19 ms·

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

417 points by thg 6y ago

bgorman 6y ago
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 leapfrog the US in areas where competition is banned, because the only possible competitors will be in other countries.
- _Microft 6y ago
  (Controversial?) opinion: patents encourage innovation because they force competitors to find new solutions instead of only copying existing solutions. That doesn’t mean that it could not go terribly wrong as for example when patents blocked progress in 3D printing for decades.
  - esclerofilo 6y ago
    Unfortunately, many patents are intentionally written to make them as broad as possible, minimizing the possibility of designing alternatives.
  - rorykoehler 6y ago
    Most innovation comes from building on existing solutions. You’re advocating reinventing the wheel
- sto_hristo 6y ago
  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 fabulous selfies are what people care about.
  - angryasian 6y ago
    Ok an oligopoly, does that make it better. Apple has a monopoly on Apple silicon.
    - zepto 6y ago
      Apple doesn’t have a monopoly on Apple silicon nobody buys it.
      - angryasian 6y ago
        >the exclusive possession or control of the supply of or trade in a commodity or service. They have exclusive possession or control of supply of these types of chips. I'm not sure if the question of whether or not they could sell or want to sell it comes into question. Lets say I buy up all the supplies of diamonds and exclude the use of diamonds in any other use than my jewelry. I believe this still falls under a monopoly
        zepto 6y ago
        There is no analogy with diamonds, because Apple doesn’t buy up a supply. There is no supply to buy up - these are just a part apple has made for their own product. If you use the logic that parts you make for your own products are ‘monopolies’, then most product companies are monopolies, and the term becomes meaningless.
  - kelnos 6y ago
    Apple is only another player in "the market" if they start selling chips, or licensing their designs, for use in non-Apple products.
  - jillesvangurp 6y ago
    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-starts-work-on-its-own-cellular-modem-chip-chief-says https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-10/apple-sta...
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  Google holds a far stronger monopoly than Qualcomm ever will. If Google required the driver support as a condition of allowing Android devices to be distributed with their hardware, Qualcomm would have to comply overnight. Every single Android device from every manufacturer that wants access to Google apps must be approved by Google, and compliant with Google's terms. The "poor Google is at the mercy of other companies" narrative about Android's product line just doesn't square with the reality.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - izacus 6y ago
    That's a strange take considering millions of devices sold across the world running AOSP Android without any kind of Google software. From Huawei/Oppo phones in China, car infotainment systems, tablets used in Enterprise environments... Your own post doesn't really square with reality.
    - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
      Phones in China alone and some infotainment systems won't keep Qualcomm afloat.
deleted 6y ago
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zozbot234 6y ago
Chipset support from the manufacturer is not, strictly speaking, essential. What we need is support in the mainline Linux kernel. Many of the custom hardware blocks that a kernel has to support via its drivers are shared across chipsets generations anyway, so they end up being supported a lot longer than any single HW platform.
- kelnos 6y ago
  Right, and we're not going to get support in the mainline kernel without chipset manufacturer support. Namely in the form of open sourcing all the binary blobs, because those aren't going to be accepted into the mainline kernel. Qualcomm just doesn't want to do this. I'm not sure if it's because they don't feel like spending the developer time (money) to do so, or if they believe 2-year obsolescence is better for their bottom line. Probably both.
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    The kernel- and user-space binary blobs can be replaced by the community. See freedreno, lima, panfrost, nouveau etc.
    - CameronNemo 6y ago
      ... with a lot of work that starts only after devices start shipping, and rarely takes advantage of the whole functionality of the hardware. This is not a sustainable model.
  - swiley 6y ago
    Have you seen the sunxi project?
kogir 6y ago
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 platform was never competitive, and they’d burned all their goodwill on the 7 and 8 fiascos.
- yokaze 6y ago
  Two things: 1. There are longterm kernel releases, with up to 10 years support, and Android uses those exactly to avoid major support issues (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)#Linux_kernel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)#Lin...). 2. That doesn't fix the issue that Qualcomm themselves do not want to release documentation and only want to support their hardware for up to two years. Ergo, you would run some outdated binary blob.
  - kevincox 6y ago
    Exactly, having the hardware work is one thing. But to support a phone you need to fix security issues. So every binary blob is a ticking time bomb that is just waiting for a security vulnerability to be found either in it, or that needs a firmware patch to solve or workaround. So either you need the source so that you can support it yourself, or you need a contract with Qualcomm to release security patches. Sure, a stable ABI may mean that it would be cheaper for Qualcomm to release version updates as well, but at this point I would be happy if I could get security updates for more than 3 years. We can start asking for feature updates next.
- CameronNemo 6y ago
  FWIW I do not want to use a 5 year old kernel and I do want to use a 5 year old phone (LG V20).
  - NullPrefix 6y ago
dathinab 6y ago
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 far as I know less likely offenders include the modem. Ironically both might be integrated into the SoC which then massively increases the chance for problems.
- nobodywasishere 6y ago
  Android should have been GPL
  - pmlnr 6y ago
    And how would that make any difference when it comes to radio firmware?
    - herogreen 6y ago
      The radio firmware could be executed on different CPU than the Android kernel and communicate with a standard protocol ?
      - monocasa 6y ago
        That's more or less what happens already.
        teruakohatu 6y ago
        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.
rektide 6y ago
