I wrote a thread[0] on Pixel 3 (trying to convince Google to extend the support) a few months before it went EoL[3] (Oct '21). Here's the important bits:
- 10M+ Pixel 3 devices that were sold worldwide
- 72% of Pixel 3's estimated lifecycle emissions are from its manufacturing[1]. Using your phone is _not the source of most of the emissions during a phone's lifecycle_.
- It has gotten worse over time, but Google hasn't offered better guaranttes. Pixel 5's emissions-over-lifetime are 30% higher than that of Pixel 3.
The alleged reason Google can't offer support beyond 3 years is because of Google's dependence on Qualcomm for the support[2]. Apparently Qualcomm asks for a ridiculous amount of money to support any chip beyond a measly 2-3 years. Apple gets away with it by building their own chips, and Pixel 6 is guaranteed to be supported for 5 years as a result.
However, the fact that Google - one of the world's richest corporation can't convince or pay Qualcomm to support a perfectly functional device in 2022 is astonishing.
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 by Qualcomm for extended support is 1M$. That's 10c/device. The VoLTE license costs more than that. The H264 license costs more than that.
Also Pixel makes Android, so surely, Android can't become incompatible with older hardware because of Android, or if it does, it's Google's own doing!
There is the question of security of binary blobs for which Google doesn't have the source code, ok!
Well let's see:
- Billions (ok, maybe just hundreds of millions) of Mediatek devices have their bootrom "open". Should we stop upgrading those, because of physical access issue?
- Everyone considers 2G utterly broken, allowing downgrading attacks, thus Google gives Android 12 the possibility to disable 2G. Yet, Google "refuses" devices launched with Android 11 Treble HALs, like devices launched with Snapdragon 888, to have this "disable 2g" [1]
- Pixel 6 stayed 45 days on an """obsolete""" security patch
So, maybe we should stop saying that security is the alpha and omega, and all or nothing. It is important. Reducing our e-waste is more important.
[1] This is a weird thing, related to Treble, Google Requirement Freeze, and Vendor System Requirements, I can explain in details if anyone is interested
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.
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.
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.
(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
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.
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?
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 $0.10 you claim it costs.
> So, as an order of magnitude, the price asked by Qualcomm for extended support is 1M$.
....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.
Meanwhile the original iPhone SE from 2016 can boot the latest iOS. And you can get a battery replacement from Apple right at the store, same day for... 49$! It just works.
In just 4 months the Pixel 3A is officially getting EoL'd. This phone was released in 2019 (fall), same time as the iPhone 11. It just shows the wide gap between iOS and Android.
> Apparently Qualcomm asks for a ridiculous amount of money to support any chip beyond a measly 2-3 years. Apple gets away with it by building their own chips
I can believe it. Qualcomm makes money per chip sold, Apple makes money by building an ecosystem. Linux support is a cost center for Qualcomm past the initial launch kernel, and we can only imagine there's a difference in caliber between the engineers writing patches and hacks around the kernel at Qualcomm vs building the OS that powers the iPhone.
Ofcourse it just works. Apple makes software and hardware for Apple.
> we can only imagine there's a difference in caliber between the engineers writing patches and hacks around the kernel at Qualcomm vs building the OS that powers the iPhone.
Android has to work everywhere from dodgy tablets running Kitkat to flagships phones that cost an arm and a leg.
Oh woe. What a hard life Apple engineers have. Oh, how brilliant they are. The world would crumble without them. Woe.
> However, the fact that Google - one of the world's richest corporation can't convince or pay Qualcomm to support a perfectly functional device in 2022 is astonishing.
Not really. You need to compensate Qualcomm for a pile of lost sales from people not getting new phones.
> You need to compensate Qualcomm for a pile of lost sales from people not getting new phones.
Why would people continue to buy phones with Qualcomm chips? The fact that my 4th gen iPad still works and my mom uses it to watch youtube and browse internet is one of the top 3 reasons I would pay a bit extra for Apple devices.
Why does Apple support iPhones for 7+ years? And why does Samsung support phones for 5 years instead of 2-3 like most other manufacturers? They would sell more phones, their suppliers would sell more chips
The Pixel 3 was a great phone. If https://lineageos.org/ or https://calyxos.org/ had been able to come up with an AI assisted camera which could match the Google Camera app (The lens is trash, Google uses software to make good images) then it would have been great.
Benefit of actual quality camera lenses is these open source OS can still provide good photos using a stock android camera app.
I have never had an issue with the stock camera on GrapheneOS, and struggle to understand what better quality one could want... AI to fill in colors and details...potentially wrong?
What "support" does Google need from Qualcomm after three years beyond driver/firmware blobs, which three years into a SoC's lifetime should be pretty stable?
We're talking about a company that maintains its own fork of the Linux kernel with something like 19,000 patches against mainstream. Anything not in a blob should be easily within their abilities to address.
Also, Nexus and Pixel devices have a long history of software and hardware problems, many of which are immediately obvious within a day or two of devices hitting people's mailboxes, and are never fixed over the life of the phone. It's not like google seems to be picking up the phone very often to talk to Qualcomm for support, even during a device's development, much less after?
The Pixel line jumped the shark when Google started permanently carrier-locking phone bootloaders for Verizon.
Can you guarantee that no one will hack Qualcomm's "blobs" tho? And if Qualcomm says "that's your problem, we only support it for 3 years", now you have millions of customers calling you a liar when you say "sorry can't fix the security issues, it's in Qualcomm's code that we don't have access to". They won't blame Qualcomm they will blame google. That's why I had real hope for Intel there for a while until they sold off their modem chip business.
You need access to the software that runs those SOCs which is owned by Qualcomm. Qualcomm isn't just going to give the sourcecode of those SOCs for Google engineers to tinker around with it. It creates all kinds of crazy legal problems.
It's not just the main Android OS that needs to be patched, the chips have their own proprietary software too.
The problem is that after 3 years, most of those chips have gone EOL and QC wants to put their resources into developing new chips because that's where the revenue comes from (e.g. how they pay their employees). Meanwhile new security flaws keep getting discovered on EOL chips that provide zero new revenue.
So what do you want here? Do you want the break neck pace of innovation to continue which is ultimately very good for everyone? Or should we spend all of our time making sure your Apple IIc still has security patches for 2022? At some point you just have to move on and that's just the trade you make for all technology. You can't simultaneously benefit from this cycle and then bemoan it. If all we ever did was make security patches for your Commodore and AppleIIc you wouldn't have a Pixel3.
I haven't owned an Android device in a while but I always thought the argument here is if the manufacturer stops supporting the device, you can always get support through the community via custom ROM's.
With so many devices in the wild, I wonder if the Pixel 3 will become our generations HTC HD2 (which got community support for seemly an eternity).
Most devices never get custom ROMs any longer than you would get regular updates anyway (since newer Android versions would not run on this chip).
