11 ms·

I want to answer that Qualcomm-is-the-issue again. You're pointing out how ridiculous it is, but let me expand: So, as an order of magnitude, the price asked

• Sebb767 5y ago
  > So, as an order of magnitude, the price asked by Qualcomm for extended support is 1M$. Do you have a source for that? That does seem pretty low.
• danaris 5y ago
  > So, as an order of magnitude, the price asked by Qualcomm for extended support is 1M$. ....and even if that estimate is two orders of magnitude too small, it's still basically pocket change for Google, which (based on about 30 seconds of Googling, so if I've misread I apologize) has been making tens of billions of dollars per quarter the past few years in net income. [edit] Figured I'd link the source of my figures for clarity: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/net-income https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/net-...
  • drstewart 5y ago
    I hate these arguments. It doesn't matter what their overall revenue is, it only matters what the cost is relative to the product at hand and to the value of the thing they're paying for. Nobody is sitting there approving expenses relative to their overall revenue. Would you pay $50 for a stick of gum? Why not? If you make hundreds of thousands of dollars, surely it shouldn't phase you?
    • monkeynotes 5y ago
      I'd happily pay 10c a year for extended support on my phone that I don't want to replace.
      • drstewart 5y ago
        That's a different and fair argument (and so would I as a Pixel 3 owner).
        • littlestymaar 5y ago
          That's a different argument, but this one too works even if “the estimate were two orders of magnitude too small”. Even $10 a year is a bargain when the alternative is throwing the phone away.
      • KerryJones 5y ago
        For perspective, they could have asked each additional Pixel purchase $.50 from the starting price to support it for an additional 5 years. (also pixel 3 owner)
    • brnaftr360 5y ago
      You're right, the relative expense to the revenue isn't a good argument when you're framing it in the light of efficient business practices. On the other hand if you consider the real intention of illuminating Google's cashflow it's pretty damning. Do you pay some relative pittance to keep devices supported, adding value to customers, reducing waste, increasing convenience? 'Cause this is a moral argument, not a financial one, and if you're fleecing the public at large (in myriad ways) it's more a question of the lord giving alms to his subject than it is paying $50 for a piece of gum. Should Lord Google be a beneficent ruler, or a shitpile?
• alksjdalkj 5y ago
  > So, as an order of magnitude, the price asked by Qualcomm for extended support is 1M$. I'll second the request for a source for this, $1M seems ridiculously low.
  • akjfhasfuhef 5y ago
    > $1M seems ridiculously low. If you see the entire picture, it's the most expensive cost any department can ever present. it is a "revenue-less $1M"! pure Career suicide. Specially because marketing can't even use it. today only false-equality sells. Eco-thinking is so 90s.
    • spion 5y ago
      Which is why the solution is to write these blog posts to warn people off of buying any Google phones as they become dangerous after 3 years.
    • nwiswell 5y ago
      By this logic Google should do away with their QA department and product support staff. You spend the $1M because it improves customer value by far more than $1M and that works out for everyone in the long run. This thread is a testament to what happens when you pinch pennies.
      • akjfhasfuhef 5y ago
        customer value only exist [in current US corporate culture] when you can use it to extract actual monetary value. QA exists to keep the sales/avoid returns/refunds. Not for pure customer value.
    • faeriechangling 5y ago
      I know PLENTY of people who bought a Samsung, Pixel, or iPhone because of the software support lifespan being a market leading 3/4-3/5 years, 3/5 years, or 7/7 years respectively compared to the standard 2/3 year support of Android OEMs. The average person now is going north of 4 years with their phone and rising. It's not about wanting to be "eco friendly" it's security, software support, and OS features being supported by some corpo instead of some teenager making a ROM. This is a huge part of the reason why Androids depreciate so much faster on the used market, if you compare the Galaxy S20 to the even older iPhone 11, the iPhone 11 will likely receive 5 years of OS updates compared to 1 year for Samsung. Other OEMs like OnePlus or Sony will have already had support end. Maybe your average customer doesn't really understand why this stuff matters but they do understand that an old iPhone seems to work better than an old Android that cost the same at release. Of course this is a great decision because people will be forced to buy a new phone more often right? No! People using your phone are a captive audience for selling high-margin services and accessories. If you don't support the phone they'll still use their old phone anyways but will be annoyed and likely to switch to the competition next purchase cutting off all your profit streams.
