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Comment by captn3m0 | Hacker News Reader

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.

[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

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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.

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.

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.

There is an important distinction between promised lifetime and actual lifetime.

For example if a CPU instruction-level issue was discovered Fairphone would have no way to fix that without microcode updates. This means that a vendor can't guarantee security updates for longer than Qualcomm will offer low-level support. However the discovery of an explotable instruction 3 years after release is quite unlikely and as far as I am aware hasn't occured so presumably Google *could" continue updates in this case.

Of course there is still consumer expection issues. If phones are usually supported for 5 years even though they only promise 3 you might feel cheated if your particular model has to stop at 3.5 years.

There is also the option of ignoring the CPU vulnerability but continuing other security updates. However trying to explain this to users is incredibly difficult. Even if you can get their attention you have to explain the impact of being able to break out of the app sandbox to them.

Have we put all our computers in a trashcan since rowhammer?

TBF, Qualcomm is probably asking a lot more from Google than from a small company in the Netherlands.

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.

> 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.

> $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.

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.

There is an easy solution to this problem.

Pass a new "right to repair" law, such that any OEM that halts software patches on any network-connected device for more than 6 months will be required to unlock bootloaders and publish technical specs.

Apple and Android will see enormous and wonderful community involvement if that were to happen, and congress could force it, should we motivate them.

Not a fan to drop maintenance on the community.

Pass a law that taxes Google punitively for each app sale on an unmaintained phone, and see how quiclky they'll find a way to support their phones.

> Pass a law that taxes Google punitively for each app sale on an unmaintained phone, and see how quiclky they'll find a way to support their phones.

Wouldn't the result of that, be that phones that get anywhere even close to being unmaintained would stop dead (or close to it), so Google doesn't get exposed to a problem?

To me, that doesn't sound better than the situation you're trying to fix.

Selling apps to the long tail of older phones is probably worth throwing some money in a maintenance team. Especially with phones having a 3 year shelf life.

Not a fan to drop maintenance on the community.

As long as there is also a minimum support window, say 3+ years, and full specs and source are community released, then why not?

The important part could easily be ensuring that older hardware can be accessed. We need an end to binary blobs, or, to force long term blob support and updates.

I imagine a scenario where you pay $20 per year for support and updates for your old device, to a third party.

Or of course, there could be foundations, compile it yourself, etc too.

But if the environment is the reason, why not share the load?

Manufacturers publishing code, sources, and docs is not trivial in of itself.

I'm not a fan of it, because that basically means that Google asks the community to take up the bill for a service they sell at extraordinarily high price.

I know that's the case for lots of open-source software, but since we're coming to that topic, Google's open-source policy that produces software that is either tightly aligned with their own interest (Chrome) or barely usable without their proprietary ecosystem (Android) is shameful. Quite frankly, I would much rather see open-source communities work on linux phones, no matter how useless that may be.

Another reason I'm not a fan of it is that if Google is allowed to transfer their responsibility to a community, I'm willing to bet that their initial support duration will drop even more, and that any issue will be blamed on open-source maintainers, log4j-style.

> But if the environment is the reason, why not share the load?

Does Google share the profits? Is their Android business barely profitable to justify getting free labour?

I think we are aligned, but, my thought is... we can only push and wish for so much.

Forcing 3+ year support in law, plus forced code release at the end, gives a massive change, and some important bits.

It is part 1.

Also, my 3 years support is after last sale... not release date.

Empower the community is not a bad idea.

> will be required to unlock bootloaders and publish technical specs

is probably sufficient motivation. There's no way Apple would be willing to do that. Google might be, but they might have a lot of resistance from Qualcomm and possibly mobile carriers and other partners.

That is imo a bad fix, because it would be very easy for Google and Apple to make sure the technical specs are unreadable and the bootloaders complicated to use, without much recourse for the lawmaker.

Comparatively, it's much easier to make a law targeting the stores that's hard to avoid.

As has been mentioned in other comments that is also easy to avoid by simply making it impossible to download apps on older phones.

Yes, indeed. But that is a massive footgun to use, and it creates a direct incentive to have longer service durations.

It is likely that Google would stand to make more money by offering longer service duration for their OS, and by demanding phonemakers to maintain their firmware.

I guess the info we need to see whether this would be a good decision or not is how much money Google makes from selling apps to phones 3 year and older.

They will just prevent the Google app store from working on unmaintained phones, or just ship one last update to remove it from them.

That would cut their market size and attractiveness to new buyers. If they choose to harm themselves, that's fine by me.

Or magically find a way to stop tracking that metric.

I'm sure that, was such a law allowed to pass, lawmakers and prosecutors would magically find a way to express their dissatisfaction if Google was trying to skirt the law in such a crude way.

My bet would be on Google successfully lobbying to kill the bill in the first place, or to cripple it and make it irrelevant (for instance with a long grace period that always gets extended).

> lawmakers and prosecutors would magically find a way to express their dissatisfaction if Google was trying to skirt the law in such a crude way.

Depends on what the law makers actually want. Enough legislation is passed just do they can tell their voters "look, we did something" without actually hurting their corporate buddies.

Depends. Given the number of devices in circulation someone will figure out how to make money if we remove the obstacles for doing so.

This actually sounds like a workable solution, the first one I've seen so far that could really solve the issue

Disagree. For certain vendors you can already get unlocked bootloaders and kernel sources. That's how various aftermarket android ROMs are built. However, even for a project like lineageos, there's only one or two maintainers per device. Do you think one or two volunteer maintainer (presumably working in their free time), can keep the entire kernel up to date and patched?

