Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 226 posts

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

#161

Post by bartvk »

imiric wrote: post #72
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…

It's a decent device, but feels several generations behind any mid-range phone released in 2019. The screen has color blurring when scrolling especially visible with text, the fingerprint reader often doesn't get a good read, and it's noticeably sluggish in everyday tasks. I justified the higher price to support their vision, not because it's a great daily driver, but it serves well as a backup phone with /e/OS. The…

> it's noticeably sluggish in everyday tasks.

I'm not a fan of statements like this. They really should be qualified further, because the Fairphone project deserves thoughtful critique.

What exactly is sluggish? Scrolling in the mail app? Tapping links when browsing over cellular? Opening the app drawer?

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

#162

Post by floatboth »

rektide wrote: post #17

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-…

SD660/630 too: https://github.com/SoMainline/linux/tree/SoMainline/v5.11-rc...

Not many device trees written yet (really only Sony devices) though

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

#163

Post by DebtDeflation »

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?

>yet a $1000 phone apparently can't scrape by for more than three years due to vendor support

The OEMs came up with a simple solution. Make batteries non-replaceable so that given the limited charge/discharge cycle life of a Li-ion the phone becomes almost useless after 2-3 years anyway.

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

#164

Post by alex7o »

swiley wrote: post #71
pantalaimon wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be freedreno, not sure how complete it is yet.

Freedreno didn't come from Qualcomm and I've been through two Qualcomm based phones since it was started. Last time I checked (and I did give up a couple years ago) they barely had framebuffer support on a couple SoCs I didn't have.

This has been a long time ago. One of the Pixel phones was running freedreno by default.

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

#165

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

loa_in_ wrote: post #99
lawl wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you interested in long-term updates, the answer is simple: buy an iPhone. I would, if apple wouldn't dictate what i can and cannot install on my phone. Is there a smartphone that's usable as a daily driver, lets me have root and provides long term updates?

> Is there a smartphone that's usable as a daily driver, lets me have root and provides long term updates? A touchscreen notebook with a GSM/LTE modem and a decent microphone running Linux is the closest you can get today as far as I know

Or, you know, almost any Android phone from a reputable brand like Oneplus for example.

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

#166

Post by Vinnl »

bartvk wrote: post #161
imiric wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a decent device, but feels several generations behind any mid-range phone released in 2019. The screen has color blurring when scrolling especially visible with text, the fingerprint reader often doesn't get a good read, and it's noticeably sluggish in everyday tasks. I justified the higher price to support their vision, not because it's a great daily driver, but it serves well as a backup phone with /e/OS. The…

> it's noticeably sluggish in everyday tasks. I'm not a fan of statements like this. They really should be qualified further, because the Fairphone project deserves thoughtful critique. What exactly is sluggish? Scrolling in the mail app? Tapping links when browsing over cellular? Opening the app drawer?

I'm writing this on a Fairphone 2, and even that I wouldn't describe as sluggish. Scrolling, tapping links, opening the app drawer - everything responds to my touches directly.

I'm sure newer phones are significantly faster, and heavier workloads can probably feel a bit janky (I don't usually have those), but phones haven't been sluggish the way pre-SSD computers could be for quite a while now.

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

#167

Post by jillesvangurp »

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…

Apple uses Qualcomm as well for their 4G/5G modem. They've started work on fixing that (by buying Intel's business unit that was working on that in 2019) but iphones still contain Qualcomm modems for now.

Most of the industry, except some Chinese vendors, use Qualcomm technology. There just are not a lot of 4G and 5G implementations out there.

In most markets, you end up licensing their patents regardless of whether you use their hard and software too. They have a near monopoly because building a replacement is a non trivial exercise and even if you succeed, you'll still have to license the patents. So, even when Apple ships their replacement, they'll be licensing patents from the likes of Nokia, Qualcomm and a few others for quite some time.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-10/apple-sta...

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

#168

Post by [deleted] »

dathinab wrote: post #124
cwyers wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? WDDM drivers written for Windows Vista can still work on Windows 10. And Windows is not a "niche" system.

Because Windows is a (very broken) Micro-Kernel system which did very little changes to it's kernel (as far as I know) in the last many years, in difference to that Linux is a macro kernel with constant changes and improvements to it. Are the improvements worth the cost? I don't know. (For server applications likely yes, but for desktop likely not). What I do know is that there are clear benefits of micro kernel arch…

[deleted]

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

#169

Post by ac29 »

scaladev wrote: post #145
rubatuga wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

X5690 (Westmere) works well in Z400. Here’s another article specifying the BIOS update: https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/new-microcode-for...

Jesus, what a pain. Why the hell do you need to wait for your proprietary OS vendor or BIOS vendor to update anything? On Linux the kernel does that for you, just configure your bootloader to point the kernel to a microcode image and that's it. Why can't windows do the same?

Microsoft does release microcode updates for windows, here's an example: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/kb4494454-intel-mi...

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

#170

Post by rincebrain »

phh wrote: post #92
gruez wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hasn't treble been around for years now?

I, as an OSS community contributor, have been using Treble for years now, and I have devices who got let down by their OEMs on Android 8, that I pushed up to Android 11, and that's been pretty cool. I, as an OEM, am still NOT allowed (by Google) to use Treble to provide upgrades. This "legality" issue is being fixed ( https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2020/12/treble-plu... ), but its effect won't reach users…

I don't see anything in your second link that explains what the "legality" issue is, could you clarify that for me, please?
Post reply on HN