Qualcomm and Google team up to offer 8 years of Android updates
Starting with the Snapdragon 8 Elite, Qualcomm enables up to eight years of update support.
I still can't understand how I can install modern Windows or Linux on a 20 year old PC but the same can't be done with 4 year old phone... 8 year is cool but it's nothing compared to 20 years.
Because phones are a mess of out of tree patches specific to that phone model with zero hope of being upstreamed into the Linux kernel without a cleaner rewrite because it's not good, it's made to work and nothing more. They do stuff like just copy pasting the drivers into the project for the next chip, make some changes, and now you have several versions of the same driver for a whole bunch of slighly different chips. The community can't keep up with that or make it generic enough.
It's improved but companies like Qualcomm also used to basically drop the code to the manufacturers when the chip launches and then move on with little maintenance for the code and stop maintaining the code once the chip is not produced anymore. Manufacturers don't have the expertise to maintain that forever nor the will, so you end up with a kernel that keeps aging and isn't keeping up with Android and the community hasn't been successful in integrating it all either.
Google's been pushing hard for this to improve but they're the only ones to even care. Samsung and others would much rather sell you a new phone.
There's also the problem that phones don't really have a BIOS, the kernel is expected to just know where the devices are via the device tree. So each phone needs a specially built kernel for it too.
Projects like LineageOS often manage to push those phones a couple versions longer but eventually interest dies as well because of kernel pains.
Not just Google, but the community has been hard at work with porting mainline Linux to phones. postmarketOS is the main OS that devices are initially ported to.
Qualcomm is actually involved with this as well, specifically with Linaro, who does a lot of kernel mainlining for Qualcomm SoCs.
Honestly I'm impressed with all the work the community has put into projects like LineageOS but when I recently checked the supported devices list I feel like we're at the lowest point we've ever been and now to buy a phone for 10 years means to buy a Pixel.
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Not often I say this but: Good job Google.
It is understandable that the answer is "because they can". But another jarring thing is how common locked bootloaders are. You can make pretty much any random laptop privacy-respecting by installing Linux, but there is a good chance your random given phone cannot have things like Lineage?! Or they can but it is so complicated that might as well not count, like Xiaomi...
Phones have a hard life compared to a computer, I suspect the number of phones that last four years would be very small, never mind 8.
Who's the sad sack that downvoted this? When was the last time you dropped your laptop in the sink?
The last time I dropped my laptop in the sink is the same as the last time I dropped my phone in the sink.
My last phone lasted 5 years till the display broke. Had to switch the battery once, but nothing else gave out. My current one gets 8 years of updates, and I plan on using it till then, as long as nothing unexpected happens.
This is great news. It's unfortunate that the 8 years of updates is limited to qualcomm flagship chip, anyway it's still a step in the right direction. My phone will be 8 years this year and it survived this long because of custom ROMs that don't support this device anymore, so i'm all in for this types of policies.
The good thing about android is you can flash some custom OS on them if they run out of updates easier than iOS
Yeah, but even them you'd need to be careful in choosing the model, because so many manufacturers make it either impossible or very hard to unlock the bootloader!!
O ... open sauce it & it will get maintained for much loner, ya greedy bastards.
Fuck Android. I want a vanilla phone that I can install Linux into....fully open source so we can be sure Walmart is not gathering ideas of what to sell me next.
This is an awesome list! We're not as screwed as I thought.
Have you looked at grapheneOS? Its essentially a fork of the android open source project with extra privacy features. So, regular android apps still work for the most part, but you dont have google spyware built in.
That may be the best option right now, but it's still a far cry from an upstreamed device
They aren't able to support devices longer than Qualcomm and Google maintain the random out-of-tree drivers for a chipset, and even state such in their "legacy support" for harm reduction
