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There have been many changes to Android that ostensibly would allow Google and the manufacturers to support older hardware longer. All for naught, because nothi
by llampx 5y ago
There have been many changes to Android that ostensibly would allow Google and the manufacturers to support older hardware longer. All for naught, because nothing talks louder than the profit motive. They want to sell people upgrades by leaving the old phones unable to upgrade.
Also, quite frankly I have trouble believing that a multi-trillion dollar company cannot negotiate with a chip supplier to have support or be able to write drivers themselves, lacking a HAL as Android does.
- modeless 5y agoQualcomm wants to sell hardware upgrades. Google wants people to use its services. Completely different motivations. Most of all Google wants to avoid a competitor taking a large majority share of the phone market and using that control to deprecate the web in favor of a curated native app store, putting a gatekeeper in between Google and its customers. That was the original motivation for Android in the first place and it hasn't really changed.
- llampx 5y agoSamsung and Huawei have their own chipsets but not an appreciable longer device lifecycle. I'm not holding my breath here.
- modeless 5y agoMaking their money predominantly from hardware sales, the motivations of Samsung and Huawei are similar to Qualcomm, not Google.
- llampx 5y agoWe're here discussing a hardware launch from Google, with a rumored selling price of $1000+. In what way does that not imply that Google wants to make money from hardware sales?
- modeless 5y agoThe key word is predominantly. As long as Google makes dramatically more money from platform-agnostic services than hardware, which will still be true even if this device is much more successful than expected, its motivations will be very different from those of hardware companies.