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-waste. however, there are some positive signs. most chips still have seen nearly no support from the chip makers, but we have seen, for example, Qualcomm land some additional support for some additional the SD845 gpu, for which reverse engineered support had already been nicely developing. we're also seeing more phones with Samsung, MediaTek, & some other chips. it's notable that none of the other chip makers have much of a presence in kernel upstreaming either. it's not just Qualcomm: everyone is very bad at making mobile devices able to be supported. i'm very interested to see what starts happening with cars, which face a similar supportability problem, but which are less disposable. long term kernel support has been extended greatly to enable a longer life. Google's Project Treble has created a device-driver abstraction layer to try to ease things along some. but it's very hard to imagine the sea-change necessary for commercial teams to take their work, & rebuild it, safely, successfully, easily, atop the complex drops of vendor code &c. chip makers have had an enormously difficult job supporting the teams making software, providing them updates that they can readily begin to use, and it's been a very conservative, slow, deliberate process. most technical folk seem anxious to shift the mode, to get more upstream support, such that kernel & system upgrades don't require carefully tailored support packages from the chip maker to make updates possible. the current pace feels very logjammed, there's so much custom code people shipping products rely on, and trying to make folks less critically dependent is such a powerful compelling vision for so many techies to improve supportability, to make updates shippable both faster & doable in the long term. [1] https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/qualcomm/snapdragon_800/845 https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/qualcomm/snapdragon_800/845 [2] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Qualcomm-SDM845-Display https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Qualcomm...
- floatboth 6y ago
  SD660/630 too: https://github.com/SoMainline/linux/tree/SoMainline/v5.11-rc4 https://github.com/SoMainline/linux/tree/SoMainline/v5.11-rc... Not many device trees written yet (really only Sony devices) though
traverseda 6y ago
Isn't this (binary blob drivers) an obvious violation of the linux kernel's GPL license? I presume that there's a good reason why that isn't being enforced, but I would like to better understand why.
- bayindirh 6y ago
  There are intentional loopholes left in the kernel to allow such drivers (Nvidia, fglrx, etc. are also closed source). There are some rules though: Kernel module is always open source and cannot use all the symbols. Also, using such driver marks the kernel tainted. There are some very valid reasons for not releasing open source drivers. NDA bound 3rd party code is one (Java had it, fglrx had it, HDCP stuff has it, Intel's old GPU drivers had it). Another reason is software based secret sauce. Again GPU drivers are the worst offenders in this class. Third reason is greed/being insecure. Lastly, some companies use this method to effectively deprecate their products, so they can sell newer units more. Embedded space is the biggest example of this. I also worked with such vendor in a very unrelated product category. It's unpleasant. I don't support any of these reasons, but I understand them from an economic sense. Some companies started to bake their magic into their hardware (Mellanox, AMD), so they can open their software completely. This is a much better path IMHO.
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    The sad thing is that all of the "reasons" are really only enabled by a lack of competition. Customers want devices with in-kernel drivers. Not just curmudgeonly Richard Stallmans who care about the plight of the wild libre, but Joe Sixpack who just wants to be able to keep using the phone he likes instead of having to buy another one every other year. There is a market for that. Regular people would choose it on purpose. And it's not being satisfied because Qualcomm keeps buying up their competitors. Because they dominate the Android market and the incentives of an effective monopolist are different than the incentives of a competitive market. If you're one of five equally-sized chip makers, you don't care that the customer isn't going to buy a new phone for ten years instead of three, because with high probability they could buy from one of the other four next time anyway. And because you need a competitive advantage to get the sale today, and "don't have to buy a new phone after three years" is that. If you're Qualcomm, you get the sale even if you don't offer the advantage because there is no viable alternative, and then you get another sale in three years. Time to break them up. Or at least, and I mean come on, stop letting them buy their competitors.
mmastrac 6y ago
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.
- ArkanExplorer 6y ago
  Google has been promising to 'solve' fragmentation and long-term support for almost a decade, and it doesn't seem like there is any real solution. If you interested in long-term updates, the answer is simple: buy an iPhone.
  - swiley 6y ago
    The answer is a monolithic GPL kernel that forces manufactures to publish driver source code but they don't want to admit it.
    - someperson 6y ago
      Or a Windows-style stable ABI with drivers remaining closed-source. That's what Google are doing with their new Fuchsia OS and Zircon kernel, which is expected to replace the GPL-licensed Linux kernel on Android and ChromeOS devices. Basically their moving away from the copyleft Linux kernel. Given Google's awful track record with Android and security updates, and their lack of ability to force companies like Qualcomm to provide longer support windows, I'm not sure their new strategy will be successful. Inevitably they'll be severe vulnerabilities found in the drivers including eg, Cellular radio / baseband drivers, Bluetooth driver, Wifi driver, and the vulnerabilities will never get patched. Hopefully Google's capability-based microkernel approach with Zircon will stop this ever happening. But again, given Google's atrocious track record with Android and security I highly doubt it. Even Windows doesn't support eg, i586 and i686 CPU architectures yet the Linux kernel does, so it seems like copyleft drivers are the only way to get security updates decades later.
      - someperson 6y ago
Decker87 6y ago
I don't blame Qualcomm one bit. Why would they want to support old hardware long after 99% of people aren't using it?
- Naac 6y ago
  People aren't using it because it is no longer receiving updates. 2-3 year old hardware should not be considered "old", or obsolete.
  - PurpleFoxy 6y ago
    Android hardware ages really poorly. I have an iPad and a few android tablets from around 2014 and the iPad is on the latest version of iOS 14 and feels almost new while the android tablets are basically unusable and on 2015 versions of android.