Fine. Let's try another law.

Any locked device must brick itself after 6 months of no patches, to ensure the safety of the network.

A few months of that, and we will arrive at the previous law.

> Fine. Let's try another law.

>Any locked device must brick itself after 6 months of no patches, to ensure the safety of the network.

What does this accomplish? Get people mad? Moreover, what prevents someone from making trivial patches to keep a device "up to date", kind of like how people make trivial changes to their passwords to keep up with password rotation policies?

Yes, aside from finally protecting our networks from hostile traffic, that is the intended purpose.

I was thinking that we could name this law after you.

To be fair if the devices bricked themselves people would start to value update lufetime even more and sales of devices with short support would drop like a rock.

But this suffers from goodhart's law. "support period" becomes the metric to game, so manufacturers would say they "support" for 10 years or whatever, but what that entails is having an inter bump up the version number every 6 months.

If they say security updates for 10 years and there are unpatched security vulnerabilities living in the device before that I think they should have to refund the purchase.

> Do you think one or two volunteer maintainer (presumably working in their free time), can keep the entire kernel up to date and patched?

Maybe I misunderstand it, but I think it’s not that bad?

The kernel gets kept up-to-date by LineageOS, the device builds (official or unofficial) use the base builds, but add device-specific tweaks, and cherry-pick commits from elsewhere. And actually a level above that is AOSP which is maintained by Google.

Would love if someone could correct me.

>And actually a level above that is AOSP which is maintained by Google.

How do you think the CVEs get discovered? What about CVEs in the qualcomm specific code? How do you know that the amateur kernel developers wouldn't fall prey to c footguns and introduce new vulnerabilities?

Don't get me wrong, this is strictly better than the current state of affairs where there's zero patches, but I think people are underestimating how much effort it takes to keep a huge codebase patched.

Or you could hold the seller responsible for any harm caused security flaws for as long as the user chooses to use the phone.

I've had some similar ideas: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28247651

> We need a lemon-like law for consumer electronics.

I wonder how this should apply to planned obsolescence of devices like smartphones.

On one hand, it's obscene that manufacturers expect us to routinely spend ~$1k on a device that will in the best case scenario last for three years. There's no inherent reason that a flagship Samsung from 2017 shouldn't be perfectly serviceable today, and likewise for a Pixel 6 or iPhone 13 in 2030. However, the discontinuation of security updates makes it so that for all practical purposes they are not.

On the other hand, we can't exactly compel speech or labor. It would be one thing if there were a kill switch triggered after N years, but in this case the obsolescence isn't caused by an active update, rather a lack thereof.

Here's a possible middle ground:

1. Block device manufacturers from arbitrarily deprecating hardware. We can't compel the release of new software, but we can block the release of new software. Require manufacturers to submit a filing with request for approval before the release of any new mobile OS update, which must include an exhaustive list of all supported devices. In the event that a device is dropped from the list in a subsequent filing, it must be explained to the satisfaction of regulators that a specific hardware limitation makes continued support for the device problematic or impractical. Given approval to drop support for a device from an OS release, there would be no obligation on the manufacturer to backport security updates to prior releases.

2. Block component manufacturers from arbitrarily deprecating hardware. Any hardware included in a publicly available consumer electronic device must have its manufacturer commit to providing up-to-date driver software with support for the latest OS for the lifetime of the device. Failure to provide this within a certain time frame (say, three months) following the request of a device manufacturer would open them up to a lawsuit, wherein they could be compelled to publish the most recent release of the driver as open source / public domain. #1 would provide the incentive for each device manufacturer to proactively enforce this, as their entire product roadmap would be effectively frozen if they allowed component manufacturers to drag their feet.

3. Ban irreversible bootloader locking in new devices. Maybe an initial bootloader lock would be acceptable, but power users should have some way to override the lock and install a custom ROM without relying on vulnerabilities in the software.

What stops OEMs from publishing dummy updates that satisfy the legal checkboxes?

Dummy updates aren't security updates, so they can't satisfy the checkboxes.

If you're asking how it gets enforced, there could be a government office tasked with enforcement, and the law could let people sue.

Then leave one security patch out of the update and push it to the next one.

So put in the full work to patch things, but do it slightly wrong on purpose? What do companies gain by being so passive-aggressive?

Higher revenues through induced obsolescence?

Delaying patches slightly doesn't really help revenues unless it's widely publicized, in which case they look bad and possibly get sued and it doesn't even save them any effort. Maybe it's a risk, but I'll definitely take that risk over what we have today.

> 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

My galaxy note 10 (purchased 2 years ago) is still receiving updates.

In fact Samsung is saying they'll support most phones for 4 years while others are supported for 5:

https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/22/22295639/samsung-galaxy-d...

I'm referring to FTA

>Samsung did guarantee support for at least three “generations” of Android OS updates in 2020

The 4/5 year support is for security updates. I will correct that some samsungs are now receiving 5 years of security updates, I didn't realize that.

> but they do understand that an old iPhone seems to work better than an old Android that cost the same at release.

I suspect that the majority of Android-using techies that notice this are either on a faster new phone cycle than 3 years, or have already priced that difference into their total value calculation.

I also strongly suspect that the average customer does not indeed understand.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

Congrats, you just figured out what Microsoft created that translation layer for. ;-)

Windows 11 ships Android userland out of band (as an optional feature).