Custom ROMs are a mess anyway:
- Untrusted sources
- Random annoying bugs (What, you need a camera?? Pff)
- Flaky "Android-Experience" (Yeah, you might be able to install Google Apps... after the 6th try)
- Device is "untrusted" - no Google Wallet or banking apps without yet another hack
- "Security Updates? You can get a full image every 2 weeks if you want that, but no idea what is included and what will break, sorry"
- Performance and stability of the device usually takes a big dive
Most importantly: You cannot build AOSP for a device, if there is no support from the firmware (Qualcomm), which is the main reason why there are no Android updates in the first place - at least that's the problem nowadays.
> ...I always thought the argument here is if the manufacturer stops supporting the device, you can always get support through the community via custom ROM's.
That doesn't apply for kernel support. Custom ROMs generally use the last supported kernel from some official ROM. Then they start to accumulate known security vulnerabilities, because they never get updated again.
While adding ROMs to the Pixel line (if unlocked) is pretty easy, however other Android phones is usually a nightmare and only geeks will ever attempt it. I only did it because of EOL android phones. I gave up about 3 years ago and just got an iPhone. I do still have an Pixel 3 with CalyxOS on it tho. I like the hackability of android, but it's just not worth it. I just don't like mobile hacking, I do that with my desktop, pi's, and various embedded boards that are much more open to fun hacking.
That's the argument here, but as a defense of Google, it's a really bizarre argument. If a volunteer-run effort like LineageOS can manage to get recent AOSP Android (including all the hardware-dependent bits) running on a Pixel 3, what's Google's excuse?
My honest opinion is that I think the whole Qualcomm thing is a canard. What I think is really going on is that after three years the batteries are at death's door. Too many people will just replace/trash the phone rather than know to replace the battery.
iPhones have the same issue, and users either live with it or get their batteries replaced. We need replaceable batteries to make a comeback. Maybe the right to repair movement can get us there.
I'm still using a Pixel 2, now 4.5 years after I got it (lack of security is easy: don't put or do anything I care about on the phone, turn off the power when having sensitive conversations nearby). It can go two days between charging.
Wish my phone could report a bad battery. I installed Accubattery which reported 68% of designed capacity. I went to one of the ubiquitious mobile stores in Indian cities and got a new battery and charging port. The guy said battery doesnt look bulged and port doesnt look work either, so if I still have issues, he will replace a board. He is right, and I have to do that shortly.
That's absolutely not true, as the other comments mention, there's still plenty of battery life after 3 years.
Not everyone watches youtube or plays games on their phone. With light usage, a phone that might only last 2-3 hours of youtube watching, can last all day instead.
Google is going to skimp and cut corners wherever they can to save money and trim the fat (e.g. cutting off google apps for business free, less and less ad yt ad revenue, accelerated EOL of devices and services, etc). This is what happens when you've barely innovated in the past few years (compared to early-mid 2000's). Google is essentially the Intel of Web 2.0 companies. They blew their huge lead dicking around with a billion messaging strategies, social media strategies (obsessing over fb), corporate scandals, etc and lost a lot of customer mind share and good graces in the process. It also doesn't help that Microsoft has found their stride again in recent years.
> I’ve bought too many Android phones over the years believing Google when they say they’ve figured out how to be better with updates, whether it was the Google Play Store promise or the Android One promise or “Project Treble.” None of it has mattered. It’s too little, too late from Google.
> By its nature, Android is a fragmented ecosystem. There’s no straight line from Android 12 to the Galaxy S21 or OnePlus 9 — every major update sees handoffs between the manufacturer, carriers, and Google, all of which result in delays. Initiatives like Project Treble seem to have helped speed up some parts of the process, but unless Google takes some drastic actions, nobody can completely fix the problem.
Case in point, Treble came out in 2017, one year before Pixel 3. Didn't help.
This is one of the things that keeps me with Apple. They're far from perfect in the reliability front, but they will keep supporting the software for much longer than I expect my phone to last. Looks like the oldest phone they still support is the 6s, and typically they support phones for a bit under 7 years after launch, and 5 after discontinuation.
Obviously they get slower and fewer features, but that's better than "Good luck LOL".
They can only stay rich if we waste and reconsume again and again. That is how ads industries thrive. Apple and Samsung are what are today because we overbought their product. Almost everyone I know at least got 3+ phones (1 current 2 in the drawers). Even got one with 15+ phones (collection he said). As long as we behave to reward companies that do this, we will continuously getting new companies or existing companies adopting this strategy. I don't see "treehuggers" using antiquated Nokia phones and routinely seen many of my environmentally conscious frens having new iphones EVERY 2 years even if their old phones are working fine and they can easily go into a cheap repair shop to change the battery. As for security reasons, yeah, "frens" actually pasting post-it passwords and no idea what is yubi keys and never bother doing 2FA.
I’m not sure if Google wanted… they could support a phone for much more than ~3 years.
Older android phones slow down / get really janky as time goes on. Even when they’re still supporting it.
It’s one of the reasons I left Android. Longer term lives for Android phones is pretty bad, flashing your own ROMs aside (I was done with that long ago).
This is a strange red herring because it is ridiculously expensive, but not meaningfully so on a per-handset basis.
Software development teams are ridiculously expensive. Going from two to four years might require a doubling in staff. You need teams dedicated to old architecture, conservatively $1m for 5 people. Your best engineers will want to move on to newer problems.
The problem compounds. These teams could be instead working on newer products with greater potential return, so they're billable at $4m for 5 people per year. 4 additional years of support is $16m. (This is fairly lean, but should be about the right order of magnitude +/- 1).
With 13m sold, that's about $1/handset. Apple/Samsung budget for this. Google chooses not to.
> However, the fact that Google - one of the world's richest corporation can't convince or pay Qualcomm to support a perfectly functional device in 2022 is astonishing.
This reasoning is... really bad. If I were a "rich corporation" and decided to sale a product at a loss or significant reduction in margin for a feature that obvious(based on sells numbers) was not a factor in deciding to buy the phone or not, I wouldn't be a "rich corporation" for very long.
The "richness" of a company has nothing to do, marginal cost does. It obviously didn't pencil out.
It's not that simple: Google makes money off of other services, a fair fraction of which is from Android users. If an Android user has a phone which is >3 years old, they are still likely to be buying apps through the Android store, using the phone to access Google's paid services, or generating data which Google uses for their ad sales.
The underlying problem with Android is that they're competing with Apple, where all of those sources generate ongoing revenue from older hardware devices, but haven't found an effective way to share revenue between the different parties involved to pay for long-term support. Apple has no problem shipping iOS updates because they don't need you to buy a new phone nearly as much if you're subscribing to iCloud, using Apple Music, and buying from the App Store.
