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Comment by swebs | Hacker News Reader

It's crazy how this is even an issue in Android when it has been a solved problem in desktop Linux for decades. I can install Ubuntu on any ancient laptop and have daily security updates for life. The only explanation I can think of is that Google planned this on purpose so users would be forced to buy new devices every few years.

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It's nothing to do with Linux. It's because desktops use standardised discoverable hardware with mostly documented peripheral interfaces. ARM phones do not.

That is really only an issue for low-level drivers and kernel level issues. There is nothing stopping OS vendors from fixing this without updating the drivers.

There is for Linux because it doesn't have a stable driver ABI. The drivers and the kernel are inseparable.

I never said otherwise. But the most critical android vulnerabilities are almost always fixable in userspace.

At the risk of sounding uninformed, does this mean the Year Of The ARM Desktop will have these same issues with updates and standardised hardware, or is it just a mobile SOC thing?

If you can force phone manifacturers to standrize chargers, same is possible for other issues.

Google did not "plan this on purpose" - if anything, they managed to deal with the general crappiness of ARM hardware somewhat better than other Linux-on-mobile efforts did, which is why Android became dominant in the first place.

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