I'm sure Google themselves had this problem with one of the Nexus phones. They had to can support for it in under 2 years because one of the chip suppliers didn't release new drivers. If Google can't do it without controlling the hardware, how can anyone?
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Texas Instruments killed smartphone OMAP about a year after the launch of the Galaxy Nexus. Galaxy Nexus likely used their SoC as an attempt to create more competition in the SoC market. Google tried and failed to do the same thing with Tegra in tablets.
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NVIDIA didn't drop support for their products early when they left the smartphone and tablet markets though. They pivoted to consoles and kept providing support for the existing products. TI approach was really messed up. They gave up, did a mass layoff + screwed their customers.
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Google ended up having to invest in making their own SoC because they got backed into a corner by the failures of these other companies.
Qualcomm could easily be making much higher end CPUs and providing much longer support for their SoC if they thought it'd be profitable...
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Qualcomm only seems interested in making higher end cores and providing longer term support for the server market where they can sell expensive high profit margin products themselves. Lack of competition is a major factor. If there were alternatives, they'd be better themselves.
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Yeah, but if Intel can't break them, with years of desktop/server experience and a war chest, who can?
Samsung and Huawei were getting there, but Huawei has obviously had its wings clipped.
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Qualcomm acquired Nuvia recently and is more than capable of making competitive chips but their focus is the server market. They make very competitive smartphone GPUs already and there was a point when they used to make decent CPUs before they cut their investment in doing that.
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I think they'll do well in the server market. I don't have much confidence that they'll bring over that architecture for that to smartphones. Qualcomm is also happily providing 10+ years of support for embedded already. They're more than capable of doing it for smartphones...
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It's a choice not to invest the resources because their customers (phone vendors) largely don't want it and wouldn't take advantage of it. They do provide what most of their customers want. Samsung wants to move fully to Exynos and Google were small fish by themselves though.
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I do wonder if they'll behave differently for the 7c though, as people definitely expect computers to have longer support than phones. Majority of phone sales are driven my mobile operator contracts so no point supporting after 2 years.
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They're providing a minimum of 10 years of product availability and support for their embedded SoC products so they know how to do it. It's entirely a choice not to do it for smartphones. They're variants of the same SoC platform they use in smartphones so it's a bit ridiculous.