I don't think you have any basis for saying "was not a factor in deciding to buy the phone." Do you really think people buying the Pixel 3 knew it would only be supported for 3 years? Also, Google would not lose money if they supported the phone longer at a few pennies per phone. The Pixel phones (and others) are advertising and data delivery devices. Google makes money every time you use them.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I had a Nexus 6P and after that experience I promised myself that I will never buy a Google hardware device ever again. The company has the wrong mentality regarding its handsets and how to take care of the customers who buy them.
If you pick and choose your hardware correctly (waiting for reviews and news of major defects to come out), you can do fairly well -- my SO has the 4a, and it works admirably for her. Had a 3a before that and she only upgraded because the screen broke and it would cost more than the phone to replace it.
But I'm inclined to agree. Just look at the 6 and 6 Pro. They rolled out an upgrade, ruined cellular connectivity for a good chunk of users, and then all of the engineers peaced out for the holidays, with no way to downgrade to a usable release for effected users other than wiping their entire phone and starting from scratch. For their flagship phones.
With word that the 6a is ditching the headphone jack and rear fingerprint sensor, and also inching up in size to gargantuan phablet dimensions, it'll be easy to switch away in the future.
I respectfully disagree. I had a 3a until very recently and was happy with it.
Then it downloaded the update for Android 12 (I think), and got corrupted, and essentially became unstable and unusable - things like bluetooth headsets would crash the device.
This was a phone that was working great, until it wasn't. I wasn't able to find others with the same issue. Their customer service is non-existent. End of the line.
This is what pushed me to get an iPhone recently - at least I can walk into an apple store if the thing crashes completely. I've bought multiple android devices over the years, and its always been underwhelming and disappointing. The only upside has been that its been cheap. Now that I can afford one, I think an iPhone is the only viable choice (for me).
I know there are people who own Google devices and this has never happened with them, but this has been my experience of being a life-long android user.
I've still got a pixel 2 and it works swimmingly. Sometimes the 4k video stops recording and sometimes there's a bit of slow down but it hasn't convince me to change devices just yet.
I jumped off when the third Nexus 5X replacement Google gave me also bootlooped. Total junk and probably the most frustrating product experience I've ever had.
The writing's on the wall when it comes to Android SOCs now anyway, Apple phones from 4 years ago perform better and still get updates. They have their own issues, but they're not existential level problems.
This is sort of what I wonder about the Tensor in the new Pixels... but after Pixel 3 I'm not willing to gamble that much money on what looks like yet-another of Google's attempts to shift blame about why they can't support their phones. If Pixel "6a" has Tensor and is priced like a phone that will only be supported for 3 years, I'll consider it.
But frankly it's really hard to justify not getting an iPhone anymore. I have three kids and they all want iPhones and all their social life is on iMessage. Not to mention that all the apps I have to use for work are better supported in iPhone and have issues on Android but IT doesn't really care. It's becoming really difficult to justify not just getting my wife and I iPhones in the next cycle and planning to hand them down.
My 5X died in my pocket before a year of usage. Just died and wouldn't turn on. I called support and they said to ship it out, and I would have a new one in about a week. Never mind 1) phones shouldn't just randomly die, and 2) a week without a phone??? Switched to iPhone and never looked back.
From what I remember, the Nexuses 5x had a manufacturing error, which caused them to spontaneously desolder some components from the board, resulting in the bootloop. This was a problem in a lot (maybe even most) phones. Mine was in a bootloop too. There was a class action about it too, see if you may still be able to claim cash: https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/1/31/16957332/l...
Personally, I support ecosystems where the people in power don't apply pressure on social media networks to ban any remotely sexually explicit content, or discussion of depression and PTSD.
Yeah, I jumped ship earlier. I had the Nexus One, Nexus S, and Galaxy Nexus (which was a horrible phone) and then jumped to an iPhone 5. It's hard to find hardware as consistently good as the iPhone and after the redesign from 12 onward it's been really great (I wish they'd keep the mini around).
I would have thought Google finally bringing the hardware design in house with the pixel phones would let them create a real competitor, but they seem to be just okay?
Lack of focus maybe? Might just be a case of commoditize your complement, in this case the complement for Google is the hardware.
Galaxy Nexus was a great phone at the time for the price. I had just gotten the galaxy 2 then realized that sprint had no coverage in Portland so I cancelled my contract (didn’t have to pay because I proved they mislead there coverage area). Moved to a GN on T-Mobile and loved it until I replaced it with a nexus 5x. GN was a good little phone to learn android dev on as well.
I've had an Android phone since the TMobile 3G (second ever Android phone) and I'm starting to seriously consider an iPhone.
I'm not an Apple fan. I don't use any Apple products right now. However, it's impossible to deny that Android phones are always 2-3 years behind Apple in terms of hardware and software.
I also never spend more than $500 on a phone, which has iPhones out of reach.
I bought an LG G7 from Google Fi, and it was exactly 18 months from the phone's release to when they stopped updating it. I didn't buy it on day one either, so I got even less. I vowed that was the last e-waste phone I'm buying and moved to an iPhone last year.
There are still a lot of things I like better on Android, but it's not worth it.
> Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I had a Nexus 6P and after that experience I promised myself that I will never buy a Google hardware device ever again. The company has the wrong mentality regarding its handsets and how to take care of the customers who buy them.
Regardless, as of 2020 the only non absolute shit Android phones are Pixels. Essential, which was another non-shit Android, is dead because rather than re-iterating its boneheaded founder decided the market was in the TV remote control like device.
Samsung's flagship phones push ads as a part of the operating system. Let that sink in. On a $1,200 phone!
OnePlus can't make its interface not crash. Neither can it convince the carriers to whitelist its profiles in the United States for 5G and Wifi calling.
My impression is Google's are still the most updated. I've had a Nexus S, 4, 5 and currently have Pixel 3. I've never really had any problems with the Google-managed devices. Motorola and Samsung... let's just say I will never, ever buy a phone from them ever again. The choice is between Pixel and iPhone. But after the Pixel 3 I will not pay for the "premium" class Pixels.
When is a hardware maker going to figure out that selling something that works like a PC in terms of third party system updates will immediately become the thing that techs buy and recommend?
People are willingly paying iPhone prices for Purism and Pinephone hardware with low specs and old chips. Does Samsung not want this money?
The thing that changed is that Google started pitching, and pricing, the Pixel phones as premium phones. At least with the Nexus line they were more modestly priced. So the lack of long term updates was still an issue, but more people were willing to swallow it given the price differential vs. the iPhone.
> My impression is Google's are still the most updated
OnePlus phones are/were also quite good (at least when I bought my OnePlus 6, I have heard it went… downhill from there). But I did two years of updates, plus one more through LineageOS. And I'll probably update again when LineageOS has their Android 12 release.
