Prominent Android manufacturers commit to supporting phone software for 7 years
Samsung phones now come backed with seven years' worth of security updates and seven generations of OS upgrades.
cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/9647496
Hopefully a blow to planned obsolescence
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Once again I look at Sundar Pichai and ask, what is the point of you? Under his stewardship, Android has lost all signs of life. The Android community is dead. There's been no innovation and the little bits of innovation they had created in recent years were quickly sunset. The last selling point of a Pixel was the quick updates and long update life but now everyone offers seven years. No identity, no community, no selling point, just blandness! They don't even leverage their money to offer cheaper hardware, the Pixel Tablet with Dock is compelling in its form factor, but upon closer look, it's less than mid-range specs, sub-par speaker performance and all with an over inflated price. At least eat the cost so that you can get one or two of these in every home. The only thing that's impressed me in recent years is bundling the watches.
i don't think they like the android community much since a lot of the community is dedicated toward getting away from the surveillance and theft that Google profits from.
Well if they would think more than 1 financial quarter ahead of things, they'd realize that they will lose customers to competition, thereby ruining both device sales and data gathering profits.
What shocks me, and I do mean shocks me, is what this line of thinking implies. Is the data google (tries to) gather from me really worth more $ than, say, an average of 350$ each year? Cause thats just 1 phone every 2-3 years and I'm looking into a tablet, and wearables eventually. I refuse to believe any knowledge about me is unique and valuable enough to beat that, and it seriously confuses me.
The last selling point of a Pixel was the quick updates and long update life
And I thought it was the ability to re-lock bootloader with a custom key which is why Graphene OS is only developed for Pixels.
I really need to install Graphene and have a proper play with it.
It's not that exciting, but that's a good thing - it works very well and is very similar to a stock experience!
They're not concerned with product, they're concerned with profit. They're strategically cutting away bits and pieces that don't make money. Incidentally, these are all the fun and exciting bits, leaving behind the blandness.
It's a shame. I remember the Google+ days when they were playing with app redesigns. Those days were fun.
I agree, from a user point of view, however from Google's point of view guys only job is to make money for the company, which he seems to be doing.
Android has been left to languish and especially the mid range and budget segment. Google had let OEM's use the largest sales market to keep selling junk low spec phones year after year with the same specs and no meaningful improvements. If you wanna really great cameras or wireless charging, your only choice is to buy a premium device. That locks out billions of people from having a great Android experience.
Even the premium segment hasn't seen that much improvement from Google. It's basically only Samsung who are pushing things forward through OneUI and through hardware Innovations like folding phones and zoom cameras to make the experience better.
I for one am tired of it and have decided that my next phone is an iPhone. For the same price as an A55 I can get a brand new iPhone 12 or for less I can get a refurbished model and have far superior cameras than any Android below €750 as well as years of OS updates and enjoy all the great user features Apple has added to iOS recently.
The last iPhone I had was the 7 and it was ok but my S7 Edge was better. I've been on Android since then but now iPhone has finally made some great improvements in both hardware and software which I think should offer me a better experience than budget Android.
You talk about android then bring up random points about the pixel phones. Those are two separate things. One could say android is doing well because multiple manufacturers have adopted the 7 year policy that google initially put forward. I mainly use iOS so not an android fanboy, but your rant isn’t really making a coherent point.
Despite Sundar's leadership, do you think that extending update support to 7 years took no innovation? The Android team has been doing major system reworks to make this practical. The Tensor team has been working to do the same on the hardware side. Samsung is likely reusing firmware and software from that work given that the hardware is shares a lot of Samsung IPs. Prior to these developments Samsung was not interested in providing anywhere close to this length of support.
Android is in the best place it's ever been since its release. It's on more things than ever and we have the kind of update support we used to only dream about in 2008. And we have devices with unlockable and rekockable bootloaders. 🤯
Samsung committed to seven years before Google and look at the length of support Apple were offering. Maybe we have different definitions of innovation.
Maybe I'm out of the loop when did Samsung commit? Isn't the article about it happening now?
Sorry, I remembered incorrectly and thus my information was wrong. They offered four years back when Google was only offering two
https://www.sammobile.com/news/galaxy-phone-seven-years-security-updates/
They didn't, Google are the first to do three years of OS updates and security patches with the Pixel 2 and extended that to the first gen Pixel. Samsung were doing two OS updates until they promised they would do 3 OS updates at the Note20 launch and extended it to the S10 and other models. You are correct that they upgraded that to four with the S21 before Google made the jump from 3 to 7.
