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?
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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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Phone vendors have historically been the ones signing the SoC firmware because Qualcomm gives them control of the root of trust via QFuses. Radio firmware (mostly) stopped being shared source though and trend is away from stuff being shared source + controlled by phone vendor.
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They're gradually moving to being more like Intel/AMD where the CPU vendors controls the root of trust, etc. rather than the phones vendors getting to control it and make changes to the radios, early boot chain, etc. Their answer to leaks is closing more rather than opening it.
Maybe they could be convinced to open source all those unnecessarily shared source HAL libraries/services so the OS device support could be entirely open source.
Still need the firmware support from them, and in practice no one really takes over serious maintenance of drivers.
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