- Google and Qualcomm teamed up to provide 4 years of software support.
- Snapdragon 888 and the upcoming chip can support 4 years of updates.
- The only Caveat, it’s up to manufacturers whether to provide 4 years of updates.
Since its inception, Android has been the largest Operating System. Unless some other such revolutionary operating system is developed, Android will continue to be on the rise. Android is based on Linux and other open-source software, designed primarily for touchscreen mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.
Open Handset Alliance sponsored by Google was an organization in which a number of developers were involved in creating Android. Android smartphone was launched in September 2008.
Since android is open source, Smartphone manufacturers create their own UI for a completely different user experience. Due to this, updates get harder to push and manufacturers drop the update entirely after a couple of years.
Google and Qualcomm to the Rescue
Google announced that all of Qualcomm’s future chipsets will support three Android OS updates with four years of security updates. In common person’s language, that means some new phones landing in 2021 will probably get an update a year or two extra than the current Android smartphone.
This is not the first time Google has tried to fix the broken update schedule. In 2017 Google announced Project Treble along with the Android 8.0 Oreo.
Project Treble’s ultimate aim is to make updates faster and easier for OEMs to roll out to devices. The biggest change introduced to android was Trebel. but remains unnoticed being a background application. Project Treble’s core idea is to remove the requirement to rework vendor implementations, allowing the OS layer to be updated independently.
Treble does separate the vendor’s low-quality implementation to the areas of the code related to a phone’s processor, modem, and so on from the rest of the operating system.
That way, those lower-level elements don’t have to be updated every time a new Android version comes along, they just exist as a constant foundation beneath everything else.
