4 ms·

This is a pretty complicated subject, but the global TL;DR, is that until now, OEMs required support from all of Google, SoC vendor, ODM to manage major Android

by phh 6y ago

This is a pretty complicated subject, but the global TL;DR, is that until now, OEMs required support from all of Google, SoC vendor, ODM to manage major Android upgrades, and OEM to manage to upgrade to newer Android versions. This was supposedly fix by Project Treble, but until now Google prevented this. So with this, OEMs no longer require support from SoC vendor and ODM to manage to upgrade to a newer Android version. They can keep the drivers provided originally by the SoC vendor and ODM, and "simply" upgrade only Android framework. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25351189 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25351189 for the complaint this is addressing

phh 6y ago
My opinion is this is a very welcome move. But I don't expect OEMs to greatly improve their device's support liftime: the industry is still not incentivized towards supporting a device for 4 years. On that point, please note how the SoC mentioned is amongst the highest-end. Don't expect low-end devices to follow suit. As a side-effect: - It's likely the number of new features on a older SoC will drop (for instance I think we wouldn't have WPA3 on SDM 855 under such a scheme) - Open-source community support will become harder. At the moment, a flagship released with Android 8 will get Android 10 drivers. With this, a flagship released with Android 11 will remain on Android 11 drivers forever. Community support is easier with the most recent drivers, so we'll loose that.