OnePlus phones are good because they are (still) easily bootloader-unlockable, and are thus good (excellent) for custom ROMs. They do update fairly often on stock, but I think the stock ROM is getting worse and worse. Still, they're up there.
I had one of those defective google Nexus 7 tablets which suffered from bad hardware and software rendering the device unusable. It died after a year. Well not completely dead, it booted but was so slow as to be totally unusable. Google did nothing to compensate save for some bullshit discount on a new nexus device. Like I'm going to give them more money after telling me to go fuck myself.
I also bought a Nexus/Pixel 5 phone or whatever around the same time and that too had issues after 2 years. I forget the issues but it had to be rebooted frequently, at least once a day due to slowdowns. Replaced with an HTC that ran much better for 4 years until I accidentally killed it.
After those two turds I will NEVER buy google garbage ever again.
My Pixel XL bricked itself one morning due to a software update that triggered some kind of hardware bug. Great phone until that point, then poof, and it wouldn't even connect with a debug connection to my PC to replace the firmware or recover itself.
I've put it on a shelf until I can get time/money to recover the data from the flash, but lesson learned.
Regret to inform you that it almost certainly isn't a bug - the flash died. It's unrecoverable.
Large numbers of pixel 3/3xl's have started dying in the last year and it looks like it's the flash wearing out on all the early adopter/heavy user devices. This happened to me too.
I had the exact same experience! Had a Nexus 6p, it boot looped and I sweared off Android forever. Ever since then I've been iPhone only and I have no complaints --- went from the 8 plus to a 13 Pro Max recently, but honestly it was a vanity upgrade and was not necessary at all.
Well, they also have the wrong mentality on virtually everything else that Google does. They've shut down many more half-baked projects, far more than their successes. Google at least to me was/is solely successful at search, and ads. Even those are quickly turning to junk and the bane of the entire internet. Google should be busted up, sooner than later. But that's just me!
Honestly, Google needs really needs to do better. Samsung has raised the bar by supporting its devices with 4 years of patches: https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/22/22295639/samsung-galaxy-d.... And frankly, how hard/expensive would it be to support these devices for far longer? Google is a massive company, and I see little reason why that can't employ a team of devs backporting patches to older phones. Current versions of Windows and Linux run happily on decades-old hardware, so a phone should at least be able to get patches for known security issues for a decade. Dev resources would be far better spent on this than yet another hamfisted attempt to build a messenger app that they'll kill in a couple years anyway.
> Samsung has raised the bar by supporting its devices with 4 years of patches
For all its warts, Apple set the bar and Android as a whole has never really reached it. The 6S is still supported right now, right? And we're on the 13?
Yep. Though, the 6s was sold for quite a long time, and I think it’s the guts of the original SE, so we’re probably still in the 5 years from last sale time frame.
My 6splus is still in the “not a bad phone” range for what I need it for today, and I haven’t managed to destroy it in 4 years.
The 5s still gets security updates 8 years on. The 6S still gets the latest OS (iOS15). My old landline phones still work ~30 years on. The idea that electronics has to be chucked and replaced every 2 or 3 years is rather wasteful.
I really hope there would be some regulations enforcing a decade of software support, not just for the operating system but also to provide drivers for hardware. After that, having to continue providing support or provide the source code with a permissive license and documentation.
I’m pretty free-market oriented but I think this might be the right answer. If you sell a network-connected device you should be on the hook for at least security updates for 10 years.
The problem is usually complexity and opportunity cost.
Once you have a team that can keep Android patched, someone at Google is going to use them to speed up another product or create a new one.
Why not add another team more? First, the situation will repeat itself, other needs would be prioritized higher. And there is a limit on the number of teams an organization can manage without non-linear manager cost increase.
Linux runs on old hardware because big corporations own old hardware and are willing to pay to not have to replace it. Replacing a phone is a cost for the individual owner. And my experience with company phones is that they are seen as a retention perk. So newer flashier phones are worth the cost, it could be different in other industries, thou.
One common solution to these problems is regulation. The government forces phone makers to patch the software for X years. Now there is a strong incentive to do so if the phone makers want to continue operating in that market.
To be fair, part of it is due to supporting the SoC, and that means dealing with Qualcomm. Samsung has the advantage of being able to develop their own SoC's and so can support them for far longer with updates and such
This excuse doesn't hold much water anymore since the Pixel 6 is based on Google's own SoC, yet it also only offers 3 years of Android version updates.
Why can't Google do like Apple and offer many years of version updates? The iPhone 6s is still running the latest version of iOS.
Google has actually started extending its security update policy for its hardware to 5 years. I don't know what "enough" is, but as someone who has to do these updates (ironically, for Fitbit devices, yes we are owned by Google now) I will say that continuing to ship updates for products you shipped 5 years ago is far from trivial. It forces you to develop in ways that are not natural for people that work with hardware (the natural thing is to branch per product, but good luck managing that if you need to land a security fix on the 15 or so products we shipped in the last 5 years). This is manageable now that we're owned by Google, but prior to the acquisition it was a serious drain on my team. And folks on my team would tell you that they don't love it even today -- having to support 5-yr old MCUs when you're trying to keep your BOM down can be very challenging, especially managing available memory.
Yeah, a pure service model would be lovely in many ways. If I ever start a company that makes HW (fat chance) my experience at Fitbit means it will certainly be service-based.
Thanks for contributing first-hand experience. Your story highlights how dysfunctional historical hardware dev practices are for the connected age. Forking for each product absolutely does not scale in an era of continual updates, and manufacturers that don't figure this out are not gonna make it. People don't forget having to discard working hardware because of some stupid software EOL.
The memory limits of old devices is a real problem, and I don't know the solution besides doing the hard work to fight the the bloat, and produce a modular solution. Apple pretends to support the Apple Watch 3, but you can not upgrade the os without a hard-reset every time because the local flash can't hold the update and user config at the same time. But I can't help wonder if they _really_ need multiple GB for the core OS in a watch.
Heh. Not going to comment on Apple Watch for obvious reasons, but I will say that we measure free memory in 10s or 100s of bytes on most of our older products. Even a single GB would be amazing, but also amazingly expensive.
Google has generally supported Chromebooks for about 6 years and just recently seem to have started extending that duration to about 8 years. Some recent Chromebook launches have support through 2029.
If Google can do this for Chromebooks, most of which aren't even designed by Google (although usually based off reference designs), clearly they can also do this for the actual phones they make and sell under the Pixel brand. And Chromebooks span quite a wide variety of hardware capabilities, from school-targeted low cost models with eMMC and <4GB RAM all the way up to devices with NVMe and gobs of RAM on cutting edge CPUs from a variety of manufacturers, both ARM and x86.
Chrome OS is proprietary (Chromium OS is not) and it also cannot be modified by any manufacturer. Every chromebook manufactured also is developed with Google being aware so that the chipset and underlying hardware can be supported. It's quite a different licensing model than Android and that's most likely why giving eight years of updates was much easier.