    - jokoon 6y ago
      If the software doesn't get updated, it doesn't mean the hardware is not aging well.
      - renox 6y ago
        Except for the battery, my GS7 is fine otherwise..
    - fuzxi 6y ago
      My 4 year old S8 is doing just fine. I'd be happy to replace the battery and use it for another 2+ years, but I only get one more quarterly security update.
phh 6y ago
What about Google? The issues fairphone mention are passing Google certification suites. They should be relaxed to help those cases. As far as I know the major issues are around GLES. It passed older CTS, so GLES was good enough back then. Surely it could be good enough now.
- PurpleFoxy 6y ago
  Isn’t gles replaced by vulkan since about 5 years ago? Google wouldn’t want so much fragmentation for app developers to deal with.
  - phh 6y ago
    Google is slowly working on deprecating/hiding OEM's GLES drivers, in favor of Vulkan, but we're still very far from that. Most of Android's rendering is still mostly GLES, using directly OEM's GLES driver. Since Android 10, apps can decide to use Angle for generic GLES over Vulkan, but that's opt-in. Also the Snapdragon 801 chip of the Fairphone 2 doesn't have (official) support for vulkan
flas9sd 6y ago
some Qualcomm SoCs (410c and 845c) are seeing mainline support. I booted a 5.11 kernel on an 2015 device yesterday and had surprisingly good working handheld with the pmOS/Phosh stack. Of course this is still a raw experience for enthusiasts, but one can use an AOSP distribution instead. The Fairphone concept of easily replacing common problems with screens and battery complements the longterm chipset support, one needs both. It wouldn't help the repair/replace decision if the screen needs 2 hours and heatguns to replace. Making it difficult to unlock the bootloader is another barrier manufacturers and mobile operators are guilty of. Mainline phones can be used until their counterpart antennas fall from the operators towers - and for 4G I think this is well into 2030.
sitkack 6y ago
Time is now for an unencumbered SoC with fully available documentation, 1k+ pages downloadable as a complete set of PDFs along with a reference design.
- userbinator 6y ago
  If you count what's been leaked, Mediatek ones would qualify. 1k pages is underestimating by quite a bit. 3-4k pages is closer to the norm, and that's just most of the programming/registers documentation. The complexity in these SoCs is astonishing.
  - sitkack 6y ago
    It was more aspirational, 1k of documentation and -3k of errata that never existed.
nanna 6y ago
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. Fairphone's a great company shipping a great product. Well worth the investment!
- luckylion 6y ago
  How happy are you with the audio quality? I've been reading about issues with echoes on coip connections that seem to have been plaguing some people for quite some time. I dislike the cell phone audio quality by itself, but additional echoes would be a complete show stopper for me.
  - nanna 6y ago
    Really can't say I've experienced anything like this at all. Audio has always worked fine for me.
- imiric 6y ago
  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 cameras can be upgraded to the 3+ ones, so it's great that it's the only truly modular and DIY repairable device on the market. I wish that a chipset swap and upgrade would be possible though. Google's Project Ara was interesting, but it was probably infeasible, and the technology might not be there yet.
  - nanna 6y ago
    I'll admit I'm not someone who really follows phone developments closely enough to disagree. What you say is the standard review of FFs, that it costs more and is technically inferior. But then again I believe it costs what a fairly sourced and built phone costs. Other phones are too cheap. > The screen has color blurring when scrolling especially visible with text Mine doesnt > the fingerprint reader often doesn't get a good read I don't make a habit of volunteering biometric data near Google, so can't comment. > it's noticeably sluggish in everyday tasks. Not sure what everyday tasks you mean? Haven't ever really noticed it being sluggish? HN is snappy as hell :) > The cameras can be upgraded to the 3+ ones I didn't know, thanks!
AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
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?
- gruez 6y ago
  >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.
  - ZiiS 6y ago
    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.
    - gruez 6y ago
      >Amd and Intel CPUs are still 100% backwards compatable with 40 year old chips The CPUs might be, but the chipset drivers definitely aren't. You'll have a hard time booting windows 95 on a ryzen system, for instance. Hell, ryzen doesn't officially support windows 7. Still, I get your point, standardization in the PC space (mainly stemming from the "IBM compatible" standard) has made backwards/forwards compatibility much easier.
      - zokier 6y ago
        Somewhat controversially at the time, Kaby Lake from Intel dropped Windows 7 support: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/01/skylake-users-given-18-months-to-upgrade-to-windows-10/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/01/skyla...
      - 6y ago
fsflover 6y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Librem_5 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PinePhone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PinePhone
- judge2020 6y ago
  IIRC there are still some binary blobs on there which might not work after some breaking change down the line, right?
  - swiley 6y ago
    Everything on the application processor is open source (think your laptop running debian.) The only thing that could break are the radios (wifi,bt,modem) becoming incompatible with the networks they communicate with but they're separate components anyway and the modem speaks a standard protocol so I'm sure it could be replaced.
    - jamiek88 6y ago
      >Everything on the application processor is open source (think your laptop running debian.) Even GPU?
      - coder543 6y ago
        The ancient Mali-400 GPU in the Pinephone seems to have an open source driver, yes. It also looks like it has been upstreamed into the kernel for years now.
      - blendergeek 6y ago
        > Even GPU? The Librem 5 uses a Vivante GPU that is supported by the open source Etnaviv driver.
- Qwertious 6y ago
  If you want a "just works" phone, don't buy a Pinephone. The PinePhone is great for it's intended purpose but it is not a good consumer-phone.
hvemsomhelst 6y ago
some qcom competitors pay ip designers for new android version drivers for designs from more than a decade ago
- ac29 6y ago
  Android is only 12 years old. Are there really devices from the 1.x/2.x Android days that are still getting updated?
dkdk8283 6y ago
Having been through a project where we built a mobile OS both the carrier demands and baseband blobs are huge barriers to market.
