the Operating System
- Updates (Feature and Security) of system apps via the Galaxy Market and the app store.
- Operating System Feature Updates
I would not worry too much about point #2 because Samsung and its partners really nailed that one.
Actions do of course speak louder than words (Link to dutch Samsung site), so I decided to look up the status of the updates for the older top-of-the-line devices that Samsung offers, because lets be honest - Expensive devices do of course require great software support 
Here are a few examples of some older devices:
- The device is now 3 generations old
- The device is fully up to date with Security Updates
- The device is fully up to date with Android Feature updates.
- The device is now 4 generations old.
- The device is fully up to that with monthly security updates.
- In terms of Android feature updates, the device is one version behind, but feature updates can also have an impact on performance.
- Device is now 5 generations old
- Device is still being updated with security updates (Latest update: March).
- Device is no longer updated with feature updates. But based on my experience this is a good thing considering there would be a significant risk that the phone would become too slow if it would get more android upgrades, I do speak out of experience here considering the S7 is one of my old phones
... This is of course without the improvements of the Samsung Apps that are constantly improving in the background 
This has been a huge improvement compared to how Samsung handled its updates in the past and its clear to me that Samsung had made a lot of progress, of course there is always room for improvements but I believe that the positive development is definitely worth mentioning
n.b. This post was originally made on the Dutch community but was translated because I felt that it was worth sharing One link was not updated considering I couldn't find a simular english article so I used the dutch source - My apologies if you have to use Google translate in order to understand it ^-^
Thanks for this comprehensive article
