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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

#101

Post by rubatuga »

boring_twenties wrote: post #75
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?

When Intel released the microcode updates for the MDS family of vulnerabilities, in May 2019, they declined to support my Westmere Xeon, which launched in May 2010. So, not quite 10 years. Still a hell of a lot better than Qualcomm, though.

HP Z400 series got the microcode updates, so it was actually up to your vendor.

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

#102

Post by the_pwner224 »

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…

> The screen has color blurring when scrolling especially visible with text

This was a big issue on my Samsung Galaxy S9 (2-3 years old flagship), OnePlus 7 Pro (2 years old flagship), and Google Pixel 5 (8 month old flagship). Those are all AMOLED so it's not an issue in normal mode black text on white background, but with dark themes scrolling makes the text look really bad, and it's even worse at low brightness.

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

#103

Post by mannerheim »

yuuta wrote: post #86

Compare mobile phones to PC today, you will find that a PC made like five or more years ago can run the latest software without issues while for mobile devices, they can hardly survive for more than three years (I guess?) since the ability to support a new Android version completely depends on the SoC manufacturer. You may also upgrade part of the hardware of PC or install whatever OS you like on them if you want to.…

Battery is also an issue. I'm two for two on destroying (my own) Android phones trying to replace the battery myself, but I've been able to replace two iPhone batteries without issue.

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

#105

Post by blackoil »

zokier wrote: post #55
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?

That got me thinking, why aren't Dell, HP, Lenovo etc selling "enterprise" Android phones? They could get probably pretty good margins on basic devices if they'd have good well-defined support periods. Bonus points for good MDM compatibility and various silly standard compliances that nobody cares about. Just being able to do purchases from same supplier as workstations seems like a major benefit for IT depts. They c…

Long term support for client side machine isn't a requirement for enterprises. Most companies typically refresh laptops after 3-5 years.

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

#106

Post by tw04 »

zokier wrote: post #55
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?

That got me thinking, why aren't Dell, HP, Lenovo etc selling "enterprise" Android phones? They could get probably pretty good margins on basic devices if they'd have good well-defined support periods. Bonus points for good MDM compatibility and various silly standard compliances that nobody cares about. Just being able to do purchases from same supplier as workstations seems like a major benefit for IT depts. They c…

Because most IT departments now get the best of both worlds. They won't pay for phones for employees but still insist employees install their spyware to "byod".

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

#107

Post by MikusR »

zokier wrote: post #55
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?

That got me thinking, why aren't Dell, HP, Lenovo etc selling "enterprise" Android phones? They could get probably pretty good margins on basic devices if they'd have good well-defined support periods. Bonus points for good MDM compatibility and various silly standard compliances that nobody cares about. Just being able to do purchases from same supplier as workstations seems like a major benefit for IT depts. They c…

Samsung has enterprise versions of some phones/tablets with 5 year security updates

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

#108

Post by namibj »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #73
cwyers wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, that seems to be the result, yes? The intent is to compel device manufacturers to release the source of their drivers, but at this point, I think we have to admit that's not a great description of what's happening in the mobile space.

> The intent is to compel device manufacturers to release the source of their drivers I doubt that was the "intent"... perhaps a contributory argument in favour of a non-stable ABI, but I understand the reasons are far more pragmatic: maintaining a stable kernel ABI is a lot of work which could have strangled Linux in its early years.

Granted, even ABI-stability to some extend is difficult. I remember that I have some cheap wifi adapters that aren't supported by in-tree code, but came with a CD (small diameter) that had the SDK on it. This was unfortunately for the old timespec or w/e the exact struct is called, and I could have ported it to use the new API, especially considering that there are in-tree and/or up-to-date versions for closely related chips, but honestly the lack of easily-accessible tooling for that discouraged me from doing so.

The reason I got them initially is that, some about 2.5y back, they were sold on Aliexpress for 3.50 EUR (~5$) and could do dual-band with at least 40 MHz channels, iirc maybe even 80 MHz on 5GHz. They are just tiny USB-A dongles with a USB 2.0 HighSpeed host interface, but they could do station/softAP/station+softAP, obviously restricted to a single channel.

There's a related issue of a rtl8812-au or rtl8821-au (or compatible) stick (Edimax EW-7822UAC) I got before that, with a USB 3.0 SuperSpeed host interface, intended for trying out a remote radio head point-to-point configuration using polarization-duplex with a recycled satellite-TV dish on each end, as it could do AP-mode on 80 MHz wide channels in the 5 GHz band on Linux, with a 867 Mbit/s link rate (assuming full polarization multiplexing based on the stick's 2x2 MIMO and a circular polarizing feed antenna).

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

#109

Post by CameronNemo »

foepys wrote: post #19
NullPrefix wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is that a fair example? Most phones sold are going to be from Samsung.[0] Their recent flagship, the Galaxy S21, is a 5.4.61 kernel.

[0] https://www.appbrain.com/stats/top-manufacturers

[1] https://github.com/mohammad92/android_kernel_samsung_sm8350/...

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

#110

Post by [deleted] »

teruakohatu wrote: post #74
monocasa wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's more or less what happens already.

It is but if the radio driver was open source then the interface with the radio SoC would be documented. Right now it is the worst of both worlds. Closed interface for a closed undocumented chip able to execute arbitrary code.

[deleted]
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