As an IPhone holder I’m happy Google is doing this to force the market to support devices for longer. Apple will be pushed to go further than 6-7 years of software support.
Yeah. Pixel 8 and 9 series have 7 years by spec. I think Samsung matched it with their latest Galaxy S series. It’s one of those rare and fleeting moments when competition works to our benefit.
Indeed. However the root problem were CPU and other hw drivers AFAIK, not Google. Making their own SoC made it possible to bypass those greedy manufacturers and extend support.
100%. Qualcomm is the piece of shit you’re thinking of. They refused to provide more than 3 years of driver updates for their SoCs for more than decade, despite the heavy work Google did to make updates from vendors dramatically easier with Project Treble. Now that Google have their own SoC and began providing longer support, Qualcomm magically began offering longer support too. The Galaxy S24 that ships with QC in NA has 7 years of support. With all that said, Google is only doing this because they’re a minority player and offering support makes people like me buy their stuff for this. If they grow to a significant market share, you’ll see them stop extending the support or even shorten it, in order to increase sales. Just like Qualcomm.
Qualcomm announced that they will provide driver support for Snapdragon 8 Elite for 8 years iirc.
So, the competition (from Google in this case) really works miracles.
Seems like it.
True.
Samsung’s update policy for their lower end models is pretty atrocious. While on paper they offer updates for a couple of years, it you look more closely, you’ll notice that the update intervals get larger and larger as time goes on. You might not get important updates for half a year. Sure, still better than not updates at all, but a pretty awful policy for security updates.
Makes sense. I suspect they’re selling more of those overall so they like replacing them more often. The only reason they’re providing longer support for the S-series is because someone else does too. They have made their own SoC (Exynos) for more than a decade and there wasn’t anyone stopping them supporting the models with that SoC for longer. They didn’t.
It’s one of those rare and fleeting moments when competition works to our benefit.
More competition is always better for the consumer.
For the Pixel 6 and 7 series Google has promised 5 years of security updates right from the beginning. What’s new here is that they now also offer feature and OS upgrades for that same time period. Certainly nice to have, but not essential.
As a pixel 6a user I’m excited I’ll get a few more years of support and use out of this phone.
Sweet. This will likely mean extended GrapheneOS support too.
Open source…forever software updates until nobody cares to update the bloody thing.
You would like postmarket os as it is foss and software support is 10 years atleast.
Android is as closed as an open-source project can get.
If only they would send me a free volume button since their factory one broke…
Good thing my pixel 6 battery is marshmallow now and I was forced to buy a new phone 2 weeks ago…
I bought the Pixel 7 Pro and omg it was hot garbage, they had an unresolved bug open for like 3 months that caused scrolling to basically work only sometimes. It was impossible to use I had to return it within a week. Worse phone buy I’ve had in ~15 years.