> It forces you to develop in ways that are not natural for people that work with hardware (the natural thing is to branch per product...)
The problem rather seems to be that close-to-hardware developers are unwilling to adapt to modern software development practices: modularity (i.e. drivers and sane HAL), automated (regression) testing and, at least for some cases, even using version control.
Since the market hasn't managed to achieve that, the government needs to step in and mandate stuff like repairability, longevity and update support - then there won't be any other choice than to drag the industry by its ears into the 21st century.
> having to support 5-yr old MCUs when you're trying to keep your BOM down can be very challenging, especially managing available memory.
And again, the answer is government regulation: when the tradeoff between extra cost on the BOM vs ability to update shifts towards extra cost for an actual Linux-capable CPU, you won't have that problem any more.
You seem to saying a lot of things here rather declaratively. I will speak to my experience only, but we have used version control, drivers, various HALs, and automated testing (plus some manual, this is HW after all and some end to end tests are simply not worth automating) throughout my time here. So those things have not been holding us back.
With respect to government regulation, every dollar on the BOM is $2-3 to the customer. Many of our competitors are not based in the US. When buying memory you’re probably competing for supply against large car companies who have longer contracts with more committed volume. These are just facts, but they affect what the solution space here looks like.
Not your responsibility I know but given that Google can't seem to be able to notify everyone who is impacted by their GSuite changes I do worry about the path they seem to be going down. To me it seems that very simple things are falling by the wayside more and more these days which doesn't bode well for the future.
I don't know much about Fuschia. I'd be surprised, though, if updatability wasn't a major concern. Part of why I don't know much about it, though, is that AFAIK it's 64-bit only, and the MCUs we run are 32-bit affairs.
Unfortunately not with such a broad statement. Our CS team is usually abreast of issues with products that are in market and keeps me and others in the loop when there’s something we need to fix from an engineering side.
It's bizarre that a company like Google doesn't realize that supporting older devices actually helps them in the long term. Apple has the most dedicated customer base in the world who will gladly upgrade all their devices every year or two, yet even 6-8 year old iPhones and iPads regularly get software updates. This increases the value of Apple devices across the board and sustains a very large resale marketplace. This means more people are coming into the Apple ecosystem at the low end and eventually working their way up.
If I know that my $900 purchase is going to be worthless in 2-3 years, why will I even bother?
I dropped my iPhone 11 and the screen got destroyed send it out for repair and picked up my old iPhone SE from 2016. Updated it to iOS 15.2 and it trucked along without problems until the replacement was here. Amazing. (I have to admit I got the battery changed when they had the free battery exchange program running).
I mean, considering all most people use their phones for is a web browser and their collection of social media apps I think the ad coverage on both is pretty darn similar.
I switched from an iPhone to Android because I won't carry a phone I can't deploy my own software to, and I stopped buying Macs, so I can't build for iOS anymore now that the last one died.
I don't really see any more or less ads because they're served through whatever app or website you're using.
This is a very important point. Xiaomi is selling premium phones with unreal amount of ads (like im their Calculator app...), but these phones have amazing support from the communities, both from Lineage and upcoming alternatives like Ubuntu Touch. So for cost-conscious, privacy-oriented people, Xiaomi is a good option. And so are the Pixels, because they also recieve similar community support, and unlocking the bootloader is a single command.
In the end of the day, every company have their own incentives (Google, Xiaomi or Apple), but the users still have power over Android, while that is so not the case for Apple and iOS.
LineageOS supports the Google Pixel 3 with LineageOS 18.1 (aka Android 11). It's definitely worth giving this a shot and you can revert to the standard Google release if you'd like. Word of warning on Verizon devices, though. If you bought from Verizon, they generally place an OEM lock on it. So, the device is "unlocked" in terms of carrier, but locked in terms of OS. Don't buy Pixels from Verizon.
I did this on my Pixel 2, but unless I’m mistaken you have to unlock the boot loader to do it, leaving your device completely unsecured if someone has physical access to it.
I gave up and got a phone from a manufacturer who provides true 6+ year security support. I was surprised to find that iPhone was essentially the only option.
In what sense is it completely unsecured? As far as I can tell the data partition at least is protected and installing another OS should require wiping this partition.
I mean given unfettered physical access someone could conceivably install malicious hard/software in it which might spy on you in other ways, but it takes some very strict security requirements for that to be an issue.
LineageOS is cool and can prolong the device usability but some apps may not work (Google Pay, banking apps) if they detect an unofficial system (via SafetyNet). And you likely won't get future vendor blob upgrades (from Qualcomm), not improving the security risk problem.
Hm.. i wonder if i can roll back to before Google completely changed all the UI a few months ago. That alone almost made me throw it out and buy an iPhone
I recently switched to an iPhone 12 for this reason. It's been almost a year and I still hate iOS. It's significantly dumber than Android and has some truly baffling UX choices. However, the phone is undeniably better than any Android phone I've ever used so I can't convince myself to switch back.
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. I used nothing but Nexus and Pixel and finally switched to an iPhone 11 Pro from my Pixel 2 in 2020 and I have the same opinion.
The phone itself is so much better, but the UX is so bizarre and full of what seems like "its this way because its always been this way" stuff. Almost every day I go to change a setting, and have to choose between the "Settings" app, or the app itself. It still irritates me that I can't assign a specific sound to an app. So now when I get a generic notification sound I have to check my phone to see if its urgent (food delivery) or trivial (twitter), because Apple forces both of those apps to sound the same.
Why do you even have "trivial" notifications like Twitter making a sound? You can allow only truly "urgent" apps to make sounds, so there's no confusion.
> So now when I get a generic notification sound I have to check my phone to see if its urgent (food delivery) or trivial (twitter), because Apple forces both of those apps to sound the same.
It's not ideal, but I've disabled sounds + banner and lockscreen notifications for almost all of my apps, allowing them to only display notifications in the notification centre. It lets me check trivial notifications when I want instead of being interrupted by them.
The one that really gets me is not having a separate slider for alarm and notification volume. Slept through my alarm the first night, now phone stays in silent all the time.
As a current Pixel 3 user, I think this article is slightly hyperbolic. The phone still works great other than a worse battery, definitely not "garbage". The author is making it sound like the phone stops working. But then again I still use Windows 7 which also doesn't have security updates.
Did we read the same article? Without security updates, you really shouldn't rely on a phone for banking/payments/secure messaging. Google has effectively killed the Pixel 3 for real usage.
You should be able to throw LineageOS on there as long as you don't have a locked Verizon bootloader. But there are a lot of caveats to that, in terms of which apps will work when rooted, which won't etc. etc.
> Without security updates, you really shouldn't rely on a phone for banking/payments/secure messaging. Google has effectively killed the Pixel 3 for real usage.
