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

Post by zepto » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 10:18 PM UTC

angryasian wrote: post #20

sto_hristo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by pantalaimon » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 10:20 PM UTC

techrat wrote: post #44

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…

What I don't understand (due to my ignorance, please explain if you can)... what keeps the driver blobs from continuing to work from one version of Android to the next? What prevents people from using the same drivers for a device on Android 7 and upgrading the OS to 9 or 10? I always understood that drivers would continue to allow the OS to recognize the component that the drivers are for unless something drasticall…

Post by zokier » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 10:21 PM UTC

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #32

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?

Post by zozbot234 » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 10:22 PM UTC

kelnos wrote: post #38

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 the…

Post by zokier » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 10:24 PM UTC

gruez wrote: post #52

ZiiS wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amd and Intel CPUs are still 100% backwards compatable with 40 year old chips. Not just their own chips but also nearly all the features of their competitor's chip too.

>Amd and Intel CPUs are still 100% backwards compatable with 40 year old chips The CPUs might be, but the chipset drivers definitely aren't. You'll have a hard time booting windows 95 on a ryzen system, for instance. Hell, ryzen doesn't officially support windows 7. Still, I get your point, standardization in the PC space (mainly stemming from the "IBM compatible" standard) has made backwards/forwards compatibility m…