yuuta 6y ago
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. However, look at those "smart" phones, which are not smart at all: you are limited to a few Android versions and you are forced to install all these proprietary userspace drivers (HALs for example). Moreover, if you want to have full access to your device (Root), you have to bag the vendor for that privilege (Xiaomi, Huawei, etc. OnePlus is way better), which should be the right for everyone. This is because the PC market is standardized (I guess, correct me if I'm wrong), compared to the phone market which has all of these proprietary blobs, private interfaces and lockdown. I hope we could have open source drivers, standardized hardware and software interfaces (like UEFI) for mobile smart devices just as PC does. Thus we can install whatever operating system or software without limitations. Also there will be less e-waste just as PC.
- mannerheim 6y ago
  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.
  - yuuta 6y ago
    Yeah. That's why replaceable battery is a good idea but they disappeared in the recent years.
ashneo76 6y ago
Completely. No doubt.
k_sze 6y ago
Like I’ve said before, there need to be laws that require companies like Qualcomm to open source their stuff once they stop supporting them in any meaningful way.
BenoitEssiambre 6y ago
This has been my main gripe with my Google phones. If a phone lasts half as long, it should cost half as much. Otherwise it's not very good value.
surround 6y ago
> First, your SoC (System on a Chip) manufacturer (usually Qualcomm) has to get hold of it and customize Android for a particular SoC, adding drivers and other hardware support. Then, that build goes to your phone manufacturer (Fairphone, in this case) which adds support for the rest of the hardware—things like cameras, the display, and any other accessories. Why is it so easy to boot any linux distro on almost any desktop computer? What makes it more difficult for phones?
- guerrilla 6y ago
  They aren't PCs. That was the purpose of the PC and open architecture. I don't know why mobile manufacuteres don't see it as beneficial to them though, but it's possibly just because it was such a rapidly developing space until recently and has yet to settle but something else could be at play.
- 10000truths 6y ago
  It's hard to make devices as small and thin as a modern day smartphone while keeping its components modular at the same time. Now, this might be an acceptable tradeoff for you in particular, but Apple, Google, Samsung et al have probably already determined that it's not worth catering to that market segment.
  - jeroenhd 6y ago
    Size has nothing to do with size or modularity. The same Qualcom chips get used from smart watches to tablets to cheap PCs, there's plenty of variety going on there. The difference is that the mobile SoCs are designed differently, requiring a complex system of bootloaders to even turn on that can change between models or even revisions of the chips. The second problem is the proprietary nature of the chips. The PC became popular because other manufacturers copied and reversed IBM's BIOS and hardware, bringing a huge variety of available hardware that runs the same software. The only way that model could be profitable was to make sure everyone stuck mostly to the same standard, because breaking compatibility made your computer significantly incompatible with existing software your customers want. The crux of this requirement was that the user brought the software to the hardware, and the manufacturer could at most provide an operating system with a few tweaks at risk of breaking whatever the user wanted to run. This backwards compatibility still exists today, to the point that many BIOS update tools from manufacturers will boot FreeDOS to flash chips, running a software architecture older than many of their users on bleeding edge x64 chips. The mobile ecosystem is designed so that devices last two, maybe three years, after that consumers throw their phones out and buy a new one. If you want to use your phone for longer then good luck, hope you bought a brand that ships you updates. Qualcom, Huawei and Mediatek do not share the same level of compatibility the original PCs did, because they control the software supply chain. You don't take your software to Qualcom and make it work, you take Qualcom's kernel and then write your software. If Qualcom doesn't want to update the kernel version for your chip, good luck getting Android to boot; their open source drivers probably won't work because they either don't exist or are shoddily designed to fit only one kernel. There's ongoing work over at the postmarketOS to mainline existing devices. Mainlined devices can run a proper, modern version of Linux with normal update support like any operating system, though Linux distributions often fail to properly implement things like deep sleep that are essential to using a phone. It'll be a while before mobile Linux becomes viable. Then there's Apple, kind of a weird manufacturer in that they provide updates for well over five years even for slow mobile devices. They can do this because they don't need to buy chips from a manufacturer with an incentive to provide as little support as possible so end users buy new devices. They're also too popular for Linux not to hack in support for their weird, proprietary architectures. All modular prototypes for Android have had the same problems with chipset and operating system constraints their constant-hardware cousins had; the same kernel supply line, with the same update problems.
jokoon 6y ago
Interesting. It seems that open source can never really win.
willtim 6y ago
Three years of support is very poor and encourages e-waste, I will not be buying a phone with Qualcomm hardware in it.
- ac29 6y ago
  That rules out iPhone as well, then.
  - kevincox 6y ago
    It seems like Apple is being enough that they can get updates for their blobs, or are writing their own blobs. Although even then there are no promises. Maybe if a critical vulnerability was found in a Qualcomm blob Apple wouldn't be able to patch it. So in practice they do very well despite containing Qualcomm parts, but it isn't clear how much of this is just luck.
    - 2ion 6y ago
      At this point Qualcomm should be pretty worried about getting replaced out of Apple hardware, so I suppose key account managers are scrambling to do Apples' bidding, at least to some degree. Apple has so much control over their embedded hardware now, they probably are already working at ridding themselves of everything that stops them from 100% control. This is unparalleled in other hardware/software ecosystems; there, the situation is often much the reverse.
The-loan-wolf 6y ago
Theirs bootloader is biggest barrier in running mainline Linux.
pabs3 6y ago
Surely any vendor that doesn't upstream their code changes has similar effects on long-term support?

