As an IPhone holder I’m happy Google is doing this to force the market to support devices for longer. Apple will be pushed to go further than 6-7 years of software support.
Yeah. Pixel 8 and 9 series have 7 years by spec. I think Samsung matched it with their latest Galaxy S series. It’s one of those rare and fleeting moments when competition works to our benefit.
Indeed. However the root problem were CPU and other hw drivers AFAIK, not Google. Making their own SoC made it possible to bypass those greedy manufacturers and extend support.
100%. Qualcomm is the piece of shit you’re thinking of. They refused to provide more than 3 years of driver updates for their SoCs for more than decade, despite the heavy work Google did to make updates from vendors dramatically easier with Project Treble. Now that Google have their own SoC and began providing longer support, Qualcomm magically began offering longer support too. The Galaxy S24 that ships with QC in NA has 7 years of support. With all that said, Google is only doing this because they’re a minority player and offering support makes people like me buy their stuff for this. If they grow to a significant market share, you’ll see them stop extending the support or even shorten it, in order to increase sales. Just like Qualcomm.
Samsung’s update policy for their lower end models is pretty atrocious. While on paper they offer updates for a couple of years, it you look more closely, you’ll notice that the update intervals get larger and larger as time goes on. You might not get important updates for half a year. Sure, still better than not updates at all, but a pretty awful policy for security updates.
Makes sense. I suspect they’re selling more of those overall so they like replacing them more often. The only reason they’re providing longer support for the S-series is because someone else does too. They have made their own SoC (Exynos) for more than a decade and there wasn’t anyone stopping them supporting the models with that SoC for longer. They didn’t.
Fairphone have been offering 5 years of support for years… and ethically sourced materials, replacable parts (inc. nokia style batteries that you can replace)
Not to mention acceptance of alternative OS installations
Fairphone is actually worse than Google when it comes to updates. Even their flagship phone is still on Android 13. Even the Pixel 6 runs Android 15 at this point and with this news it is guaranteed to get at least Android 17. Google has always been offering 5 years of support for the Pixel 6 and 7 series. What they didn’t promise until this announcement was additional feature/OS upgrades, but when it comes to that they were already ahead of Fairphone.
When it comes to alternative OSes, Google actually makes it very easy to install them. That’s one reason why GrapheneOS and the likes chose Pixel phones as their primarily supported phones.
IMHO, security updates are more important than OS updates, and Fairphone is good in that regard. I’d be hard-pressed to even name a killer feature from the last few versions of Android (or iOS, for that matter).
Absolutely, security updates are much more important than feature updates. Upgrading to newer Android versions is mostly useful to have access to newer Android APIs (apps eventually will require newer versions, although that usually takes quite a while). Another benefit of newer Android versions might be added security features.
The fairphone 5 is on android 14 and android 15 has only started to be deployed 2 months ago.
Ok, that endoflife.date site apparently isn’t quite up-to-date then. But even still, Android 14 was released in October 2023 and as far as I can tell, Fairphone released their Android 14 update only in July 2024. I’m not saying Fairphone’s update policy is terrible or anything. It certainly is better than that of many other vendors, but if you want updates as quickly as possible, you are probably better of with a Pixel phone. Of course repairability is an entirely different matter.
Isn’t the main reason for GrapheneOS to choose Pixels that Pixels have the Titan security chip?
Fairphone has a great approach and I would love to buy an EU phone with replaceable parts, however I’ve read pretty underwhelming things about their software support. in that sense, paying 90€ every 3-4 years to get the battery replaced on a pixel,would be a better bet. That,plus the pixel a variants are very competitively prices and you get huge bang dor your buck.
I wish fairphones were cheaper…
At its price point, it’s very underwhelming.
I also did the math and I could get an average phone (used) every year for three years before I break even. And those average phones would be more powerful with each iteration.
Unless you’re bought into eco-friendly minimal waste messaging, it’s really hard to choose fairphone.
People also could get extended support via CalyxOS and GrapheneOS on the Pixel Models.
For the Pixel 6 and 7 series Google has promised 5 years of security updates right from the beginning. What’s new here is that they now also offer feature and OS upgrades for that same time period. Certainly nice to have, but not essential.
Open source…forever software updates until nobody cares to update the bloody thing.
You would like postmarket os as it is foss and software support is 10 years atleast.
Huh, they support a lot more hardware than they used to, that’s pretty amazing! I may have to try it out.
Any idea if MMS is supported properly yet? That has been my main hurdle, and it looks like my other issues (battery life and audio quality) may be resolved by picking other hardware than the PinePhone.
Any idea if MMS is supported properly yet? That has been my main hurdle, and it looks like my other issues (battery life and audio quality) may be resolved by picking other hardware than the PinePhone.
Good news MMS has been functional since 2021.
https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/113603951027289464
Android doesn’t have any long term support branches for older versions of the mobile OS.
It was clear they’d likely provide 5 years of OS updates for 6th/7th gen Pixels rather than 3 from the start. Documentation clearly hinted at it by saying they’d provide 5 years of security AND features updates.
