Fairphone suggests Qualcomm is the biggest barrier to long-term Android support
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Re: Fairphone suggests Qualcomm is the biggest barrier to long-term Android support
#2Why would a company which holds an effective monopoly over Android chips in the US do anything in order to discourage the sale of new chips? Providing support for older chips would hurt sales.
Qualcomm is abusing its monopoly position and the laws/patents that allow this need to be changed. Qualcomm is a great example of how IP laws can hurt progress and competition.
In the future China and other countries will leapfrog the US in areas where competition is banned, because the only possible competitors will be in other countries.
Re: Fairphone suggests Qualcomm is the biggest barrier to long-term Android support
#3[deleted]
Re: Fairphone suggests Qualcomm is the biggest barrier to long-term Android support
#4Chipset support from the manufacturer is not, strictly speaking, essential. What we need is support in the mainline Linux kernel. Many of the custom hardware blocks that a kernel has to support via its drivers are shared across chipsets generations anyway, so they end up being supported a lot longer than any single HW platform.
Re: Fairphone suggests Qualcomm is the biggest barrier to long-term Android support
#5Qualcomm is only able to obstruct in this way because Linux doesn’t keep the kernel driver ABI stable for any fixed period of time.
If Android used FreeBSD and Qualcomm shipped drivers for the latest build when the SoC was released, you’d have up to five years of support from that kernel release.
Windows Phone 10 was actually in a position to support phones for years and even got Qualcomm onboard. It’s a shame the platform was never competitive, and they’d burned all their goodwill on the 7 and 8 fiascos.
Re: Fairphone suggests Qualcomm is the biggest barrier to long-term Android support
#6Qualcomm is only able to obstruct in this way because Linux doesn’t keep the kernel driver ABI stable for any fixed period of time. If Android used FreeBSD and Qualcomm shipped drivers for the latest build when the SoC was released, you’d have up to five years of support from that kernel release. Windows Phone 10 was actually in a position to support phones for years and even got Qualcomm onboard. It’s a shame the pl…
Two things:
1. There are longterm kernel releases, with up to 10 years support, and Android uses those exactly to avoid major support issues (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)#Lin...).
2. That doesn't fix the issue that Qualcomm themselves do not want to release documentation and only want to support their hardware for up to two years. Ergo, you would run some outdated binary blob.
Re: Fairphone suggests Qualcomm is the biggest barrier to long-term Android support
#7Why would a company which holds an effective monopoly over Android chips in the US do anything in order to discourage the sale of new chips? Providing support for older chips would hurt sales. Qualcomm is abusing its monopoly position and the laws/patents that allow this need to be changed. Qualcomm is a great example of how IP laws can hurt progress and competition. In the future China and other countries will leapf…
(Controversial?) opinion: patents encourage innovation because they force competitors to find new solutions instead of only copying existing solutions.
That doesn’t mean that it could not go terribly wrong as for example when patents blocked progress in 3D printing for decades.
Re: Fairphone suggests Qualcomm is the biggest barrier to long-term Android support
#8Qualcomm is only able to obstruct in this way because Linux doesn’t keep the kernel driver ABI stable for any fixed period of time. If Android used FreeBSD and Qualcomm shipped drivers for the latest build when the SoC was released, you’d have up to five years of support from that kernel release. Windows Phone 10 was actually in a position to support phones for years and even got Qualcomm onboard. It’s a shame the pl…
FWIW I do not want to use a 5 year old kernel and I do want to use a 5 year old phone (LG V20).
Re: Fairphone suggests Qualcomm is the biggest barrier to long-term Android support
#9Qualcomm is only able to obstruct in this way because Linux doesn’t keep the kernel driver ABI stable for any fixed period of time. If Android used FreeBSD and Qualcomm shipped drivers for the latest build when the SoC was released, you’d have up to five years of support from that kernel release. Windows Phone 10 was actually in a position to support phones for years and even got Qualcomm onboard. It’s a shame the pl…
Because the solution would be to actually upstream the necessary drivers or publish enough documentation that they could be created instead of doing hacks.
Re: Fairphone suggests Qualcomm is the biggest barrier to long-term Android support
#10Qualcomm is only able to obstruct in this way because Linux doesn’t keep the kernel driver ABI stable for any fixed period of time. If Android used FreeBSD and Qualcomm shipped drivers for the latest build when the SoC was released, you’d have up to five years of support from that kernel release. Windows Phone 10 was actually in a position to support phones for years and even got Qualcomm onboard. It’s a shame the pl…
1. There are userspace blob too.
2. Android did change drivers architecture across version in the past. We are talking something as old as Android 6