• londons_explore 5y ago
  Supporting it for 3 extra years for $1M is only $333k per year, which probably only pays for 2 junior developers. Would you like to be one of two developers whose responsibility is looking after all security patches and the build and release process for a 100 million line codebase? Sounds cheap to me.
  • phh 5y ago
    Getting paid twice my current salary year to cherry-pick commits from one branch to another and click rebuild? Hell yes! Though Qualcomm get much cheaper engineers than me in India.
  • jokethrowaway 5y ago
    Or you could hire a team of 5 in Eastern Europe
    • gambiting 5y ago
      In eastern europe? 300k would get you 5 developers in the UK for a year, easy.
  • WYepQ4dNnG 5y ago
    Well it clearly shows that their business model is fundamentally flawed and they should probably stop selling phones.
• modeless 5y ago
  I'm calling BS on this. There is no way you can get years of extra support out of Qualcomm for $1m. As for e-waste, well unlike other major manufacturers every Google phone can be unlocked and you can install any OS you want. So there is no need to discard the hardware after support ends. You just have to bear the support costs yourself. Too expensive? Well, you're the one saying it's not too expensive, so why not start a company to provide extended support for devices like this? Charge $1 per device, that's a healthy profit over the $0.10 you claim it costs.
  • phh 5y ago
    > You just have to bear the support costs yourself. Too expensive? I ported Android 12 on thousands of Android devices. I'm already bearing the support cost myself. Small proof, Android 12 on 17 of devices I bought with my money to support that cost, 7 days after Android 12 is released https://twitter.com/phhusson/status/1447824974396497924 https://twitter.com/phhusson/status/1447824974396497924
    • modeless 5y ago
      That's really great! I'm glad that you can do that. But (and I'm sure this will be an unpopular sentiment) you realize that it doesn't fully address the article's concerns about security. Nor does it provide the experience people expect from tested manufacturer updates (which are far from perfect, but still). This is not the same thing as manufacturer support. You could provide that level of support even as a third party, but it would be a lot more work and it would require the cooperation of Qualcomm and other vendors. You'd need to start a company and charge for your work to make it feasible.
      • aquaticsunset 5y ago
        Well, I'd say the existence of phh's ability to do this despite being in an environment that's unsupportive (or even hostile) is proof the model works. It would flourish with a regulatory bump keeping the manufacturers in check and unable to continue this poor support lifecycle. This is about their profits. It's not about security, environmental responsibility, or the users. Regulatory authority exists to promote the interests of the people when the interests of the corporation's profits conflict with them.
• flaburgan 5y ago
  I'm writing this message from a Fairphone 2 released in 2014 with Android 5, now updated to Android 10 thanks to the company still providing support for it 7 years later. And it has a Qualcomm snapdragon. A small company in the netherland is successful doing it. If Google wanted they would have done it. They just don't want. ps the Pixel 3 is also supported by Ubuntu Touch.
  • BobbyJo 5y ago
    TBF, Qualcomm is probably asking a lot more from Google than from a small company in the Netherlands.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • Iolaum 5y ago
      IIRC they are probably doing it without Qualcomm. In a similar way to the way LineageOS devs port devices to newer versions. I decided to take a risk with them and buy FP4 to support them.
  • nextos 5y ago
    Yes, but another conclusion from this is that we will miss PCs when they are gone. A sane architecture means support is much easier. I've used low power PCs that were more than one decade old, and I could still run the same well supported software as in a newly built machine. Some regulation is needed to stop this madness. We don't have enough resources to let everyone trash their phones every three years. Rare earths are scarce, not to talk about all the junk going to landfills.
    • pjmlp 5y ago
      PCs only happened because Compaq managed to screw IBM and with it created the clone market. Had IBM been able to prevent it (and they did try with PS/2 and MCA when the courts failed), there wouldn't be PCs as we know it, rather like every other 16 bit computer of the time.
