This is great news. It’s unfortunate that the 8 years of updates is limited to qualcomm flagship chip, anyway it’s still a step in the right direction. My phone will be 8 years this year and it survived this long because of custom ROMs that don’t support this device anymore, so i’m all in for this types of policies.
Qualcomm and Google team up to offer 8 years of Android updates
Submitted 2 months ago by misk@sopuli.xyz to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
SavageCoconut@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Xed@lemm.ee 2 months ago
The good thing about android is you can flash some custom OS on them if they run out of updates easier than iOS
Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee 2 months ago
O … open sauce it & it will get maintained for much loner, ya greedy bastards.
werefreeatlast@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Fuck Android. I want a vanilla phone that I can install Linux into…fully open source so we can be sure Walmart is not gathering ideas of what to sell me next.
Xatolos@reddthat.com 2 months ago
werefreeatlast@lemmy.world 2 months ago
This is an awesome list! We’re not as screwed as I thought.
waitmarks@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Have you looked at grapheneOS? Its essentially a fork of the android open source project with extra privacy features. So, regular android apps still work for the most part, but you dont have google spyware built in.
ozymandias117@lemmy.world 2 months ago
That may be the best option right now, but it’s still a far cry from an upstreamed device
They aren’t able to support devices longer than Qualcomm and Google maintain the random out-of-tree drivers for a chipset, and even state such in their “legacy support” for harm reduction
hypertown@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I still can’t understand how I can install modern Windows or Linux on a 20 year old PC but the same can’t be done with 4 year old phone… 8 year is cool but it’s nothing compared to 20 years.
Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me 2 months ago
Because phones are a mess of out of tree patches specific to that phone model with zero hope of being upstreamed into the Linux kernel without a cleaner rewrite because it’s not good, it’s made to work and nothing more.
It’s improved but companies like Qualcomm also used to basically drop the code to the manufacturers when the chip launches and then move on with little maintenance for the code and stop maintaining the code once the chip is not produced anymore. Manufacturers don’t have the expertise to maintain that forever nor the will, so you end up with a kernel that keeps aging and isn’t keeping up with Android and the community hasn’t been successful in integrating it all either.
Google’s been pushing hard for this to improve but they’re the only ones to even care. Samsung and others would much rather sell you a new phone.
refurbishedrefurbisher@lemmy.sdf.org 2 months ago
Not just Google, but the community has been hard at work with porting mainline Linux to phones. postmarketOS is the main OS that devices are initially ported to.
hypertown@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Honestly I’m impressed with all the work the community has put into projects like LineageOS but when I recently checked the supported devices list I feel like we’re at the lowest point we’ve ever been and now to buy a phone for 10 years means to buy a Pixel.
Not often I say this but: Good job Google.
Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Phones have a hard life compared to a computer, I suspect the number of phones that last four years would be very small, never mind 8.
hypertown@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Do people really treat their phones so badly? I have a Galaxy Note II (Almost 12 year old phone!) that still works. Thanks to community support it has Android 12 installed and it’s currently working as a radio in my garage.
My uncle is using my old S8 as his daily driver and it works no problem.