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Fairphone suggests Qualcomm is the biggest barrier to long-term Android support

arstechnica.com

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Re: Fairphone suggests Qualcomm is the biggest barrier to long-term Android support

#11

Post by esclerofilo »

_Microft wrote: post #7
bgorman wrote: post #2

Why 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.

Unfortunately, many patents are intentionally written to make them as broad as possible, minimizing the possibility of designing alternatives.

Re: Fairphone suggests Qualcomm is the biggest barrier to long-term Android support

#12

Post by rowanG077 »

kogir wrote: post #5

Qualcomm 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…

This is not true. They could simply upstream the drivers.

Re: Fairphone suggests Qualcomm is the biggest barrier to long-term Android support

#13

Post by sto_hristo »

bgorman wrote: post #2

Why 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…

But Qualcomm doesn't have a monopoly on the market. There's Apple too. Sure, Android mostly uses Qualcomm in higher end models, but that is not the reason why Qualcomm can do anything they want.

The reason things are the way they are is simple - users doesn't care. Users will happily throw cash the for next groundbreaking, awesome possum camera innovation that is just so totally worth the $1000 upgrade, because fabulous selfies are what people care about.

Re: Fairphone suggests Qualcomm is the biggest barrier to long-term Android support

#14

Post by NullPrefix »

CameronNemo wrote: post #8
kogir wrote: post #5

Qualcomm 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).

Just be happy that the kernel you get on your brand new phone is only 5 years old.

Re: Fairphone suggests Qualcomm is the biggest barrier to long-term Android support

#15

Post by dathinab »

It's not just Qualcomm it's closed source driver blobs in general.

Even if your CPU might still be supported your other hardware might not. A common offender is camera drivers as far as I know and while you sometimes can still make the camera work it often comes with noticeable decreased quality (as the special patent encumbered closed source image post processing sausage is missing).

Besides that potential but as far as I know less likely offenders include the modem.

Ironically both might be integrated into the SoC which then massively increases the chance for problems.

Re: Fairphone suggests Qualcomm is the biggest barrier to long-term Android support

#16

Post by rorykoehler »

_Microft wrote: post #7
bgorman wrote: post #2

Why 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.

Most innovation comes from building on existing solutions. You’re advocating reinventing the wheel

Re: Fairphone suggests Qualcomm is the biggest barrier to long-term Android support

#17

Post by rektide »

worth noting that there has been really good progress reverse-engineering support for 2017's Snapdragon 845[1] (SD845). quad A76 + quad A55 on Samsung 10nm. pretty modern, all in all.

generally i still feel tortured by the situation, by highest of high tech devices being unsupportable, unmaintainable after a couple years, and it seems like upstream support is the only available path to keep devices from turning to e-waste. however, there are some positive signs. most chips still have seen nearly no support from the chip makers, but we have seen, for example, Qualcomm land some additional support for some additional the SD845 gpu, for which reverse engineered support had already been nicely developing.

we're also seeing more phones with Samsung, MediaTek, & some other chips. it's notable that none of the other chip makers have much of a presence in kernel upstreaming either. it's not just Qualcomm: everyone is very bad at making mobile devices able to be supported.

i'm very interested to see what starts happening with cars, which face a similar supportability problem, but which are less disposable. long term kernel support has been extended greatly to enable a longer life. Google's Project Treble has created a device-driver abstraction layer to try to ease things along some. but it's very hard to imagine the sea-change necessary for commercial teams to take their work, & rebuild it, safely, successfully, easily, atop the complex drops of vendor code &c. chip makers have had an enormously difficult job supporting the teams making software, providing them updates that they can readily begin to use, and it's been a very conservative, slow, deliberate process. most technical folk seem anxious to shift the mode, to get more upstream support, such that kernel & system upgrades don't require carefully tailored support packages from the chip maker to make updates possible. the current pace feels very logjammed, there's so much custom code people shipping products rely on, and trying to make folks less critically dependent is such a powerful compelling vision for so many techies to improve supportability, to make updates shippable both faster & doable in the long term.

[1] https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/qualcomm/snapdragon_800/845

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Qualcomm...

Re: Fairphone suggests Qualcomm is the biggest barrier to long-term Android support

#19

Post by foepys »

NullPrefix wrote: post #14
CameronNemo wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Just be happy that the kernel you get on your brand new phone is only 5 years old.

Example: the Nokia 7.2 was released at the end of 2019 and is running on Linux 4.4.194 on the newest available Android update. 4.4 was first released in January 2016 and is currently at 4.4.262. 4.4.194 was released in September 2019.

The newest LTS release at the end of 2019 was 4.19, released in October 2018. 4.9 and 4.14 are also LTS releases. 4.4 is a bit special because it's a Super Long Term Support kernel but 4.19 is SLTS as well.

Re: Fairphone suggests Qualcomm is the biggest barrier to long-term Android support

#20

Post by angryasian »

sto_hristo wrote: post #13
bgorman wrote: post #2

Why 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…

But Qualcomm doesn't have a monopoly on the market. There's Apple too. Sure, Android mostly uses Qualcomm in higher end models, but that is not the reason why Qualcomm can do anything they want. The reason things are the way they are is simple - users doesn't care. Users will happily throw cash the for next groundbreaking, awesome possum camera innovation that is just so totally worth the $1000 upgrade, because fabul…

Ok an oligopoly, does that make it better. Apple has a monopoly on Apple silicon.
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