There is a lot of real usage which is not "banking/payments/secure messaging". Besides, stopping security updates does not mean the phone suddenly becomes open to the whole world. Many vulnerabilities might be exploitable only when running code natively on the device, or only when within radio range, or only when plugged directly to the USB port.
There's also the fact that LineageOS will fix only Android-related bugs, you're still stuck with the unpatched vendor firmware (which includes the kernel, unless I'm mistaken).
How important are these security updates to your average user? If they're meant to prevent hypothetical targeted attacks, I honestly wouldn't be too worried about them. Plenty of people continue to use their Android phone despite not receiving security updates, yet I haven't heard anyone having a issue with this.
Losing control of your email/google/social media accounts and reputation (eg scams made in your name, blackmail, etc) is a comparable risk to most people. Banks are experienced at handling fraud and you're also legally shielded from bank fraud in many jurisdictions.
(though banks are also clueless in other respects, outlawing devices with lineageos but allowing devices with out of date vendor OS)
Yeah - and it's worth noting that you still get updates for your browser and messaging apps (because the android version isn't too old). Just don't install risky apps. If you're a minimalist, you're fine with a phone that stopped getting base system updates in the last year or two. I still use a Galaxy S8 that got its last security update 10 months ago.
If there's a vulnerability like stagefright in the base system that could make many up-to-date apps vulnerable, you'll hear about it on the news.
What drove me off of Android was my bank stopped supporting my device because of security updates. When I bought the phone it was a just released LG flagship, I got a full 18 months worth of sporadic at best updates, followed by nothing.
My bank disabled the app on my phone some 4 months later, when some major vulnerability was still unpatched on my phone. They told me to get a new phone, so I picked up an 2016 iPhone SE and went on my way.
Frankly I don't get why you still use Windows 7. For the Pixel I understand that you make a choice between throwing perfectly good hardware and security but for 7, I'm not aware of any PC that can run 7 that can't run 10.
Readit News
- 10M+ Pixel 3 devices that were sold worldwide
- 72% of Pixel 3's estimated lifecycle emissions are from its manufacturing[1]. Using your phone is _not the source of most of the emissions during a phone's lifecycle_.
- It has gotten worse over time, but Google hasn't offered better guaranttes. Pixel 5's emissions-over-lifetime are 30% higher than that of Pixel 3.
The alleged reason Google can't offer support beyond 3 years is because of Google's dependence on Qualcomm for the support[2]. Apparently Qualcomm asks for a ridiculous amount of money to support any chip beyond a measly 2-3 years. Apple gets away with it by building their own chips, and Pixel 6 is guaranteed to be supported for 5 years as a result.
However, the fact that Google - one of the world's richest corporation can't convince or pay Qualcomm to support a perfectly functional device in 2022 is astonishing.
[0]: https://twitter.com/captn3m0/status/1427908406086553601
[1]: https://storage.googleapis.com/mannequin/sustainability/repo...
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/the-fairphone-2-hits...
[3]: https://endoflife.date/pixel
You're pointing out how ridiculous it is, but let me expand:
So, as an order of magnitude, the price asked by Qualcomm for extended support is 1M$. That's 10c/device. The VoLTE license costs more than that. The H264 license costs more than that.
Also Pixel makes Android, so surely, Android can't become incompatible with older hardware because of Android, or if it does, it's Google's own doing!
There is the question of security of binary blobs for which Google doesn't have the source code, ok!
Well let's see: - Billions (ok, maybe just hundreds of millions) of Mediatek devices have their bootrom "open". Should we stop upgrading those, because of physical access issue? - Everyone considers 2G utterly broken, allowing downgrading attacks, thus Google gives Android 12 the possibility to disable 2G. Yet, Google "refuses" devices launched with Android 11 Treble HALs, like devices launched with Snapdragon 888, to have this "disable 2g" [1] - Pixel 6 stayed 45 days on an """obsolete""" security patch
So, maybe we should stop saying that security is the alpha and omega, and all or nothing. It is important. Reducing our e-waste is more important.
[1] This is a weird thing, related to Treble, Google Requirement Freeze, and Vendor System Requirements, I can explain in details if anyone is interested
I'll second the request for a source for this, $1M seems ridiculously low.
Do you have a source for that? That does seem pretty low.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
....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-...
In just 4 months the Pixel 3A is officially getting EoL'd. This phone was released in 2019 (fall), same time as the iPhone 11. It just shows the wide gap between iOS and Android.
> Apparently Qualcomm asks for a ridiculous amount of money to support any chip beyond a measly 2-3 years. Apple gets away with it by building their own chips
I can believe it. Qualcomm makes money per chip sold, Apple makes money by building an ecosystem. Linux support is a cost center for Qualcomm past the initial launch kernel, and we can only imagine there's a difference in caliber between the engineers writing patches and hacks around the kernel at Qualcomm vs building the OS that powers the iPhone.
> we can only imagine there's a difference in caliber between the engineers writing patches and hacks around the kernel at Qualcomm vs building the OS that powers the iPhone.
Android has to work everywhere from dodgy tablets running Kitkat to flagships phones that cost an arm and a leg.
Oh woe. What a hard life Apple engineers have. Oh, how brilliant they are. The world would crumble without them. Woe.
Not really. You need to compensate Qualcomm for a pile of lost sales from people not getting new phones.
Why would people continue to buy phones with Qualcomm chips? The fact that my 4th gen iPad still works and my mom uses it to watch youtube and browse internet is one of the top 3 reasons I would pay a bit extra for Apple devices.
Samsung right? So who is going to compensate Qualcomm for their lost sales because they're shit to consumers?
Benefit of actual quality camera lenses is these open source OS can still provide good photos using a stock android camera app.
We're talking about a company that maintains its own fork of the Linux kernel with something like 19,000 patches against mainstream. Anything not in a blob should be easily within their abilities to address.
Also, Nexus and Pixel devices have a long history of software and hardware problems, many of which are immediately obvious within a day or two of devices hitting people's mailboxes, and are never fixed over the life of the phone. It's not like google seems to be picking up the phone very often to talk to Qualcomm for support, even during a device's development, much less after?
The Pixel line jumped the shark when Google started permanently carrier-locking phone bootloaders for Verizon.
It's not just the main Android OS that needs to be patched, the chips have their own proprietary software too.
The problem is that after 3 years, most of those chips have gone EOL and QC wants to put their resources into developing new chips because that's where the revenue comes from (e.g. how they pay their employees). Meanwhile new security flaws keep getting discovered on EOL chips that provide zero new revenue.
So what do you want here? Do you want the break neck pace of innovation to continue which is ultimately very good for everyone? Or should we spend all of our time making sure your Apple IIc still has security patches for 2022? At some point you just have to move on and that's just the trade you make for all technology. You can't simultaneously benefit from this cycle and then bemoan it. If all we ever did was make security patches for your Commodore and AppleIIc you wouldn't have a Pixel3.