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.

It's fascinating that Google, the stewards of Android, have refused to solve any of those problems. The most successful operating system in history is managed by a company who refuses to solve its deficiencies.

Compare with the second most successful platform, and how Microsoft has been solving problems for decades while maintaining their first commandment: Thou shall not break backwards compatibility.

> It's fascinating that Google, the stewards of Android, have refused to solve any of those problems. The most successful operating system in history is managed by a company who refuses to solve its deficiencies.

I wouldn't say that they've refused to solve its deficiencies; Google is not to blame for nor do they have any control over the Linux kernel's development practices. The kernel developers don't want to have stable APIs and the natural result is that out-of-tree drivers are poorly supported.

The Fairphone doesn’t seem to have a problem with the exact same conditions.

There is a saying about thrust and bricks around here somewhere... one example does not the ecosystem make. That said there are examples of SoC's which get attention and manufactures which do a better job than 3 years, but its the exception rather than the rule, and the updates frequently are quite late.

If your willing to dedicate an engineer or two to keeping it running then so be it. I can assure you that your average 10 year old PC running Linux probably hasn't gotten that much attention since before it was released. But then again, PC's adhear to industry standards and are mostly iterative designs.

(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?

Sounds cheap to me.

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.

Or you could hire a team of 5 in Eastern Europe

In eastern europe? 300k would get you 5 developers in the UK for a year, easy.

Well it clearly shows that their business model is fundamentally flawed and they should probably stop selling phones.

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.

> 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

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.

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.

> 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-...

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?

Personally, I don't care what's "efficient" and what will make Google the most money. What I care about is how they treat a) their users, and b) the planet.

Money is a means to an end. The fact that so much of our society treats it as their score in the game of life—something to be maximized at all costs as an end in itself—is a disease of the mind.

If Google (and, yes, literally every other major corporation) made more decisions based on what was better for their users (not just "their customers", because in certain aspects of their business that's advertisers, not regular users) and for the health of the planet, while simply making sure that they had a reasonably comfortable financial cushion, we would all be better off, and Google's executives and shareholders would barely notice the difference in their high scores.

I'd happily pay 10c a year for extended support on my phone that I don't want to replace.

That's a different and fair argument (and so would I as a Pixel 3 owner).

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.

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)

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?

> '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.

The argument still breaks down at bigger numbers. If you have 500 different ideas for ways the lord should spend a negligible 1% of his money, then even if you have a good argument that the lord should do something, that's not enough by itself to show that any particular idea meets the bar.

If Google starts subsidizing their physical devices from their infinite money bin of advertising revenue, they'll run afoul of antitrust and anti dumping laws.

Whaaa? Nope, not how that works.

You can't run afoul of antitrust laws without being a monopoly. It's why Apple can make it so safari is the only browser available on the Iphone whereas microsoft lost a bunch of money (particularly in the EU) for installing IE by default on everyone's computer.

Android phones are nowhere near antitrust territory, specifically from google. Before they'd run any risks they'd need to actually outsell someone like samsung or apple.

Just because you are rich and potentially a monopoly in one market, doesn't mean you are in all markets.

If Google is deemed a monopoly in search (or advertising, or Android app store, etc.), using that position or money to try and gain advantage in another market (in this case, phones) is problematic.

And this way, they risk running afoul false advertising and class action lawsuits. Its not mentioned anywhere that the phone becomes dangerous to use after 3 years.

If Google charges Apple-level prices, surely it's reasonable for customers to expect Apple-level support.

If Apple-level support was a decisive factor for Android customers either they wouldn't be buying Android phones, or Google would have offered it long ago.

It seems reasonable for Google to offer that level of support, certainly. But anyone expecting it isn't paying attention to Google's record.

For somebody that uses Linux privately and professionally, Apple support was one of the major reasons I switched from Android to iOS based devices. Just until recently I had iPhone 6s (I keep my devices until they break or go out of support).

Apple used to look expensive to me, but if I divide initial cost per number of year of device exploitation, it actually gets cheaper then Android devices.

1 million dollars for million of users sticking around for 2 extra years on Google services is EXTREMELY cheap all things considered.

Problem is those millions will still be using Google Services, just on a new phone paid by themselves.

Not necessarily. Every time you force a user to abandon their current product you risk them looking over the wall at your competitors. In the U.S. at least, iPhones are really attractive, and I say this as an Android user. When my Pixel 3a is EOL'ed in May 2022, I think I may take the plunge and finally switch. If I do that, Google immediately loses my valuable telemetry, they lose my usage of Chrome mobile, and they risk my switching to iCloud - something I can't use on my Android phone.

Google's operating income is like $50B. A more proportionate question would be whether I was willing to pay $10 for a reusable shopping bag since it's marginally better for the environment compared to a free plastic bag—and the answer is yes, absolutely, it wouldn't even be a question.

Google has a profit of ~20 billion dollars per quarter. That is, it has a profit of ~80 billion dollars per year.

There's only so much you can do with money. Their yearly profit (once again, not revenue, profit) is larger than the entire state budget revenue of more than 150 countries (not combined) [1].

So yes. The argument is very valid.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governmen...

>Would you pay $50 for a stick of gum?

There are people who do.

https://wakkinews.com/2018/12/18/worlds-most-expensive-chewi...