• 908B64B197 5y ago
  Part of the problem here is that SoC drivers are hacked on top of the kernel (and are not merged in-tree). So SoC vendors have this pile of legacy and hacked-on code they need to cherry-pick every time the Kernel changes an interface they used (which is a lot) [0]. Of course, that costs and fortune and hampers the sales of newer chipsets so it’s not in the SoC vendor’s interest to do so. I was hopeful with Windows Phone running a build of NT that the platform would still have the same strict ABI compatibility for drivers as the desktop version has. So you get kernel updates and the existing drivers just work. Now, with Windows getting some emulation support for Linux (one of their Subsystems for Linux effectively translates system calls and execution happens in the NT kernel) I wonder if they could ship a phone running NT with an Android userland. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_binary_interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_binary_interface
  • iforgotpassword 5y ago
    Congrats, you just figured out what Microsoft created that translation layer for. ;-)
  • zeusk 5y ago
    Windows 11 ships Android userland out of band (as an optional feature).
• Melatonic 5y ago
  Also don't discount that most of your APPS themselves will still get security updates (as long as they keep compatibility with your Android OS version - which is likely for awhile) and realistically poor app security often worries me more than the OS itself. Android is (overall) a pretty secure system. Unless some massive exploit is released past my phones final security patch I am not that worried about using my device longer.
• StillBored 5y ago
  While Qualcomm is assuredly partially at fault here for encouraging piles of one off unsupportable devices without backwards compatibility with the previous SoCs they are also largely a victim of things outside of their control (although its good business for them to force everyone to buy a new phone every couple years). Plenty of blame can also be found with: Arm, who has refused to bundle or assure system IP compliance to the level of their CPUs (aka interconnects, interrupt controllers, iommu's, pcie bridges, etc). Meaning that even very basic things like how one gets an interrupt isn't reliable, and somewhat worse are the buggy implementations of arm system IP that are allowed to reach the market. Google, for failing to provide platform standard interfaces, similar to what the Arm server vendors enforce via SBSA/SBBR. Meaning that every single phone is doing low level platform mgmt in proprietary ways. That includes its own power mgmt, led blinking, etc, a good part of the time actually in the linux kernel, or via proprietary hooks in the linux kernel. Further despite making more money on the android ecosystem than RH+suse+canonical put together their changes are generally dwarfed by other much smaller players (although they have hired a bunch of maintainers over the past couple years). Linux itself, for failing to provide a stable/backwards compatible driver API. Meaning a small simple driver either needs to spend months upstreaming (if that is even possible, see GPUs) or man years of maintenance keeping up with the kernel churn over the lifetime of the device. Further the arm/kernel community encourages a "everything in the kernel" (everything from firmware functionality, to the actual machine descriptions in the form of all the DTs) attitude which completely fails to grasp the huge number of bugs and device varieties on these arm devices. Its rumored that QC by itself had a million plus lines of out of tree code a few years ago. Its likely that this attitude could more than double the number of lines of driver code in the linux kernel if just the past few years of Arm Soc's were fully supported. So, the combination of the three are the perfect storm of massive overhead for supporting the couple hundred phone models in existence. Imagine for a moment if every PC model made in the past 10 years required a few (tens) of thousand lines of kernel changes, how unworkable that would be. There aren't enough engineers to solve this as a brute force problem, the solution is to look at the PC market and consider that maybe it would be better if there were actually some standardization in the phone space.
  • captn3m0 5y ago
    The Fairphone doesn’t seem to have a problem with the exact same conditions.
• phh 5y ago
  (pretty sure most people will miss this answer, but anyway) So, to clarify things considering all the answers: - Qualcomm's development cost is shared amongst all OEMs (Except Google), because all OEMs share the same development branches Qualcomm-side. So 1M$ isn't 1M$ for Qualcomm but more - Qualcomm's development cost is shared amongst a lot of SoCs. Qualcomm have like one shared tree per year. So one development tree spans maybe 10 SoCs, including XR, automative, IoT, and smartphones. So yeah, from Qualcomm's PoV, it's not 1M$ additional revenue it's much more. - "Extended support" is +30% of support time (so just one additional year). My source tells me that the actual content of "Extended support" varies a lot. Sometimes it's just security patches, sometimes it's Android major upgrade - Qualcomm "standard" support is 3 years, - My source is currently writing a full-blown article about Android upgrades. Not sure you'll trust them more than me though