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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

#31

Post by luckylion »

nanna wrote: post #30

Congratulations to Fairphone. This sounds like a massive task especially for such a small team. I run a Fairphone 3 and I couldn't be happier. Sure it was on the pricy side but it's served me well, takes great photos, has survived numerous drops (the phone protector shipped with it is great), looks cool,strikes up interesting conversations now and then, and will apparently have Android updates well into the future. F…

How happy are you with the audio quality? I've been reading about issues with echoes on coip connections that seem to have been plaguing some people for quite some time. I dislike the cell phone audio quality by itself, but additional echoes would be a complete show stopper for me.

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

#32

Post by AdmiralAsshat »

It's mind-boggling to me that Qualcomm only guarantees 2-3 years of support for their chipset. Compare that to the PC processor space, how much does AMD/Intel provide? 10 years? More?

Somehow people seem to be running on 15 year-old Thinkpads without a problem, yet a $1000 phone apparently can't scrape by for more than three years due to vendor support?

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

#33

Post by ArkanExplorer »

mmastrac wrote: post #24

It will be interesting to see what Project Treble brings to the table w.r.t. long term support for Android devices. It should help with the bitrot problem, though it pushes a bunch of stuff into blobs instead of creating long-term maintainable kernel source code.

Google has been promising to 'solve' fragmentation and long-term support for almost a decade, and it doesn't seem like there is any real solution.

If you interested in long-term updates, the answer is simple: buy an iPhone.

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

#34

Post by nobodywasishere »

dathinab wrote: post #15

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 fa…

Android should have been GPL

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

#35

Post by pmlnr »

nobodywasishere wrote: post #34
dathinab wrote: post #15

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 fa…

Android should have been GPL

And how would that make any difference when it comes to radio firmware?

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

#36

Post by toast0 »

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…

> 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.

Regardless of how much goodwill they burned with 7 and 8, their handling of the WM 10 release nailed the coffin shut. They actually made a release that ran ok, but it was 18 months after the initial release. And Edge managed to be worse than mobile IE, but they were pretending to be Apple and disallowed competing browsers in WP. Grumble mumble, live tiles were nice.

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

#37

Post by herogreen »

pmlnr wrote: post #35
nobodywasishere wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android should have been GPL

And how would that make any difference when it comes to radio firmware?

The radio firmware could be executed on different CPU than the Android kernel and communicate with a standard protocol ?

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

#38

Post by kelnos »

zozbot234 wrote: post #4

Chipset 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.

Right, and we're not going to get support in the mainline kernel without chipset manufacturer support. Namely in the form of open sourcing all the binary blobs, because those aren't going to be accepted into the mainline kernel.

Qualcomm just doesn't want to do this. I'm not sure if it's because they don't feel like spending the developer time (money) to do so, or if they believe 2-year obsolescence is better for their bottom line. Probably both.

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

#39

Post by monocasa »

herogreen wrote: post #37
pmlnr wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how would that make any difference when it comes to radio firmware?

The radio firmware could be executed on different CPU than the Android kernel and communicate with a standard protocol ?

That's more or less what happens already.

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

#40

Post by [deleted] »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #25
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…

Google holds a far stronger monopoly than Qualcomm ever will. If Google required the driver support as a condition of allowing Android devices to be distributed with their hardware, Qualcomm would have to comply overnight. Every single Android device from every manufacturer that wants access to Google apps must be approved by Google, and compliant with Google's terms. The "poor Google is at the mercy of other compani…

[deleted]
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