    The gums were repackaged and auctioned off to fans who would do anything to have something already used by Britney Spears, including an already been chewed, sticky bubble gum. The gums were sold for between $50 to $100.

Almost everything is pocket change for google, so why aren't they buying almost everything every year. Genius!

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.

Not defending Google here at all, but that $49 battery change was a hard-fought victory from Apple.

And it doesn’t apply to anywhere outside the US (Writing this comment on my iPhone SE, which is still on the original battery because it’s much costlier to swap the battery in India).

Why does it costs more?

To me that’s an insane win for everyone, including Apple. Because it completely changes the value proposition of iPhones.

Hand me down iPhones for teenagers became a no brainer since all it costs is 49$ to get a 3-4 years old phone back to brand new. And they get the blue bubbles in iMessage (which, if you ask parents, is THE social differentiator in schools these days). Having a well architected stack and great engineering pays off in surprising ways!

> And they get the blue bubbles in iMessage (which, if you ask parents, is THE social differentiator in schools these days).

I would also add that "if you ask students, it is THE social differentiator" as well.

BUT, how the f_ck is it a good thing to encourage teenagers to get locked in to a company's products so they can stay socially relevant? iMessage's manipulative strategy (because teenagers value social belonging) by Apple is morally corrupt. I'm not saying it's effective (because their strategy absolutely is); I'm saying it's wrong. We shouldn't be encouraging children to get locked into the richest company in the world's walled garden for the rest of their life—what they use as teenagers is what they're going to, chances are, keep using for the rest of their lives.

Teenagers literally do not use Android devices. The iOS market share in American high schools is easily over 90%. If you go to a high school classroom, you would be surprised to find more than one or two Android users in one classroom.

Do you want your future to be one where Apple's locked down operating system has a market share of over 90%? Where Android is irrelevant and neglected, and you do not own your device—because unlike on iOS, some Android phones actually do let you unlock your bootloader and boot different operating systems?

Please do not encourage the spread of iMessage. It lets one company cement their iron grip on the upcoming generations and will result in a net loss of computer freedom.

> iMessage's manipulative strategy (because teenagers value social belonging) by Apple is morally corrupt

Apple decided to build better messaging on their platform. They saw that carriers simply didn’t care or understood messaging and decided to innovate and take care of the experience. Texting on iPhone just works. We should celebrate that. Google could have created a competing product as feature rich but instead decided to spawn and kill 10 different chat apps.

> Where Android is irrelevant and neglected

Honestly, the android handset makers are already neglecting their own OS, looking at the barely three years of support they offer.

> Please do not encourage the spread of iMessage

I already do. Honestly, I support the platform that just works. To me a phone is simply a tool to get things done.

> Texting on iPhone just works.

Downloading Telegram, Signal, Discord, WhatsApp, or the number of third-party messaging applications that is widely used by a number of people, within and outside the blue bubble of the US "just works" as well. And unlike iMessage, these platforms let you chat with other people. What's so wrong with that? Is it too much friction to click to install a (superior with objectively tons more features than iMessage that work on all its platforms) third-party messaging client? Telegram even has games, which are quite popular amongst the teenagers, just like iMessage.

>Is it too much friction to click to install a third-party messaging client?

Yes. This is why defaults matter. In this case, it generated a network effect.

Clearly not in Europe or India or China. First world problems, I guess.

Countries where iPhones are less dominant and the Android SMS app is the default - so we see people using Whatsapp or equivalent.

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.

The issue are patched drivers that are not ported when new kernel releases are introduced.

Apple, somehow, managed to avoid these problems on their SoCs.

> Oh woe. What a hard life Apple engineers have. Oh, how brilliant they are. The world would crumble without them. Woe.

Honestly, they shipped results. And judging by the difference between offers from Qualcomm and Apple, are in a different league.

> 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.

The pixel 3 doesn't stop working after support for it runs out. Same as how that 4th gen iPad hasn't received the last 5 major version releases. (It runs iOS 10, we're on 15 now)

This was due to the transition from 32-bit to 64-bit. The 5th gen iPad has an A9, the first to support iOS 11 (64-bit only).

The last iOS 10 update is 10.3.4, shipped in July 2019, a bit more than 6.5 years after the release of the 4th gen iPad in Nov 2012.

Yup Apple is pretty good here. My daily browser is an iPad Air 2, it's still getting all the iPadOS updates, 7.25 years after its release.

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

Apple and Samsung are (primarily) hardware companies, whereas Google is an advertiser. If your income depends on hardware sales, longevity/reliability is an important factor for your long-term brand reputation that you can’t afford to sacrifice.

Google-branded phones are essentially just another avenue for them to push Google Play Services, one where they can guarantee the platform experience they envision developing vanilla Android. I think they also serve as reference hardware, but the custom tensor chip on the most recent pixels sorta eschews that… unless they are pushing the idea of putting a TPU on Android phones.

Its similar to why NVIDIA(designer/manufacturer) doesn’t offer as good customer service or warranty on their graphics cards as EVGA (hardware/packager) does.

This isn't a super convincing argument cuz you can spin it the exact opposite way here(hardware manufacturers want to sell more devices, google wants people to be using their services and have as many devices in the wild as possible).

Probably here there's not a great overarching narrative of reasons, but I ... believe Apple controls more of the components in its phones and can do the management itself

Apple uses their own chips in their phones. Samsung also has their own silicon, though they do use Qualcomm chips in some models too.

So what are the non-Qualcomm phones that have longer support?