With so many devices in the wild, I wonder if the Pixel 3 will become our generations HTC HD2 (which got community support for seemly an eternity).
Most devices never get custom ROMs any longer than you would get regular updates anyway (since newer Android versions would not run on this chip).
Custom ROMs are a mess anyway:
- Untrusted sources
- Random annoying bugs (What, you need a camera?? Pff)
- Flaky "Android-Experience" (Yeah, you might be able to install Google Apps... after the 6th try)
- Device is "untrusted" - no Google Wallet or banking apps without yet another hack
- "Security Updates? You can get a full image every 2 weeks if you want that, but no idea what is included and what will break, sorry"
- Performance and stability of the device usually takes a big dive
Most importantly: You cannot build AOSP for a device, if there is no support from the firmware (Qualcomm), which is the main reason why there are no Android updates in the first place - at least that's the problem nowadays.
That doesn't apply for kernel support. Custom ROMs generally use the last supported kernel from some official ROM. Then they start to accumulate known security vulnerabilities, because they never get updated again.
Hardly death's door...
(1)As measured by Accubattery just now
Not everyone watches youtube or plays games on their phone. With light usage, a phone that might only last 2-3 hours of youtube watching, can last all day instead.
https://www.xda-developers.com/list-android-devices-project-...
> I’ve bought too many Android phones over the years believing Google when they say they’ve figured out how to be better with updates, whether it was the Google Play Store promise or the Android One promise or “Project Treble.” None of it has mattered. It’s too little, too late from Google.
which links to https://www.theverge.com/22881882/android-12-google-pixel-6-..., which says:
> By its nature, Android is a fragmented ecosystem. There’s no straight line from Android 12 to the Galaxy S21 or OnePlus 9 — every major update sees handoffs between the manufacturer, carriers, and Google, all of which result in delays. Initiatives like Project Treble seem to have helped speed up some parts of the process, but unless Google takes some drastic actions, nobody can completely fix the problem.
Case in point, Treble came out in 2017, one year before Pixel 3. Didn't help.
Obviously they get slower and fewer features, but that's better than "Good luck LOL".
Older android phones slow down / get really janky as time goes on. Even when they’re still supporting it.
It’s one of the reasons I left Android. Longer term lives for Android phones is pretty bad, flashing your own ROMs aside (I was done with that long ago).
This is a strange red herring because it is ridiculously expensive, but not meaningfully so on a per-handset basis.
Software development teams are ridiculously expensive. Going from two to four years might require a doubling in staff. You need teams dedicated to old architecture, conservatively $1m for 5 people. Your best engineers will want to move on to newer problems.
The problem compounds. These teams could be instead working on newer products with greater potential return, so they're billable at $4m for 5 people per year. 4 additional years of support is $16m. (This is fairly lean, but should be about the right order of magnitude +/- 1).
With 13m sold, that's about $1/handset. Apple/Samsung budget for this. Google chooses not to.
This reasoning is... really bad. If I were a "rich corporation" and decided to sale a product at a loss or significant reduction in margin for a feature that obvious(based on sells numbers) was not a factor in deciding to buy the phone or not, I wouldn't be a "rich corporation" for very long.
The "richness" of a company has nothing to do, marginal cost does. It obviously didn't pencil out.
The underlying problem with Android is that they're competing with Apple, where all of those sources generate ongoing revenue from older hardware devices, but haven't found an effective way to share revenue between the different parties involved to pay for long-term support. Apple has no problem shipping iOS updates because they don't need you to buy a new phone nearly as much if you're subscribing to iCloud, using Apple Music, and buying from the App Store.
Deleted Comment
But I'm inclined to agree. Just look at the 6 and 6 Pro. They rolled out an upgrade, ruined cellular connectivity for a good chunk of users, and then all of the engineers peaced out for the holidays, with no way to downgrade to a usable release for effected users other than wiping their entire phone and starting from scratch. For their flagship phones.
With word that the 6a is ditching the headphone jack and rear fingerprint sensor, and also inching up in size to gargantuan phablet dimensions, it'll be easy to switch away in the future.
Then it downloaded the update for Android 12 (I think), and got corrupted, and essentially became unstable and unusable - things like bluetooth headsets would crash the device.
This was a phone that was working great, until it wasn't. I wasn't able to find others with the same issue. Their customer service is non-existent. End of the line.
This is what pushed me to get an iPhone recently - at least I can walk into an apple store if the thing crashes completely. I've bought multiple android devices over the years, and its always been underwhelming and disappointing. The only upside has been that its been cheap. Now that I can afford one, I think an iPhone is the only viable choice (for me).
I know there are people who own Google devices and this has never happened with them, but this has been my experience of being a life-long android user.
The writing's on the wall when it comes to Android SOCs now anyway, Apple phones from 4 years ago perform better and still get updates. They have their own issues, but they're not existential level problems.
But frankly it's really hard to justify not getting an iPhone anymore. I have three kids and they all want iPhones and all their social life is on iMessage. Not to mention that all the apps I have to use for work are better supported in iPhone and have issues on Android but IT doesn't really care. It's becoming really difficult to justify not just getting my wife and I iPhones in the next cycle and planning to hand them down.
https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/29/tumblr-ios-tags-ban-apple/
I escaped from such a world as a child. Apple's sanitization of the internet is fundamentally unethical.
Shame, because my Nexus 5 and Nexus 4 still run great. I don't use them as phones, but they're still solid devices I use for other projects.
I would have thought Google finally bringing the hardware design in house with the pixel phones would let them create a real competitor, but they seem to be just okay?
Lack of focus maybe? Might just be a case of commoditize your complement, in this case the complement for Google is the hardware.
I'm not an Apple fan. I don't use any Apple products right now. However, it's impossible to deny that Android phones are always 2-3 years behind Apple in terms of hardware and software.
I also never spend more than $500 on a phone, which has iPhones out of reach.
There are still a lot of things I like better on Android, but it's not worth it.
Regardless, as of 2020 the only non absolute shit Android phones are Pixels. Essential, which was another non-shit Android, is dead because rather than re-iterating its boneheaded founder decided the market was in the TV remote control like device.
Samsung's flagship phones push ads as a part of the operating system. Let that sink in. On a $1,200 phone!
OnePlus can't make its interface not crash. Neither can it convince the carriers to whitelist its profiles in the United States for 5G and Wifi calling.
I admit that Bixby is a ridiculous barnacle whose eradication would improve the product.
My impression is Google's are still the most updated. I've had a Nexus S, 4, 5 and currently have Pixel 3. I've never really had any problems with the Google-managed devices. Motorola and Samsung... let's just say I will never, ever buy a phone from them ever again. The choice is between Pixel and iPhone. But after the Pixel 3 I will not pay for the "premium" class Pixels.
