On what basis do you claim that they need vendor support for the SoC to provide support for the phone using it?
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They're shipping the firmware, drivers, libraries and other device support code provided by Qualcomm including proprietary and shared source code that they're not able to continue supporting themselves.
They've demonstrated they don't provide any proper extended support already.
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So it's less a matter of not being possible, and more a matter of them not being up to the task of doing it.
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The likelihood that a tiny vendor will be able to support that SoC for longer than Google is pretty much nil. Even when you look at the monthlies or quarterlies from Samsung, past a certain age there are conspicuously missing fixes that would require SoC vendor involvement.
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Samsung is able to do 4 years for most of their devices now because they time most of them with the SoC releases and Qualcomm has moved from 3 to 4 years of support. Google could have moved from 3 to 4 years for Pixel 6 if they'd stayed with Snapdragon too but can do better now.
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Samsung will hopefully be able to drop Snapdragon, move fully to Exynos and provide 5-6 years of support too. It'd be great if they started selling them and if there was actually some real competition with Snapdragon making it better. Snapdragon is best option for other vendors.
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Mediatek, etc. are all complete trash with absolutely horrible privacy/security and often have actual non-theoretical, clearly non-accidental backdoors.
Snapdragon isn't bad compared to every other option but it's clear that it would be a lot better if they had competition...
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The lower-end ones especially internationally, yeah, and those really don't have comparable security. They do ship the updates but Mediatek just doesn't provide anywhere close to comparable security + security researchers are nearly all focused on Qualcomm which has helped a lot.
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They're providing 4 years of updates for most Exynos / Snapdragon ones now.
I have more confidence in Qualcomm's security than Samsung. Snapdragon does a lot of things very well. Qualcomm's secrecy + lack of LTS is a serious problem especially as main/only non-budget SoC vendor.
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I don't think Snapdragon is bad, I'm just tired of them having no serious competition and holding back CPU performance and longer term support. Tired of them unnecessarily making driver libraries shared source instead of open source too. They're widely leaked anyway... why do it?
Qualcomm's kernel drivers are open source and their late stage bootloader (stripped down / hardened EDK2 UEFI) is open source.
However, they've got an intense secrecy culture where they think it makes sense to keep a ton of the HAL libraries/services shared source...
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Could all be rewritten as open source libraries, and as a device vendor you get the source to build them anyway. I don't understand it though. Them not providing more than 4 years of GPU firmware, radio firmware and so on can't really be fixed by anyone externally though.
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