417 points by thg 6y ago

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 leapfrog the US in areas where competition is banned, because the only possible competitors will be in other countries.

_Microft 6y ago
(Controversial?) opinion: patents encourage innovation because they force competitors to find new solutions instead of only copying existing solutions. That doesn’t mean that it could not go terribly wrong as for example when patents blocked progress in 3D printing for decades.
- esclerofilo 6y ago
  Unfortunately, many patents are intentionally written to make them as broad as possible, minimizing the possibility of designing alternatives.
- rorykoehler 6y ago
  Most innovation comes from building on existing solutions. You’re advocating reinventing the wheel
sto_hristo 6y ago
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 fabulous selfies are what people care about.
- angryasian 6y ago
  Ok an oligopoly, does that make it better. Apple has a monopoly on Apple silicon.
  - zepto 6y ago
    Apple doesn’t have a monopoly on Apple silicon nobody buys it.
    - angryasian 6y ago
      >the exclusive possession or control of the supply of or trade in a commodity or service. They have exclusive possession or control of supply of these types of chips. I'm not sure if the question of whether or not they could sell or want to sell it comes into question. Lets say I buy up all the supplies of diamonds and exclude the use of diamonds in any other use than my jewelry. I believe this still falls under a monopoly
      - zepto 6y ago
        There is no analogy with diamonds, because Apple doesn’t buy up a supply. There is no supply to buy up - these are just a part apple has made for their own product. If you use the logic that parts you make for your own products are ‘monopolies’, then most product companies are monopolies, and the term becomes meaningless.
- kelnos 6y ago
  Apple is only another player in "the market" if they start selling chips, or licensing their designs, for use in non-Apple products.
- jillesvangurp 6y ago
  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-starts-work-on-its-own-cellular-modem-chip-chief-says https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-10/apple-sta...
ocdtrekkie 6y ago
Google holds a far stronger monopoly than Qualcomm ever will. If Google required the driver support as a condition of allowing Android devices to be distributed with their hardware, Qualcomm would have to comply overnight. Every single Android device from every manufacturer that wants access to Google apps must be approved by Google, and compliant with Google's terms. The "poor Google is at the mercy of other companies" narrative about Android's product line just doesn't square with the reality.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- izacus 6y ago
  That's a strange take considering millions of devices sold across the world running AOSP Android without any kind of Google software. From Huawei/Oppo phones in China, car infotainment systems, tablets used in Enterprise environments... Your own post doesn't really square with reality.
  - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    Phones in China alone and some infotainment systems won't keep Qualcomm afloat.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

zozbot234 6y ago

Chipset support from the manufacturer is not, strictly speaking, essential. What we need is support in the mainline Linux kernel. Many of the custom hardware blocks that a kernel has to support via its drivers are shared across chipsets generations anyway, so they end up being supported a lot longer than any single HW platform.

kelnos 6y ago
Right, and we're not going to get support in the mainline kernel without chipset manufacturer support. Namely in the form of open sourcing all the binary blobs, because those aren't going to be accepted into the mainline kernel. Qualcomm just doesn't want to do this. I'm not sure if it's because they don't feel like spending the developer time (money) to do so, or if they believe 2-year obsolescence is better for their bottom line. Probably both.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  The kernel- and user-space binary blobs can be replaced by the community. See freedreno, lima, panfrost, nouveau etc.
  - CameronNemo 6y ago
    ... with a lot of work that starts only after devices start shipping, and rarely takes advantage of the whole functionality of the hardware. This is not a sustainable model.
- swiley 6y ago
  Have you seen the sunxi project?

kogir 6y ago

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 platform was never competitive, and they’d burned all their goodwill on the 7 and 8 fiascos.

yokaze 6y ago
Two things: 1. There are longterm kernel releases, with up to 10 years support, and Android uses those exactly to avoid major support issues (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)#Linux_kernel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)#Lin...). 2. That doesn't fix the issue that Qualcomm themselves do not want to release documentation and only want to support their hardware for up to two years. Ergo, you would run some outdated binary blob.
- kevincox 6y ago
  Exactly, having the hardware work is one thing. But to support a phone you need to fix security issues. So every binary blob is a ticking time bomb that is just waiting for a security vulnerability to be found either in it, or that needs a firmware patch to solve or workaround. So either you need the source so that you can support it yourself, or you need a contract with Qualcomm to release security patches. Sure, a stable ABI may mean that it would be cheaper for Qualcomm to release version updates as well, but at this point I would be happy if I could get security updates for more than 3 years. We can start asking for feature updates next.
CameronNemo 6y ago
FWIW I do not want to use a 5 year old kernel and I do want to use a 5 year old phone (LG V20).
- NullPrefix 6y ago

dathinab 6y ago

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 far as I know less likely offenders include the modem. Ironically both might be integrated into the SoC which then massively increases the chance for problems.

nobodywasishere 6y ago
Android should have been GPL
- pmlnr 6y ago
  And how would that make any difference when it comes to radio firmware?
  - herogreen 6y ago
    The radio firmware could be executed on different CPU than the Android kernel and communicate with a standard protocol ?
    - monocasa 6y ago
      That's more or less what happens already.
      - teruakohatu 6y ago
        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.