People are willingly paying iPhone prices for Purism and Pinephone hardware with low specs and old chips. Does Samsung not want this money?
OnePlus phones are/were also quite good (at least when I bought my OnePlus 6, I have heard it went… downhill from there). But I did two years of updates, plus one more through LineageOS. And I'll probably update again when LineageOS has their Android 12 release.
OnePlus phones are good because they are (still) easily bootloader-unlockable, and are thus good (excellent) for custom ROMs. They do update fairly often on stock, but I think the stock ROM is getting worse and worse. Still, they're up there.
I also bought a Nexus/Pixel 5 phone or whatever around the same time and that too had issues after 2 years. I forget the issues but it had to be rebooted frequently, at least once a day due to slowdowns. Replaced with an HTC that ran much better for 4 years until I accidentally killed it.
After those two turds I will NEVER buy google garbage ever again.
I've put it on a shelf until I can get time/money to recover the data from the flash, but lesson learned.
I bought a Samsung.
Large numbers of pixel 3/3xl's have started dying in the last year and it looks like it's the flash wearing out on all the early adopter/heavy user devices. This happened to me too.
Deleted Comment
For all its warts, Apple set the bar and Android as a whole has never really reached it. The 6S is still supported right now, right? And we're on the 13?
My 6splus is still in the “not a bad phone” range for what I need it for today, and I haven’t managed to destroy it in 4 years.
Once you have a team that can keep Android patched, someone at Google is going to use them to speed up another product or create a new one.
Why not add another team more? First, the situation will repeat itself, other needs would be prioritized higher. And there is a limit on the number of teams an organization can manage without non-linear manager cost increase.
Linux runs on old hardware because big corporations own old hardware and are willing to pay to not have to replace it. Replacing a phone is a cost for the individual owner. And my experience with company phones is that they are seen as a retention perk. So newer flashier phones are worth the cost, it could be different in other industries, thou.
One common solution to these problems is regulation. The government forces phone makers to patch the software for X years. Now there is a strong incentive to do so if the phone makers want to continue operating in that market.
> Once you have a team that can keep Android patched, someone at Google is going to use them to speed up another product or create a new one.
Apple is still supporting phones made in 2016. Given Google size and profit margin, it is a business choice.
Why can't Google do like Apple and offer many years of version updates? The iPhone 6s is still running the latest version of iOS.
My employer still upgrades 10yrs old TV boxes just fine. (Rocking Linux 5.4 LTS, launched on 2.6)
It is not natural for companies whose business model is selling hardware. Or course their business incentive is not to make long-term support!
But my employer's business model isn't about selling hardware, but a service, hence the incentive to upgrade perfectly working hardware.
The memory limits of old devices is a real problem, and I don't know the solution besides doing the hard work to fight the the bloat, and produce a modular solution. Apple pretends to support the Apple Watch 3, but you can not upgrade the os without a hard-reset every time because the local flash can't hold the update and user config at the same time. But I can't help wonder if they _really_ need multiple GB for the core OS in a watch.
https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6220366?hl=en
If Google can do this for Chromebooks, most of which aren't even designed by Google (although usually based off reference designs), clearly they can also do this for the actual phones they make and sell under the Pixel brand. And Chromebooks span quite a wide variety of hardware capabilities, from school-targeted low cost models with eMMC and <4GB RAM all the way up to devices with NVMe and gobs of RAM on cutting edge CPUs from a variety of manufacturers, both ARM and x86.
The problem rather seems to be that close-to-hardware developers are unwilling to adapt to modern software development practices: modularity (i.e. drivers and sane HAL), automated (regression) testing and, at least for some cases, even using version control.
Since the market hasn't managed to achieve that, the government needs to step in and mandate stuff like repairability, longevity and update support - then there won't be any other choice than to drag the industry by its ears into the 21st century.
> having to support 5-yr old MCUs when you're trying to keep your BOM down can be very challenging, especially managing available memory.
And again, the answer is government regulation: when the tradeoff between extra cost on the BOM vs ability to update shifts towards extra cost for an actual Linux-capable CPU, you won't have that problem any more.
With respect to government regulation, every dollar on the BOM is $2-3 to the customer. Many of our competitors are not based in the US. When buying memory you’re probably competing for supply against large car companies who have longer contracts with more committed volume. These are just facts, but they affect what the solution space here looks like.
Do you see any prospects in terms of Fuscia making long-term support perhaps a matter of just keeping legacy drivers within the available mix?
If I know that my $900 purchase is going to be worthless in 2-3 years, why will I even bother?
Too many customers don't know the difference between buying an appliance and something to watch ads from Google.
I switched from an iPhone to Android because I won't carry a phone I can't deploy my own software to, and I stopped buying Macs, so I can't build for iOS anymore now that the last one died.
I don't really see any more or less ads because they're served through whatever app or website you're using.
In the end of the day, every company have their own incentives (Google, Xiaomi or Apple), but the users still have power over Android, while that is so not the case for Apple and iOS.
Edit: fixed typo
How To: https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/blueline/install
Download: https://download.lineageos.org/blueline
I gave up and got a phone from a manufacturer who provides true 6+ year security support. I was surprised to find that iPhone was essentially the only option.
I mean given unfettered physical access someone could conceivably install malicious hard/software in it which might spy on you in other ways, but it takes some very strict security requirements for that to be an issue.
The phone itself is so much better, but the UX is so bizarre and full of what seems like "its this way because its always been this way" stuff. Almost every day I go to change a setting, and have to choose between the "Settings" app, or the app itself. It still irritates me that I can't assign a specific sound to an app. So now when I get a generic notification sound I have to check my phone to see if its urgent (food delivery) or trivial (twitter), because Apple forces both of those apps to sound the same.
It's not ideal, but I've disabled sounds + banner and lockscreen notifications for almost all of my apps, allowing them to only display notifications in the notification centre. It lets me check trivial notifications when I want instead of being interrupted by them.
You should be able to throw LineageOS on there as long as you don't have a locked Verizon bootloader. But there are a lot of caveats to that, in terms of which apps will work when rooted, which won't etc. etc.
There is a lot of real usage which is not "banking/payments/secure messaging". Besides, stopping security updates does not mean the phone suddenly becomes open to the whole world. Many vulnerabilities might be exploitable only when running code natively on the device, or only when within radio range, or only when plugged directly to the USB port.
(though banks are also clueless in other respects, outlawing devices with lineageos but allowing devices with out of date vendor OS)
Dead Comment
If there's a vulnerability like stagefright in the base system that could make many up-to-date apps vulnerable, you'll hear about it on the news.
That's a bit hyperbolic. Your point stands, otherwise.
My bank disabled the app on my phone some 4 months later, when some major vulnerability was still unpatched on my phone. They told me to get a new phone, so I picked up an 2016 iPhone SE and went on my way.