The difference is that you need way more interaction. Expose a webserver on the internet and check how many requests you get from just bots.
You can control what you navigate and how to interact with the outside world, but you can’t control how the outside world will interact with your services.
WannaCry targeted hospitals, businesses and similar machines.
WannaCry targeted everything with SMB exposed, blindly.
Also, you should read more about security through obscurity, the fact that “no one will target you because you are a low-value target” is a false sense of security.
I believe the risk of running outdated software is super inflated and mediatic, 99% of people would be absolutely fine running a version of Android from 3 years ago or Windows 8.
That’s the same thing people running windows XP on internet were thinking in 2017.
Then WannaCry arrived and they got their data encrypted :)
Perhaps images, video, font etc. rendering could be compromised?
Yes, it already happen in the past. Also the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth stack got exploited, like multiple kernel drivers.
But it shouldn’t be a matter of “in the past was X exploited?” but more on having a correct security posture.
Honestly if you are arguing about wasting a “perfectly working phone” you should blame it on the vendor, especially Android devices vendors have this let’s say “defect” of dropping the support after 4/5 years.
Also not going to talk about custom ROMs (with the super rare exclusion of some) managed by god knows who, without any security team behind.
Since even the NFC and Cellular Network stack got vulnerabilities the only way you would consider an old phone “safe” to use is just turning it into the equivalent of a local ARM server.
Also pretty fun seeing the replies in the original post talking about how Google Play store shouldn’t have malware on it.