The Long Life of an IoT System: What Changes in Year 3, Year 5, and Year 10 — Long After Everyone Has Stopped Paying Attention

A EurthTech Deep Technical Narrative

There is a strange silence that falls over IoT systems after the first year.

The excitement of deployment fades. The dashboards that once fascinated everyone become routine. The firmware that seemed groundbreaking becomes “the old build.” The cloud pipeline that once felt modern is now just another service. The devices that engineers watched like newborn infants now sit quietly in their installations — ceilings, rooftops, factory walls, pump rooms, warehouses, fields, poles, pipes.

Nobody thinks about them.

This is the quiet, invisible era of an IoT product's life —the era that makes or breaks it.

Because after the first year, your IoT system stops being a project…and becomes an organism with a long lifespan.

What you face in Year 3, Year 5, and Year 10 has nothing to do with what you faced during development.

Let’s walk into that decade.

Year 3 — When the Real World Starts Leaving Its Marks

By Year 3, the honeymoon ends.

Sensors begin to age.

Humidity elements saturate.

IMUs accumulate bias.

Analog front-ends drift by noticeable margins.

Temperature probes lose accuracy.

Plastic enclosures expand and contract with seasons, changing thermal profiles.

Solar-powered nodes accumulate dust, reducing charge.

Li-ion batteries degrade — not linearly, but behaviourally.

Firmware assumptions begin to collide with physics.

Maybe your RTC, running on a low-cost crystal, has drifted by minutes.

Maybe flash memory sectors (especially on ESP32/ESP32-S3) begin showing bit errors.

Maybe NB-IoT networks deprecate older attach profiles.

Maybe LoRaWAN gateways get upgraded to a new regional parameter release.

Maybe BLE phone OS updates change scanning intervals.

Year 3 is the moment your IoT product starts diverging from the world it was designed for.

Devices don’t fail. They age.

And ageing demands something engineering rarely talks about: long-term humility.

Your system must be willing to update itself — thresholds, calibrations, ML models, correction factors — based on what Year 3 reveals.

Systems that don’t evolve at Year 3collapse at Year 5.

Year 5 — When the World Changes Faster Than Your Devices

By Year 5, the environment evolves faster than the system was designed to.

Cellular providers start turning off older network features.

TLS minimum versions increase.

Cipher suites once recommended become deprecated.

Gateways built on Linux kernels need security patches.

MQTT brokers face new performance expectations.

Underlying cloud services migrate to new architectures.

Hardware components disappear from the market.

Your MCU variant goes End-of-Life (“EOL”).

Your sensor variant gets replaced by a “drop-in compatible” model that behaves slightly differently.

Your flash chip vendor changes manufacturing process.

A popular IoT module you relied on is suddenly no longer produced.

Meanwhile, the devices you deployed five years ago keep running.

Unaware.

Stable.

Faithful.

But they are now running in a world that has moved on without them.

This is the era where long-term architecture decisions begin to matter:

Did you choose MCUBoot or ESP-IDF OTA with robust rollback?

Did you abstract sensor drivers using Zephyr DeviceTree or STM32 HAL layers?

Did you avoid hardcoding radio parameters?

Did you rely on TLS 1.2 or design for TLS 1.3 migration?

Did you isolate cryptographic algorithms so they can be swapped with PQC (like Dilithium / Falcon via liboqs)?

Did you design for model updates at scale?

Did you keep firmware partitioning flexible?

Year 5 punishes rigid architectures.It rewards systems that remain fluid.

Year 10 — When the Device Outlives Its Assumptions

Very few IoT products survive until Year 10. Even fewer survive correctly.

This is the decade where the most unexpected truths appear:

Electrolytic capacitors dry out.

Quartz crystals drift far beyond initial parts-per-million.

Hardware calibration constants become meaningless.

Enclosures yellow or crack.

Mechanical mounts deform.

Batteries enter nonlinear degradation curves.

MCUs begin failing in unpredictable ways from flash wear.

Cloud systems evolve drastically:

AWS IoT changes its default authentication behaviours.

Azure modifies provisioning patterns.

MQTT versions shift.

Edge runtimes like Balena OS change container models.

Grafana dashboards evolve.

OpenTelemetry replaces legacy logging.

Security requirements force mandatory key rotations.

Zero-trust frameworks become default.

And somewhere, on a rooftop in Dubai,your device — built 10 years ago —is still sending packets.

But the system around it has completely changed.

Year 10 is when you learn the deepest truth of IoT engineering:

Your product isn’t running in time.

It is running through time.

And resilience is no longer enough. Survival requires evolution.

The Long Life of ML Models — A Hidden Aging Problem

People think ML models are software. But ML models age like organisms.

In Year 1, your classifier is pristine — trained on fresh data, quantized perfectly.

In Year 3, behaviours drift and you recalibrate thresholds.

In Year 5, the data distribution changes, and cloud inference begins disagreeing with edge inference.

In Year 7, new patterns emerge that were never part of your training set.

In Year 10, the model is archaeologically old.

This is why long-lived IoT products depend on:

Edge Impulse retraining workflows,

MLOps pipelines that store historical datasets,

Shadow inference comparisons between TFLite Micro models and ONNX cloud versions,

Telemetry-based model drift detection,

Seasonal retraining,

OTA-distributed weight updates.

Without ML lifecycle planning,your edge AI becomes outdated before your hardware does.

Security Through the Decade — The Hardest Part of Long-Term IoT

Cryptography never stays the same.

TLS versions are deprecated. Elliptic curves fall out of favour. RSA becomes too slow for constrained devices.Post-quantum algorithms (Dilithium, Falcon, Kyber) become mandatory for regulatory compliance.Device identity rotates.Certificates expire.Time sync sources change. Secure elements require firmware updates.

A device built today using ECC-P256 might be considered insecure in Year 7. A zero-trust system built today must evolve toward PQC systems by Year 10.

This requires architectures that:

Support crypto agilitySupport key rotation using secure elements (ATECC608, Optiga Trust)Support secure bootloader patchingSupport remote attestation updatesSupport cloud authentication shifts

Security at Year 10 is not patching. It is migration.

Why the Product That Survives 10 Years Becomes a Legacy

When you meet a device that has been running for 10 years,you feel something rare — admiration.

It has lived through weather, upgrades, outages, network changes, firmware changes, cloud migrations, radio environments, installer mistakes, user errors, and time itself.

Most IoT products die early because they were never designed to live long.

But the ones that survive —they become legacy systems.

They become reference architectures. They teach engineers humility. They force long-term thinking. They reveal which technologies stood the test of time. They expose which shortcuts never mattered — and which shortcuts destroyed fleets.

A 10-year-old IoT system is more than a product. It is a story —a decade-long dialogue between hardware, software, physics, and people.

If your IoT system reaches Year 10with dignity, consistency, security, and intelligence —you didn’t just build a device.

You built an era.

A Closing Thought: IoT Is Not a Sprint — It Is a 10-Year Conversation With Reality

The real measure of an IoT product is not day one. It is not the demo. It is not the pilot. It is not the first customer. It is not even the first thousand units.

The real measure is:

What does your device look like 10 years after you deployed it?

Is it still reporting?

Is it still useful?

Is it still trustworthy?

Is it still secure?

Is it still compatible with the world around it?

Is it still learning?

Is it still a citizen of the ecosystem you created?

An IoT system that survives a decadeproves that every design decision —from sensor selection to crypto design to telemetry strategy to OTA to ML lifecycle —was made with maturity.

And that maturity is the highest form of engineering.

The IoT systems that lastare the ones that embrace evolutionas the natural state of existence.