Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL don't have maintainers so I've been doing all of the work myself despite having tons of other work to do. It's unreasonable to expect 1 person to do everything for you. If people wanted these devices to be supported longer, they would contribute to that.
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They could be supported this way for a long time but we'll need to delist them and more strongly discourage using them. Can take away time from other things to do these updates but there are diminishing returns. A million dollars wouldn't get them to the 2020-11-05 patch level.
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No offense intended, my apologies. What you are attempting to do with the project is laudable!
Though I have a Pixel device, and was a G1/ADP1 early adopter for Android, I more or less gave up on it around the Sidekick 4G era, the Nexus devices I owned were mostly furstration.
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In the long term we're not going to be targeting Pixel devices anyway. It's what makes the most sense right now. We don't have a hardware partner able to produce something better. If there was something better, we'd use that instead of using Pixels.
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Qualcomm supports their SoC for 3 years (soon 4) so that's the inherent limitation with a Qualcomm SoC device. Maybe that will be longer by the time we're in a position to do that. For now, it doesn't get any better. There are more important considerations than this one too.
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Ah, that's a good point! I recall telling me that after finding reporting some baseband bug findings that the vendor response was that the team which created the baseband had been, disbanded. ;)
It's really hard to support something like that. ;-/
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Need firmware updates for a bunch of different components, largely part of the SoC and realistically also support from the vendor for the drivers and other device support code since we're not going to be able to maintain all of it ourselves.
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One of the first important updates that the Pixel 2 didn't get was new GPU firmware fixing IOMMU isolation issues in November. They ended up releasing a post-EOL update in December with these fixes among others, but still without providing the 2020-10-05 or December patch levels.
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Can't be provided since the support from the component vendors is over. Google would have to pay Qualcomm to support the SoC longer. Their hardware division doesn't sell enough devices. They'd have to want to do it for Android and beyond in general, not just for their devices.
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Yeah, it seems difficult to make a business justification for Google/AI on that front.
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They should probably be doing it for Android as a whole. It isn't all on them though. If enough of the clients of SoC vendors wanted longer support, they'd probably be providing it. A lot of them probably like the status quo of being able to shift the blame to Qualcomm, etc.