Samsung right? So who is going to compensate Qualcomm for their lost sales because they're shit to consumers?

[deleted]

Don't see why we are blaming Google for not bowing to Qualcomm rather than Qualcomm's low level of support.

Because Google controls the vast majority of phone manufacturing on the planet: They have to approve every new hardware model. I think if Google said it was dropping support for Qualcomm in new models of phones unless an extended support lifecycle was reasonably offered, that Qualcomm would respond with "okay, bye".

Google likes to hide behind "the OEMs make those kinds of decisions", but it's not reality: The Android MADA still gives them complete control of every Android hardware platform sold with support for Play Services.

And, considering Google is one of the three most valuable companies on the entire planet, sitting on massive piles of cash stashed everywhere they can possibly stash it to avoid paying taxes.... Google can afford to pay for support if it wants to.

If Google wanted to support phones more than three years, it would do that. It doesn't want to, and it's time to stop pretending otherwise.

Google leveraging its control of android to extract better terms from Qualcomm for the Pixel business would be a blatant violation anti-trust statutes and they would get demolished in court

Considering how blatantly Android is already violating antitrust statues (the Android MADA mentioned above which governs the relationship between Google and OEMs is... flagrantly illegal, and has only gotten away with it by being kept very secret), I am quite doubtful that the government will yet do anything any sooner because Google chooses to support users better.

It would not be leveraging for the Pixel business either, it would leveraging Android for Android as a whole: Presumably Google could drop support for hardware that does not provide five years of support from the Android codebase. It would then be on Qualcomm to either meet or fail to meet that requirement, and set their license pricing accordingly.

Having a support lifecycle of at least five years is... bare minimum for the industry. Nobody could argue that it is an antitrust issue to require it.

What kind of market share does the Pixel business have?

Yeah exactly. Both google and qualcomm benefit from this arrangement. They might "blame" qualcomm but they're not going to go out of their way to try to change the behavior and therefore make less money on phones.

Google is the one selling you the phone.

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.

You can get Google Camera on anything: https://www.celsoazevedo.com/files/android/google-camera/

On pixel phones I'm pretty sure you can install the camera from the Play Store with no fuss on LineaseOS.

I say that using a LineaseOS Pixel 4a with Google Camera and don't remember doing anything special to install it.

Talk about letting the wolf into the henhouse.

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?

The Pixel phones are well known for having a _ton_ of postprocessing for their photos to look good. Stabilisation, color correcting a known faulty sensor, etc. Not having this is truly visible.

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.

Can you guarantee there won't be an unpatchable boot ROM security flaw in three years of devices' "support" span?

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.

> 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?

I want my perfectly good phone, that I bought 3 years ago, to still get updates. In all honestly, my old Motorola G4 would still be a good phone if it had more storage (and didn't eat SD cards).

Everything about my Pixel 3a (which is EOL in 4 months), works absolutely perfect for all my needs. Great camera, still very good battery life, plenty of storage / power. This is forced obsolescence for a device that is more than capable of handling most everyone's mobile workload. And, as a mobile minimalist, mine especially.

This kinda shit makes me want to go back to a fucking flip phone. I'll probably roll the dice with Lineage or Calyx, but the absurdity of all this is really frustrating.

Ultimately most people don't need the rapid pace of new chips. The pixel 3 level is sufficient for the foreseeable future. There isnt a binary innovation or support. Just as we have LTS branches of software we should have LTS firmware. I would buy a LTS device in a heartbeat. But there are those who want the bleeding edge and they should be catered for too.

> Or should we spend all of our time making sure your Apple IIc still has security patches for 2022

Microsoft's timilene for OS support is easily 10 to 20 years. Windows XP was released in 2001. It's final ecurity support ended in 2019. 18 years later.

I know, it's hard for modern "programmers" to fathom such a level of commitment.

> 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

QCOM Mkt cap 188.12B

Alphabet Mkt cap 1.70T

Alphabet cannot buy Qualcomm for the same reason Nvidia could not buy Arm.

If your implication is that someone market cap equals negotiating leverage you would only be right if Alphabet was the only elephant that Qualcomm was in bed with.

Point taken, however: modern apps don't run on 80s hardware, but they do run on a Pixel 3. The line in the sand just needs to align a bit more with the physical capabilities, for e-waste reasons.

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).

Yeah, custom ROMs.

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.

> newer Android versions would not run on this chip

Why would all the Android Java stuff actually require a newer chip?

e.g. OnePlus 3 started with 7.x, was officially updated only to 9.x, but with LineageOS it runs 11.x currently.

> Untrusted sources

As if the vendors are super trustworthy…

> you might be able to install Google Apps... after the 6th try

Google services are "just one more zip to flash" and I've never heard of having to retry multiple times.

> no Google Wallet

Not too hard to carry the actual physical cards, or use a separate device (smartwatch).

> or banking apps

Complain to your bank / switch to a better bank.

> no idea what is included

LineageOS shoves the commit log right in your face, you can have a pretty good idea when it's really important to update.

> Performance and stability of the device usually takes a big dive

Really? Performance and stability are typically the reasons to switch to custom.

CyanogenMod/LineageOS have been, in my experience, the most performant and stable Android experiences by far, since the 4.x days at least.

GP seems to be complaining about random ROMs while ignoring the biggest one.

I used to ROM-hop a lot, but nowadays, I just stay on whatever the official LineageOS build is (for my OnePlus Nord, that’s still Android 10, but I tried stock and couldn’t handle it) and install my weekly updates.