rektide 6y ago

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-waste. however, there are some positive signs. most chips still have seen nearly no support from the chip makers, but we have seen, for example, Qualcomm land some additional support for some additional the SD845 gpu, for which reverse engineered support had already been nicely developing. we're also seeing more phones with Samsung, MediaTek, & some other chips. it's notable that none of the other chip makers have much of a presence in kernel upstreaming either. it's not just Qualcomm: everyone is very bad at making mobile devices able to be supported. i'm very interested to see what starts happening with cars, which face a similar supportability problem, but which are less disposable. long term kernel support has been extended greatly to enable a longer life. Google's Project Treble has created a device-driver abstraction layer to try to ease things along some. but it's very hard to imagine the sea-change necessary for commercial teams to take their work, & rebuild it, safely, successfully, easily, atop the complex drops of vendor code &c. chip makers have had an enormously difficult job supporting the teams making software, providing them updates that they can readily begin to use, and it's been a very conservative, slow, deliberate process. most technical folk seem anxious to shift the mode, to get more upstream support, such that kernel & system upgrades don't require carefully tailored support packages from the chip maker to make updates possible. the current pace feels very logjammed, there's so much custom code people shipping products rely on, and trying to make folks less critically dependent is such a powerful compelling vision for so many techies to improve supportability, to make updates shippable both faster & doable in the long term. [1] https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/qualcomm/snapdragon_800/845 https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/qualcomm/snapdragon_800/845 [2] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Qualcomm-SDM845-Display https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Qualcomm...

floatboth 6y ago
SD660/630 too: https://github.com/SoMainline/linux/tree/SoMainline/v5.11-rc4 https://github.com/SoMainline/linux/tree/SoMainline/v5.11-rc... Not many device trees written yet (really only Sony devices) though

traverseda 6y ago

Isn't this (binary blob drivers) an obvious violation of the linux kernel's GPL license? I presume that there's a good reason why that isn't being enforced, but I would like to better understand why.

bayindirh 6y ago
There are intentional loopholes left in the kernel to allow such drivers (Nvidia, fglrx, etc. are also closed source). There are some rules though: Kernel module is always open source and cannot use all the symbols. Also, using such driver marks the kernel tainted. There are some very valid reasons for not releasing open source drivers. NDA bound 3rd party code is one (Java had it, fglrx had it, HDCP stuff has it, Intel's old GPU drivers had it). Another reason is software based secret sauce. Again GPU drivers are the worst offenders in this class. Third reason is greed/being insecure. Lastly, some companies use this method to effectively deprecate their products, so they can sell newer units more. Embedded space is the biggest example of this. I also worked with such vendor in a very unrelated product category. It's unpleasant. I don't support any of these reasons, but I understand them from an economic sense. Some companies started to bake their magic into their hardware (Mellanox, AMD), so they can open their software completely. This is a much better path IMHO.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  The sad thing is that all of the "reasons" are really only enabled by a lack of competition. Customers want devices with in-kernel drivers. Not just curmudgeonly Richard Stallmans who care about the plight of the wild libre, but Joe Sixpack who just wants to be able to keep using the phone he likes instead of having to buy another one every other year. There is a market for that. Regular people would choose it on purpose. And it's not being satisfied because Qualcomm keeps buying up their competitors. Because they dominate the Android market and the incentives of an effective monopolist are different than the incentives of a competitive market. If you're one of five equally-sized chip makers, you don't care that the customer isn't going to buy a new phone for ten years instead of three, because with high probability they could buy from one of the other four next time anyway. And because you need a competitive advantage to get the sale today, and "don't have to buy a new phone after three years" is that. If you're Qualcomm, you get the sale even if you don't offer the advantage because there is no viable alternative, and then you get another sale in three years. Time to break them up. Or at least, and I mean come on, stop letting them buy their competitors.

mmastrac 6y ago

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.

ArkanExplorer 6y ago
Google has been promising to 'solve' fragmentation and long-term support for almost a decade, and it doesn't seem like there is any real solution. If you interested in long-term updates, the answer is simple: buy an iPhone.
- swiley 6y ago
  The answer is a monolithic GPL kernel that forces manufactures to publish driver source code but they don't want to admit it.
  - someperson 6y ago
    Or a Windows-style stable ABI with drivers remaining closed-source. That's what Google are doing with their new Fuchsia OS and Zircon kernel, which is expected to replace the GPL-licensed Linux kernel on Android and ChromeOS devices. Basically their moving away from the copyleft Linux kernel. Given Google's awful track record with Android and security updates, and their lack of ability to force companies like Qualcomm to provide longer support windows, I'm not sure their new strategy will be successful. Inevitably they'll be severe vulnerabilities found in the drivers including eg, Cellular radio / baseband drivers, Bluetooth driver, Wifi driver, and the vulnerabilities will never get patched. Hopefully Google's capability-based microkernel approach with Zircon will stop this ever happening. But again, given Google's atrocious track record with Android and security I highly doubt it. Even Windows doesn't support eg, i586 and i686 CPU architectures yet the Linux kernel does, so it seems like copyleft drivers are the only way to get security updates decades later.
    - someperson 6y ago

Decker87 6y ago

I don't blame Qualcomm one bit. Why would they want to support old hardware long after 99% of people aren't using it?

Naac 6y ago
People aren't using it because it is no longer receiving updates. 2-3 year old hardware should not be considered "old", or obsolete.
- PurpleFoxy 6y ago
  Android hardware ages really poorly. I have an iPad and a few android tablets from around 2014 and the iPad is on the latest version of iOS 14 and feels almost new while the android tablets are basically unusable and on 2015 versions of android.
  - jokoon 6y ago
    If the software doesn't get updated, it doesn't mean the hardware is not aging well.
    - renox 6y ago
      Except for the battery, my GS7 is fine otherwise..
  - fuzxi 6y ago
    My 4 year old S8 is doing just fine. I'd be happy to replace the battery and use it for another 2+ years, but I only get one more quarterly security update.

phh 6y ago

What about Google? The issues fairphone mention are passing Google certification suites. They should be relaxed to help those cases. As far as I know the major issues are around GLES. It passed older CTS, so GLES was good enough back then. Surely it could be good enough now.

