“Selfishly, a little bit, we built Shield for ourselves,” Bell told Ars Technica. “We actually wanted a really good TV streamer that was high-quality and high-performance, and not necessarily in the Apple ecosystem. We built some prototypes, and we got so excited about it. [CEO Jensen Huang] was like, ‘Why don’t we bring it out and sell it to people?’” //

“Early on when we were building Shield TV, we decided we were going to make it for a long time. Jensen and I had a discussion, and it was, ‘How long do we want to support this thing?’ And Jensen said, ‘For as long as we shall live.’”

In 2025, Nvidia wrapped up its tenth year of supporting the Shield platform. Even those original 2015 boxes are still being maintained with bug fixes and the occasional new feature. They’ve gone all the way from Android 5.0 to Android 11 in that time. No Android device—not a single phone, tablet, watch, or streaming box—has gotten anywhere close to this level of support.