IMO performance is usually better the more random the ROM (so xXx NoLimits > LineageOS > Vendor OS), stability can be very hit or miss with the random ones but is equal for LineageOS and vendor.

Despite Magisk Hide not getting developed anymore, at least on 10 I can pass safety check despite being rooted btw.

I have LineageOS installed on an old BQ Aquaris X for more than a year now.

Most of the time it is unusable and slow. It randomly crawls, i.e. opening a browser, an input field, or the GMail App will make the device halt for about 10s. It will never get the new Android. Camera was always crappy with LineageOS. WiFi is broken since a few weeks and will constantly just vanish, needing to connect manually.

I almost only ran Cyanogen or Lineage on my devices, if not stock. I tinkered a lot with my Cyanogen installs back in the days, trying to even the bumps and failings.

Any device that has a decent stock image will run better with stock than any LineageOS or CustomROM in my experience.

I have never heard about that device. I’ve been using HTC Desire Z (T-Mobile G2 in the USA), some Nexus, and then OnePlus One, 5 and now Nord. All of them were faster with Cyanogen/LineageOS. Never had broken anything (cam, wifi, etc.) with official, stable builds. Camera works as well.

As I said, I’m currently still on Android 10, but I don’t really mind that.

Holy wow, a person in the wild using SafetyNet apps on custom ROM?!

Any chance you can name and shame those apps for my further edification?

I currently have none, I just wanted to see if I would pass :D

But Google Pay requires it, so does my Health Insurance app (TK, which I don’t use), and the Banking App for DKB (fun fact, they enabled it in a normal update and left many people suddenly without access).

Pretty sure my banking apps - Monzo, Starling and Curve require SafetyNet. Also, I use Google Pay. And I'm running them on a custom ROM - Arrow OS.

I don't understand what the problem with that should be though.

> Not too hard to carry the actual physical cards, or use a separate device (smartwatch).

Yeah, because what I want is to buy a watch if I want to pay with my phone. Great solution!

> Complain to your bank / switch to a better bank.

Ah, yes, the "Switch-banks-because-your-phone-is-broken"-Trick, didn't think of that!

> LineageOS shoves the commit log right in your face, you can have a pretty good idea when it's really important to update.

Yeah, but the CVEs and firmware bugs are not and will never be in the commit logs. And even if they are, when I install an update on my phone OTA, I obviously will not pull up the commit log! How much time do you think I have?!

That's what the "Security Level"-indicator in the device settings/info is for.

> Really? Performance and stability are typically the reasons to switch to custom.

Yes, really. My LineageOS was always crappy slow on my BQ Aquaris, for every version. The camera is simply unusable. Every update brings another random bug. Since a few weeks it will lose WiFi, needing manual intervention, sometimes just 3 seconds after connecting.

If you want a working device, and not tinker with it all the time, or risk being stranded without certain functionality, you are safer with a device with a decent stock from a manufacturer that updates it diligently.

Google 'blueline' (the codename for Pixel 3) shows "partial" mainline kernel support, and work in progress for more - https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Google_Pixel_3(google-blu... So there is some hope that this might become at least a semi-usable device with reasonably trusted, non-flaky sources. Android app support can then be provided on top of the mainline kernel as a custom "container" via Anbox/Waydroid.

Custom ROMs are the Pareto principle in practice. Yes, you can relatively easily modify & build out 80% working functionality. As for the final 20%...

Huh? You get more features on custom ROMs, not less. Only very new ROMs or those newly switching to a new major Android version have missing features.

You've never run a ROM with a major bug or missing feature?

Only when using unstable ones or those with edgy names ;)

Custom ROMS are locked out of every Verizon device sold as well. Locked bootloaders have relegated a huge chunk of Pixel 3s to the landfill prematurely.

- I trust some custom roms more than vendors

- Bugs / perf / stability / qualcomm not providing firmware are device dependant, it's a good idea to check compatibility before buying the phone, same as when you're buying a laptop you're planning to use with linux.

- GApps can be installed easily but they're basically spyware, so maybe think twice about that.

- Magisk et similia fix banks app (no idea about Google Wallet, I don't use it)

> ...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.

Obviously YMMV, but last year there was exactly one OEM merging kernel LTS (Sony). While many (dare I say most?) Custom ROMs do.

I've read a few times that Sony is doing good work in terms of their kernels, but details eluded me, and as the result I never owned a Sony Android phone. Are they really good in that regard? Do they upstream? How long do they publish security patches for?

Yeah so uh, Sony is super weird. There is the production side of Sony, and the developer side of Sony. They barely coexist, they are two completely different minds. Think I'm exaggerating? They have two bootloaders, one for developers, one for production. (The led changes color). Once you have unlocked your bootloader, you have to download and use a different flash tool to flash Sony's ROM. They are not available on the same page. That being said: - the "production" side is a meh OEM. Usually only one major upgrade, annoying lock-ins - the developer side is amazing. They make contribution to mainline Linux, they provide AOSP build trees, they upgrade major Linux kernel versions, their AOSP build tree is much more open source than Google's, they provide very clean fixes for stupid Qualcomm issues that is not fixed even on Pixels, they provide more android major upgrades

So yeah, weird. I believe their AOSP side is funded by some governments who want the most maintainable and auditable Android on their devices

I wonder how much of Sony Mobile is left in Sweden since the Sony Ericsson days. Maybe that's why they differ so much, they come from different company cultures?

