In what turns out to be arguably the biggest Android news story of the week, Google today announced that all future chipsets from Qualcomm, starting with the upcoming Snapdragon 888, will support four years of Android OS and security updates. In layman’s terms, this means that most new phones landing in 2021 will likely get an extra year of OS updates and security patches – assuming OEMs get on the shelf and follow suit.
The change builds on some of Google’s previous improvements and is quite technical. Most of our readers are probably already familiar with Project Treble, which restructured the way parts of Android work to make it easier for manufacturers to deliver updates – and that actually makes a difference. But because of how it worked, it actually created jobs for chipset makers more difficult, which amplified the work they had to do to support multiple generations of software, depending on when phones would launch during that chip’s life cycle. In short, making it easier for smartphone makers to deliver software updates has pushed additional work at companies like Qualcomm.
Above: A rough idea of how complicated a chipset vendor’s job was through years of updates. Below: How it is now, with these changes.
Over the past year, Google has partnered with Qualcomm to fix that problem, bringing the logic of Treble’s modularity down to the chipset level as well. This makes Qualcomm’s job easier, allowing them to keep chips for a longer period of time, resulting in today’s news: all future Qualcomm chipsets starting with the Snapdragon 888 will have four years of Android OS version updates and four years of security updates. support. That means many Android phones will be launched in 2021 and later probably receive four years of updates.
That lack of certainty is because, while Google and Qualcomm made this change, they aren’t the ones to provide updates to your phone. This only guarantees that the updates will be available when smartphone companies want them. At the moment, we don’t know of any manufacturers that have stepped in to match these numbers when it comes to Qualcomm’s future chips. But I think there is a good chance that companies known for their update commitment, such as Samsung and Google, will take advantage of this. Or at least they should.
We asked Google if any phone manufacturers are already on board to accommodate that change, and if there are plans to offer the same level of support to other chipset vendors (like MediaTek), but we’ve yet to hear at the time of writing. We will update as and when more information is available.
So far, the best update commitment you can get in the world of consumer Android devices is three years – usually for security patches associated with two or three years of OS updates. This is in stark contrast to iPhones, which pretty much get updates until Apple can’t run the software on its older hardware – that’s usually about five years, and sometimes more. In many cases, perfectly capable Android phones have been left behind due to limited software support windows, as was the case with Google’s recent Pixel 2 series this month.
Ultimately, we can’t promise that today’s change will result in more sustainable Android phones. In fact, this change only applies to future phones powered by upcoming Qualcomm chipsets starting with the 888. and it’s still up to phone manufacturers to actually deliver those updates regardless of the changes Google or Qualcomm make. At best, we’ll finally reap these benefits in 2025. Anyway, at least it’s something.