A Qualcomm manager spoke about the company’s plans to keep their old chip models up to date in order to increase the longevity of your smartphones.
Android manufacturers seem to want to change things and catch up when it comes to software support for their smartphones which are becoming more durable. A welcome change and accompanied by chip specialist Qualcomm.
Better tracking of chips
Until a few years ago, software tracking for Android devices was limited to two years of major updates. Since then, the situation has changed, notably with Google which guarantees seven years of updates on its Pixels. Samsung makes the same promise on the Galaxy S24. In order to allow this extension, an entire industrial process must change and be updated. Previously, chip designers tended to drop support for older versions, making software updates more difficult.
Qualcomm is one of the major suppliers of chips like MediaTek. The San Diego giant spoke with Android Authority through Chris Patrick, the company’s vice president and general manager of phones, who explains that the company takes this issue very seriously.
It’s very complicated for a customer — a manufacturer — to get security updates, Android version updates, and push them out to every end user. It’s actually very expensive and very complicated.
Chris Patrick, however, denies that the responsibility lies solely with Qualcomm, stating that the company is working to make their process easier to use for smartphone manufacturers. “One of the things that we’ve been working on for several years with Google and with the manufacturers is to change the structure of the inline code, to sort of change the machinery to make these updates. “, he declares.
Despite these statements and the mention of work carried out over several years, the manager does not give a precise timetable for these upcoming changes for the Android ecosystem, mentioning upcoming announcements in “the year ».