PurpleFoxy 6y ago
Isn’t gles replaced by vulkan since about 5 years ago? Google wouldn’t want so much fragmentation for app developers to deal with.
- phh 6y ago
  Google is slowly working on deprecating/hiding OEM's GLES drivers, in favor of Vulkan, but we're still very far from that. Most of Android's rendering is still mostly GLES, using directly OEM's GLES driver. Since Android 10, apps can decide to use Angle for generic GLES over Vulkan, but that's opt-in. Also the Snapdragon 801 chip of the Fairphone 2 doesn't have (official) support for vulkan

flas9sd 6y ago

some Qualcomm SoCs (410c and 845c) are seeing mainline support. I booted a 5.11 kernel on an 2015 device yesterday and had surprisingly good working handheld with the pmOS/Phosh stack. Of course this is still a raw experience for enthusiasts, but one can use an AOSP distribution instead. The Fairphone concept of easily replacing common problems with screens and battery complements the longterm chipset support, one needs both. It wouldn't help the repair/replace decision if the screen needs 2 hours and heatguns to replace. Making it difficult to unlock the bootloader is another barrier manufacturers and mobile operators are guilty of. Mainline phones can be used until their counterpart antennas fall from the operators towers - and for 4G I think this is well into 2030.

sitkack 6y ago

Time is now for an unencumbered SoC with fully available documentation, 1k+ pages downloadable as a complete set of PDFs along with a reference design.

userbinator 6y ago
If you count what's been leaked, Mediatek ones would qualify. 1k pages is underestimating by quite a bit. 3-4k pages is closer to the norm, and that's just most of the programming/registers documentation. The complexity in these SoCs is astonishing.
- sitkack 6y ago
  It was more aspirational, 1k of documentation and -3k of errata that never existed.

nanna 6y ago

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. Fairphone's a great company shipping a great product. Well worth the investment!

luckylion 6y ago
How happy are you with the audio quality? I've been reading about issues with echoes on coip connections that seem to have been plaguing some people for quite some time. I dislike the cell phone audio quality by itself, but additional echoes would be a complete show stopper for me.
- nanna 6y ago
  Really can't say I've experienced anything like this at all. Audio has always worked fine for me.
imiric 6y ago
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 cameras can be upgraded to the 3+ ones, so it's great that it's the only truly modular and DIY repairable device on the market. I wish that a chipset swap and upgrade would be possible though. Google's Project Ara was interesting, but it was probably infeasible, and the technology might not be there yet.
- nanna 6y ago
  I'll admit I'm not someone who really follows phone developments closely enough to disagree. What you say is the standard review of FFs, that it costs more and is technically inferior. But then again I believe it costs what a fairly sourced and built phone costs. Other phones are too cheap. > The screen has color blurring when scrolling especially visible with text Mine doesnt > the fingerprint reader often doesn't get a good read I don't make a habit of volunteering biometric data near Google, so can't comment. > it's noticeably sluggish in everyday tasks. Not sure what everyday tasks you mean? Haven't ever really noticed it being sluggish? HN is snappy as hell :) > The cameras can be upgraded to the 3+ ones I didn't know, thanks!

AdmiralAsshat 6y ago

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?

gruez 6y ago
>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.
- ZiiS 6y ago
  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.
  - gruez 6y ago
    >Amd and Intel CPUs are still 100% backwards compatable with 40 year old chips The CPUs might be, but the chipset drivers definitely aren't. You'll have a hard time booting windows 95 on a ryzen system, for instance. Hell, ryzen doesn't officially support windows 7. Still, I get your point, standardization in the PC space (mainly stemming from the "IBM compatible" standard) has made backwards/forwards compatibility much easier.
    - zokier 6y ago
      Somewhat controversially at the time, Kaby Lake from Intel dropped Windows 7 support: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/01/skylake-users-given-18-months-to-upgrade-to-windows-10/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/01/skyla...
    - 6y ago

fsflover 6y ago

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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Librem_5 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PinePhone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PinePhone

judge2020 6y ago
IIRC there are still some binary blobs on there which might not work after some breaking change down the line, right?
- swiley 6y ago
  Everything on the application processor is open source (think your laptop running debian.) The only thing that could break are the radios (wifi,bt,modem) becoming incompatible with the networks they communicate with but they're separate components anyway and the modem speaks a standard protocol so I'm sure it could be replaced.
  - jamiek88 6y ago
    >Everything on the application processor is open source (think your laptop running debian.) Even GPU?
    - coder543 6y ago
      The ancient Mali-400 GPU in the Pinephone seems to have an open source driver, yes. It also looks like it has been upstreamed into the kernel for years now.
    - blendergeek 6y ago
      > Even GPU? The Librem 5 uses a Vivante GPU that is supported by the open source Etnaviv driver.
Qwertious 6y ago
If you want a "just works" phone, don't buy a Pinephone. The PinePhone is great for it's intended purpose but it is not a good consumer-phone.

hvemsomhelst 6y ago

some qcom competitors pay ip designers for new android version drivers for designs from more than a decade ago

ac29 6y ago
Android is only 12 years old. Are there really devices from the 1.x/2.x Android days that are still getting updated?

