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Comment by MattGaiser | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> 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?

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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.

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