Google and Qualcomm announce one of the most important news for the Android ecosystem of this 2020 that we are a few weeks away from saying goodbye: four years of updates.
So far, Google and many of its partners have offered three years of Android version updates and security updates, but starting next year, we could add another year of updates.
Four years of updates from 2021
Three years ago, Google attacked fragmentation with Project Treble. It separated the operating system layer from the vendor’s implementation to speed up updates, ensuring that the processors would be compatible with the latest three versions of Android (three years) but now a change will allow mobile phones to receive soon four years of updates and four versions of Android
Until now, an SoC maker had to create multiple combinations of implementations for their new chips and previous versions. The result was that within three years of launching a chipset, the SoC vendor would need to support up to 6 combinations of operating system framework software and vendor implementations, multiplied by tens of different processors.
To reduce engineering costs and improve upgrades, during this past year Google worked with Qualcomm to solve this problem, and what they did is remove the retroactive requirement from the processors since they had the mobiles. Now, the same SoC implementation will support four versions of Android. Processor manufacturers will no longer have to create an update implementation for each new release.
This novelty will take effect from the new SoCs marketed in the factory with Android 11, starting with the Snapdragon 888 and the new processors that Qualcomm is starting to launch on the market.
With this change, future pixels should have four years of updates. Surely more manufacturers are encouraged to extend their support for their mobiles for another year.
What remains a mystery if in the future mobile phones with processors from other manufacturers such as MediaTek O Samsung if they will also support four versions of Android. For the moment, Google has only confirmed that only Qualcomm processors will offer four years of updates, it is with the manufacturer that they have implemented this novelty.
Via | Google