dkdk8283 6y ago

Having been through a project where we built a mobile OS both the carrier demands and baseband blobs are huge barriers to market.

yuuta 6y ago

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. However, look at those "smart" phones, which are not smart at all: you are limited to a few Android versions and you are forced to install all these proprietary userspace drivers (HALs for example). Moreover, if you want to have full access to your device (Root), you have to bag the vendor for that privilege (Xiaomi, Huawei, etc. OnePlus is way better), which should be the right for everyone. This is because the PC market is standardized (I guess, correct me if I'm wrong), compared to the phone market which has all of these proprietary blobs, private interfaces and lockdown. I hope we could have open source drivers, standardized hardware and software interfaces (like UEFI) for mobile smart devices just as PC does. Thus we can install whatever operating system or software without limitations. Also there will be less e-waste just as PC.

mannerheim 6y ago
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.
- yuuta 6y ago
  Yeah. That's why replaceable battery is a good idea but they disappeared in the recent years.

ashneo76 6y ago

Completely. No doubt.

k_sze 6y ago

Like I’ve said before, there need to be laws that require companies like Qualcomm to open source their stuff once they stop supporting them in any meaningful way.

BenoitEssiambre 6y ago

This has been my main gripe with my Google phones. If a phone lasts half as long, it should cost half as much. Otherwise it's not very good value.

surround 6y ago

> First, your SoC (System on a Chip) manufacturer (usually Qualcomm) has to get hold of it and customize Android for a particular SoC, adding drivers and other hardware support. Then, that build goes to your phone manufacturer (Fairphone, in this case) which adds support for the rest of the hardware—things like cameras, the display, and any other accessories. Why is it so easy to boot any linux distro on almost any desktop computer? What makes it more difficult for phones?

guerrilla 6y ago
They aren't PCs. That was the purpose of the PC and open architecture. I don't know why mobile manufacuteres don't see it as beneficial to them though, but it's possibly just because it was such a rapidly developing space until recently and has yet to settle but something else could be at play.
10000truths 6y ago
It's hard to make devices as small and thin as a modern day smartphone while keeping its components modular at the same time. Now, this might be an acceptable tradeoff for you in particular, but Apple, Google, Samsung et al have probably already determined that it's not worth catering to that market segment.
- jeroenhd 6y ago
  Size has nothing to do with size or modularity. The same Qualcom chips get used from smart watches to tablets to cheap PCs, there's plenty of variety going on there. The difference is that the mobile SoCs are designed differently, requiring a complex system of bootloaders to even turn on that can change between models or even revisions of the chips. The second problem is the proprietary nature of the chips. The PC became popular because other manufacturers copied and reversed IBM's BIOS and hardware, bringing a huge variety of available hardware that runs the same software. The only way that model could be profitable was to make sure everyone stuck mostly to the same standard, because breaking compatibility made your computer significantly incompatible with existing software your customers want. The crux of this requirement was that the user brought the software to the hardware, and the manufacturer could at most provide an operating system with a few tweaks at risk of breaking whatever the user wanted to run. This backwards compatibility still exists today, to the point that many BIOS update tools from manufacturers will boot FreeDOS to flash chips, running a software architecture older than many of their users on bleeding edge x64 chips. The mobile ecosystem is designed so that devices last two, maybe three years, after that consumers throw their phones out and buy a new one. If you want to use your phone for longer then good luck, hope you bought a brand that ships you updates. Qualcom, Huawei and Mediatek do not share the same level of compatibility the original PCs did, because they control the software supply chain. You don't take your software to Qualcom and make it work, you take Qualcom's kernel and then write your software. If Qualcom doesn't want to update the kernel version for your chip, good luck getting Android to boot; their open source drivers probably won't work because they either don't exist or are shoddily designed to fit only one kernel. There's ongoing work over at the postmarketOS to mainline existing devices. Mainlined devices can run a proper, modern version of Linux with normal update support like any operating system, though Linux distributions often fail to properly implement things like deep sleep that are essential to using a phone. It'll be a while before mobile Linux becomes viable. Then there's Apple, kind of a weird manufacturer in that they provide updates for well over five years even for slow mobile devices. They can do this because they don't need to buy chips from a manufacturer with an incentive to provide as little support as possible so end users buy new devices. They're also too popular for Linux not to hack in support for their weird, proprietary architectures. All modular prototypes for Android have had the same problems with chipset and operating system constraints their constant-hardware cousins had; the same kernel supply line, with the same update problems.

jokoon 6y ago

Interesting. It seems that open source can never really win.

willtim 6y ago

Three years of support is very poor and encourages e-waste, I will not be buying a phone with Qualcomm hardware in it.

ac29 6y ago
That rules out iPhone as well, then.
- kevincox 6y ago
  It seems like Apple is being enough that they can get updates for their blobs, or are writing their own blobs. Although even then there are no promises. Maybe if a critical vulnerability was found in a Qualcomm blob Apple wouldn't be able to patch it. So in practice they do very well despite containing Qualcomm parts, but it isn't clear how much of this is just luck.
  - 2ion 6y ago
    At this point Qualcomm should be pretty worried about getting replaced out of Apple hardware, so I suppose key account managers are scrambling to do Apples' bidding, at least to some degree. Apple has so much control over their embedded hardware now, they probably are already working at ridding themselves of everything that stops them from 100% control. This is unparalleled in other hardware/software ecosystems; there, the situation is often much the reverse.

The-loan-wolf 6y ago

Theirs bootloader is biggest barrier in running mainline Linux.

pabs3 6y ago

Surely any vendor that doesn't upstream their code changes has similar effects on long-term support?