They upstream their changes and have a user-unlockable bootloader, which puts them ahead of approximately all of their competitors. Unfortunately they don't really seem interested in selling their phones in most English-speaking markets.

By upstreaming you mean Android project, not Linux right? E.g. not to mainline?

You can have a look at https://github.com/sonyxperiadev/kernel

Downloading a rom from an internet forum to stay up to date with security patches seems like potentially flawed logic.

Where else would you get the update from?

Yes, now you're grasping what everyone is complaining about.

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?

LineageOS does not provide real, production support for these devices. If a random binary blob turns out to have an unfixable security issue, this is likely not a showstopper for the typical LineageOS user: they can easily deploy workarounds, reassess their risk etc. Most users would want to rely on rather stricter support than that.

For every reported, exploitable bug in a firmware blob there are generally several in machine-independent core OS components. So, upgrading everything they easily can still has value -- and that's a lot.

See my other answer somewhere below: I still use my HD2 from 2009 today.

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.

My 3a xl battery is at 91% design capacity(1), 3385 mAh, and is still utterly sufficient and far better than any other phone I've had.

Hardly death's door...

(1)As measured by Accubattery just now

2 full days on GrapheneOS sometimes.

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.

Eh, I don't really mind if the batteries are a pain to replace as long as they only need it every 3-4 years. Especially if the tradeoff is that the battery is bigger and more water resistant thanks to its internal placement.

I recall back in the era of user replaceable batteries they tended to not last very long, and were of incredibly spotty quality.

I mostly just hated dropping my phone to have the battery pop out and loosing any work I was doing on my phone.

The batteries are "replaceable"; your own comment acknowledges that. What you mean is batteries the user can easily replace, which means you have to make compromises in the design of the phone and its structural integrity.

The market has chosen against that. What you're talking about is forcing people to accept your personal preference, by law, because your design preference didn't win in the market.

Personally, I oppose that.

The market has chosen against that

Did it though? Or did the manufacturers choose that for us by choosing to market phones based on millimeters of measurement and grams of weight and one piece glass backs that most people cover up with a case anyway.

This seems kind of like the car manufacturers saying that they are only meeting demand when they sell large SUV's and trucks, while running ads showing SUV's on dirt trails touting the freedom that a large SUV/truck gives drivers, even though most high end SUV's and trucks won't go any farther offroad than a gravel parking lot at a winery.

If phone manufacturers started competing on environmental costs of their phones instead of being the smallest/lightest, then maybe replaceable batteries would come back.

We like big, light, thin and waterproof phones.

It's only natural to want something comfortable to use which you can see clearly on and which doesn't break your nose when it falls on your face in bed. A minority (me included) would prefer smaller phones with a massive battery, no matter the thickness - and yet I can't stop marvelling at how cool my new big, light, thin phone is. If my phone didn't break in 3 years I'll think about buying a battery on eBay and replace it (or get it done by someone, if I'm not capable of doing it).

SUVs are appealing because they're big and cost a lot of money. It's often a display of superiority and wealth. Those people would drive a tank if they could.

People are not buying SUVs or phones because of advertising, but because of their intrinsic qualities (whether physical or social).

> SUVs are appealing because they're big and cost a lot of money. It's often a display of superiority and wealth. Those people would drive a tank if they could.

Uh, that and they're useful? The only thing comparable for the combo of carrying capacity, people seating, and towing of your average SUV is a full size van. Which drives like shit, has terrible visibility side and rear, and is often even more of a break-in target. Oh, and it costs the same or more as that SUV that's easy to park, easy to drive, fits all your kids or family or bikes and luggage and can still haul a light trailer.

The modern SUV is the evolution of the station wagon. Some of the early models were just wealth signals, I can kind of agree with that, but generally there's no better option for someone who regularly hauls 4+ people and a bunch of crap everywhere.

> The only thing comparable for the combo of carrying capacity, people seating, and towing of your average SUV is a full size van.

Not really? The most popular non-pickup in the US (The Rav4) only seats 4 and has a 1500 lb towing capacity. Most station wagons can do that (for example the V90 can tow between 1650 and 3700 lb). The Sienna, which is a minivan, can tow 3500 lbs and carry 8 people

The Sienna, which is a minivan, can tow 3500 lbs and carry 8 people

And the Sienna has 50% more cargo capacity than a Ford Expedition unless you take out all the seats, then they have about the same cargo capacity.

https://www.truedelta.com/Toyota-Sienna-vs-Ford-Expedition-s...

The Sienna is available in AWD, and has a hybrid drivetrain.

It's biggest disadvantage over an SUV is ground clearance and towing capacity. As you said, the Sienna can tow 3500 lbs, but the Expedition can tow 6000-9000 lbs depending on drivetrain. Well, I take that back, the biggest disadvantage of a minivan compared to an SUV is that the minivan is a minivan.

The Rav4 is a car shaped like a small SUV. That "Compact SUV" style of car is not what I was talking about at all. Again though, if you want the model that can tow and has all wheel drive, you're looking at 47,000 USD for the Sienna.

I'm sure you can find another outlier here and there, but in general, SUV's get a lot of hate but are generally great choices for safety, ease of use, and capability.

I feel like there's a missing middle ground here. Sure, we don't have to go back to the days of peel off or slide off backs. But why not allow the phone to be opened easier? Perhaps a few tiny screws and a gasket vs...glue?

