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Comment by tcd | Hacker News Reader

One of my concerns about this is fragmentation. They've essentially announced 6 different phones released over a staggered time period.

Will all batches get updates for the same duration? Will they all get same day software releases? How about support? Will there be subtle differences that cause headaches? If you opt for one revision over another and that has issues, what's the process going to be to handle that case?

Rather than just having a single shipping device with a fixed design they're going to incrementally change it, and I fear it's going to be an absolute disaster.

I think if you visit this comment in exactly a year's time I'll probably be right, and it'd hardly be a surprise.

I absolutely agree with smacktoward, they're doing this to hide the fact they're simply not ready, but instead opening a can of worms that could devastate the entire project.

Not a fan of this, you can only hope this is the right move forward.

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Most phones are incrementally changed like that (aside of the case maybe, that's unusual), it's just usually not announced publicly. Aside of the v2 at the end of the schedule, this is all about multiple batches of a single model (and even v2 probably won't have a separate software distribution - I would expect just a different bootloader to flash).

That still doesn't answer the question of the fact there _will_ be different models and how that affects software support.

For example, Chestnut says: "improved power management", will all previous models get that?

In Birch it says "Next run of board", are there changes that change the software in any way?

Evergreen is the "LTS" release, do the others not get "LTS"?

In Q4 2020 there's a new CPU, does that affect drivers or software in any way? Will they provide software updates for all devices for a number of years?

You'd hope opting for Model 1 2019 doesn't punish you but I can't see how they have the resources for testing every single model for every single software release.

It's not a good idea in the long run. Not even Google would do something like that and nor should a smaller company, it's idiotic.

> That still doesn't answer the question of the fact there _will_ be different models and how that affects software support.

There will be different revisions, not models. It doesn't affect software support.

> For example, Chestnut says: "improved power management", will all previous models get that?

Yes (unless there's some serious hardware bug fixed in Chestnut, which is unlikely).

> In Birch it says "Next run of board", are there changes that change the software in any way?

No.

> Evergreen is the "LTS" release, do the others not get "LTS"?

You just apt-get upgrade to LTS. It's listed in the milestone because, well, it's not going to arrive before that.

> In Q4 2020 there's a new CPU, does that affect drivers or software in any way?

Unknown at this point, but even if yes, then today with kernel device trees it shouldn't be any issue.

> Will they provide software updates for all devices for a number of years?

This software is made to work on GNU/Linux. You can already run it on other devices, even your laptop. Just look at GTA04 - it's also kept close to mainline and in turn, it's still being supported.

> Not even Google would do something like that and nor should a smaller company

Google does something like that. Apple does as well. There are multiple hardware revisions of single iPhone models, some even include as big changes as different LTE modules.

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