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

41–50 of 226 posts

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

#41

Post by kelnos »

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 is only another player in "the market" if they start selling chips, or licensing their designs, for use in non-Apple products.

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

#42

Post by gruez »

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?

>Compare that to the PC processor space, how much does AMD/Intel provide? 10 years? More?

They don't "provide" anything. It's the software (eg. linux/windows) that's providing backwards compatible support. Vendor support for pc hardware lasts a few years at most.

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

#43

Post by gruez »

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.

Hasn't treble been around for years now?

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

#44

Post by techrat »

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 drastically changes on the OS side of things.

Why can't we say "Fuck you, Qualcomm" and continue to use the older drivers for newer OS versions without having to wait for them to officially support it?

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

#45

Post by detaro »

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…

With new Android versions come new kernel versions, and the interfaces to drivers are not stable, and I assume Android-specific interfaces also do change.

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

#46

Post by ZiiS »

gruez wrote: post #42
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?

>Compare that to the PC processor space, how much does AMD/Intel provide? 10 years? More? They don't "provide" anything. It's the software (eg. linux/windows) that's providing backwards compatible support. Vendor support for pc hardware lasts a few years at most.

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.

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

#47

Post by swiley »

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…

The Linux driver ABI doesn't need to be stable because the drivers are supposed to be published under the GPL. This way manufactures just need to help get their drivers upstreamed and are largely off the hook for support after that.

Androids awful graphics API is hack that allows Qualcomm to keep the driver source closed which means the BSPs rot and you can't use your phone after 2-3 years.

I'll happily buy a 10 year old SoC with half the clock speed but open source drivers over anything from Qualcomm because of how awful they are with this.

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

#48

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#50

Post by judge2020 »

fsflover wrote: post #49

If you want lifetime updates for your phone, consider Librem 5 [0] or Pinephone [1] instead. They do no rely on Android but use GNU/Linux as OS. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Librem_5 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PinePhone

IIRC there are still some binary blobs on there which might not work after some breaking change down the line, right?
Post reply on HN