Replacing a battery is technically possible still, it just requires a ton of patience, a heat gun, maybe a suction cup, maybe a razor knife. And even then you run the risk of breaking the back glass in the process(been there, done that).

I don't think we need to go back to being able to hot swap batteries on the fly, but surely we can come up with something everyday people can realistically do at home.

Or simply supporting local repair shops: it might require some special tools or equipment but if the phone store in every mall can have that, it's a lot more accessible than if you need to pay top dollar and/or not have the device for a few days.

like https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkpbgy/apple-will-tell-you-h...?

Exactly - there are good arguments for tightly sealed devices but that should be paired with right to repair laws requiring minimum part & tool availability and capping prices.

Modern iphones all require a fancy laser to remove the back glass. [1]. You won't be doing that with a screwdriver at home.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X07j5deVIfU

No need to go lie on the internet. You don't need to remove the glass to open the case, it's still two screws and a sealing gasket. Removing the glass is more like an industrial process to replace a broken glass backing but retaining the rest of the back cover.

After you remove the cover you still have to remove a few pieces of the top layer of components, as described in guides like this iPhone 13 Pro battery replacement one: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPhone+13+Pro+Battery+Replaceme...

Now, say you tried a DIY repair and you broke the glass, that'd be a different case of suckage, but that doesn't really mean that suddenly batteries aren't replaceable. There could be a discussion around ease of replacement but there is ease of manufacture and sealing properties to consider as well.

That guide has 36 steps which include melting adhesive, using suction cups and using a pick to detach the display from the case.

On top of that there are a number of peripherals to remove before even getting to the battery. To me that seems extremely difficult.

Rewiring the wire-wrap backplane of a (in comparison) low-power computing system from 60 years ago with just a wire wrapping tool and wire with only 2 steps is 'extremely simple' if we were to use your measurement of tools, steps and material, yet I doubt anyone replacing their phone batteries could do that... It's all relative.

By remove you mean completely melt and destroy. There's no easy way to remove it without breaking the entire glass back, this is bonkers.

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.

Pixel 3A user here. Battery works great 2.5 years in. Should I be worried?

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.

Wasn't Project Treble supposed to reduce Google's dependency on Qualcomm updating their drivers?

https://www.xda-developers.com/list-android-devices-project-...

The OP covers this in the article:

> 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.

My rule of thumb is that Google products or initiatives with “Project” in the official name never work out. If it was a real thing they would have given it a real name at launch.

Exception that proves the rule: I use Google Fi (formerly Project Fi) as my mobile provider. While they haven't exactly added resources to it, it serves me remarkably well as a cellular provider. And I use an iPhone!

That's a good counterexample! Hopefully they won't realize it's still chugging along and keep it alive. :)

I haven't heard about Project Treble till your comment. A quick google:

"Project Treble (take a deep breath) is Google's ambitious effort to rearchitect Android in order to establish a modular base in which the lower-level code created by silicon vendors is separated from the main Android operating system"

As in abstracted away hardware code? As in...how operating systems have been built since before TikTokers were even born?

Everything is on a spectrum, they are further siloing off hardware from software and cutting out some spaghetti code between the two. Before hardware manufacturers had to merge in google's code with theirs before they release, with proper segregation google's aim with the project is to make a clean cut between the two so that kernel and up aren't so tightly coupled and they can upgrade their OS without breaking the hardware.

Further than they siloed it before, yes. In comparison to the competition (which sadly withdrew for other reasons), they are extremely far behind: Windows ME worked fine with hardware and drivers from Windows 95. But the whole problem is the consequence of Linux not having a stable driver interface.

There are many adjectives that could be used for Windows ME, but "worked fine" is not one of them. Whether with Win95 drivers or its own.

I've certainly used modem drivers from Win 95 in Win Me

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".

Yes, this. The 6s came out in 2015 and is still supported. I used one until just a few months ago. Worked great.

The 5 years for Pixel are for security updates only. OS updates are still 3 years. IMHO it's still too low, but it's a (small) step up.

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.

Given Google's track record we will see exactly how well supported it is in years 4 and 5. I expect it will be just the bare minimum.

You're correct. Google is promising 3 years of OS updates and 5 years of security updates.

Apple foresaw this and made the appropriate investments because they explicitly value device longevity. Google could easily do the same.

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).

>ridiculous amount of money

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.

How many emissions are we talking about here?

> 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.

So you don't think I have "any basis" for saying that was not a factor in deciding to buy a phone? Do you know people? Most don't pay much attention things of this nature, the people on this board are not even close to the norm. And the pixel has been a sales success since it's introduction. To me, your argument amounts to "not ah!".

Also, where did you get the "few pennies per phone" number? If that is accurate, what do you attribute google's decision to not spend basically nothing for longer updates from Qualcom?

Thanks for your comment. I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree. From my own (purely anecdotal) experience, if most people had been told that their phone would be unsupported after 3 years they would have considered that strongly in their purchase. Since my experience is anecdotal it proves nothing, but my major disagreement is that you point to sales numbers as evidence that people don't care about support.

>feature that obvious(based on sells numbers) was not a factor in deciding to buy the phone or not,

I don't think those customers were informed of the limited support prior to the sale, so those sales numbers are not meaningful in this context. Also, many companies offer longer support. Google is selling Pixel as a premium phone so (in my opinion) offering only 3 years of support is a major abuse of the customer relationship.

As far as pennies per phone, I was referring to this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30075970

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