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Comment by netdur | Hacker News Reader

sorry but that's just naive idealism, my wife has android flagship, a Samsung s10, she will receive one more year of updates, then she will be on her own, my daughter has iPhone 6S, this old device will receive iOS 14 soon.

my wife do not care about updates, she will not hesitate a second to get iPhone once she knows her social media or pictures is not safe on her android device, this is the issue Android have and Fuchsia have to fix.

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I'm pretty sure Qualcomm not giving a shit about supporting their SoC is why my Android watches were practically EOL'd within months.

Not sure how Fuchsia is supposed to solve this. If you can port those Qualcomm SoC drivers to the fixed Fuchsia interface, you could just as easily port them to the mainline Linux kernel and submit them upstream.

"Easily"? Some things can only be shipped as binary blobs. For example, you won't get open source audio drivers that support patent-encumbered codecs like Dolby Atmos.

Windows has a stable binary ABI which means that my drivers don't go stale when Microsoft pushes out a minor rev to the NT kernel. Windows does its updates and my peripherals [mostly] work just fine.

Exactly. It is kind of funny how IT people look through their tech glass and think that the rest of the world (99.9999%) does the same. Nobody cares about software, everybody cares about user experience. Linux proved the point that having unstable driver interface has nothing to do with the success of the platform.

I think that if you consider success for the average user, Android has proved it, not the Linux kernel.

Note that it will only get one more major Android version, but Samsung provides 4 years of security updates, so she still has 3 more years before she's on her own.

Certainly not as good as Apple, but I believe that's the best you can find in Android land.

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