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Comment by swiley | Hacker News Reader

Who cares if they won't share the driver source you'll have to throw it out after 2 years anyway.

This is exactly my issue with Qualcomm. They don't compete in device support or performance metrics. They literally offer nothing competitive. They only exist because of the way the market is segmented.

If they shared the sources it would guarantee doubling the lifetime of the device.

By the way I think Qualcomm do share sources (through code Aurora?). But they don't upstream them.

Writing this from a zl1 running LOS17.1 using Snapdragon 821.

P.S. Big thanks to mosimach for being device and specialised kernel fork maintainer.

They make their money the second it's sold, and don't make any after. Why should they care how long it lives?

I just checked and didn't see any graphics drivers.

one could regulate this. Share source and toolchain or don't sell in this market. The EU has something coming with their repairability laws, but the software side isn't too underlined yet.

The early to mid 2010 android devices are piling up left and right, but the software is old. As phones they're still good enough but network operators build back tower hardware for 3G, so there's another EoL date coming at least for their data channels.

You can keep using mobiles even after stop receiving updates. They don’t get remotely disabled or anything.

For most people their phone is their most important tech device where a lot of critical data transit (banking, social etc) so using an unsecured phone isn't a good idea.

Well, sometimes they get remotely disabled by ransomware.

You can keep using your old phone, but no updates means no security updates. This means your browser and other apps are susceptible to compromise. As time goes on the exploits are automated, this becomes less the provenance of determined organizations, and more accessible to script kiddies or casual hackers.

If the drivers are open source you can at least run something like LineageOS or another Android derived open source ROM and still run an updated OS on your old hardware.

It's a gamble, I surely wouldn't use a KitKat phone for internet browsing, it is probably no different from using an ancient version of IE from 20 years ago, it is just a matter of time before something bad happens. The biggest problem is, most OEMs nowadays lock bootloaders and make it a lot tougher to use custom ROMs for longer support, non malicious pre-installed applications, and removing Google services - almost non-existent FOSS support from Qualcomm devices doesn't help either. I only buy for myself and suggest to others devices that are more likely to get community driven support, that for example bars some manufacturers with ridiculous lock-ins.

Same could be said for Windows XP and Windows 7, but its not recommended...

Windows 95 FTW!

In addition to security, sometimes new versions of Android have a feature that I would like to use. And knowing that the hardware I am using is perfectly capable of supporting it but just because the greedy Android ecosystem wants to sell me new devices bothers me. And not only new features but there can also be bugs. For example I have an Android tablet which stopped getting updates after just 1 year. It has bugs which did not get solved during this period so they will never get solved. Also I like using dark mode that is introduced with Android 10, which will never come to my tablet. So I need to buy a new tablet if I want dark mode or less buggy experience.

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