Fairphone—the sustainable, modular smartphone company—is still shipping updates to the 5-year-old Fairphone 2. The company won’t win any awards for speed, but the phone—which launched in 2015 with Android 5—is now being updated to Android 9.0. The most interesting part of this news is a video from Fairphone detailing the update process the company went through, which offers more transparency than we normally get from a smartphone manufacturer. To hear Fairphone tell the story of Android updates, the biggest barrier to longer-term support is—surprise!—Qualcomm.
I thought this was common knowledge in our little corner of the world. Qualcomm has almost a monopoly on the mid-to-high-end smartphone world when it comes to SoCs, and they have a long history of cutting off support for chipsets well before those chipsets become unusable.
Well, if you limit to a market segment, Qualcomm may have a near monopoly. But in general, they don’t. In fact Mediatek has the biggest market share.
https://www.counterpointresearch.com/mediatek-biggest-smartphone-chipset-vendor-q3-2020/
Frankly, none of the manufacturers are covering themselves with glory when it comes to support. Given there aren’t that many SoCs, and even fewer architectures that they are built from, the whole situation is a terrible mess. These devices are expensive, and the obsolescence of what should otherwise be perfectly serviceable hardware is disgusting.
> These devices are expensive, and the obsolescence of what should otherwise be perfectly serviceable hardware is disgusting.
One way of looking at it. Another is that they are too cheap and this is an exp[ected outcome becuase people in no way want to pay for a longer supported product. People are disgusting, the companies just give them what they want (colectively, not individually, but try changing the collective!)
I would not, buty then I am a klutz. Glass protectors which are weaker than the actual screen are the only reason my phones last more than a year these days! Also I need a case on the back too now sinc they often want to make that glass too! (which just pointlessly increases weight).
As for your other point. I think mediatek just mop up the toilet end of the market mostly. Now I have had devices with MT in before. Some were ok, some not. But they were all below low end. All advances have done is make the below low end usagle somewhat. Go get an oldarm device with 8gb storage with say 1gb (or less) ram. Those were unusable. I have a phone to that spec I bought just to see it (it was cheap and only ever a second of third phone), it was completely unusable unless to added a sd card and told the os to use it to extend the phone storage rather than using as other storage.
The problem is the buyers. most want cheap. Those that don;t want to change quickly. There is no market for anything better.
Me, I would only ever buy a google device these days. Up to date OS, support well past the EOL date (and I understand why they still set one but ignore it, sometimes big things occur but mostly not). Sideloading.
Most other android efforts force me into some horrible dual registarion crap. Samsung especially. (I used samsung devices a lot in the early android days, I did not use the supplied OS, these days samsung is just too much of a pain). Apple is right out because of no sideloading (yes I would perfer a requirement to allow alternative appstores with no sideloading but hey ho). Apple were never a contender on phones outside of the us given the ridiculous lack of 3g at the start. Also too small for too long. This did upset me on androisd as well. And windows phones before that (pre mobile 7, you know decent os!). The phones were a replacement for my PDA mopre than anything, make it a reasonable one. Horrible years those when you have to downgrade to upgrade but needed something recent enough to work. (dell x51v over ir became a pain before there was a reasonable replacement).
Notches have also become an annoiance of late. At least they have got down to punchhole. I still would prefer a bezel though. I guess the move to > 16:9 makes the space less relivent though. I got a pixel 3 over the 3xl for that reason even though I would have liked the larger screen. My 4xl is fine though.
The fact that google’s pixel phones (and the nexus’s) are not the best sellers just shopw how stupid the market is. People have no clue what they want. MY OH was the same. She was but I like samsung. Then she dropped her in contract samsung. Stuill kept on for months until the glass got scratchy! Gave her my pixel 3. Liked it a lot more after a bit of use. Now uses a 4a, it is a improvement slightly over the 3, though mostly for battery since my 3 was well used! (not 4a 5g as she liked the size!). Still trying to convince her of the benefit of using gestures rather than the software buttons though!
Anyway before my drivvel what I was trying to say is,.. you can’t blame the manufactureres for this. Blame the users 60%. Blame the regulators 40%, the rest is reactionary.
Carrot007,
Plus the manufactures deserve a considerable share of the blame too. Planned obsolescence is real. There’s a FOSS community eager to provide long term support doubling or even tripling a device’s practical lifespan without any more work from the manufacturers, unfortunately hardware makers aren’t willing to provide the community with the programming specs. It’s no secret that their profit incentives are maligned with product longevity.
It’s become widespread problem well beyond phones. A friend of ours repairs appliances and won’t recommend any brand because it’s all garbage. Appliances are being designed to fail over logic boards that are extremely cheap for the manufacturer to fix under warranty, but extremely expensive for the owner to replace out of warranty. Even if you try to do your homework as a consumer, you can get screwed by this. The economics are such that the more products that fail and degrade soon after warranty, the better 🙁
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5v8D-alAKE
Kochise,
That’s a very informative video, but the caption “actual conspiracies” suggests to me that the video is actually a conspiracy rather than the truth. Anyways I didn’t know had been the case for lightbulbs, and I didn’t know there was a movie about it
Yeap, there was a whole movie about that bulb. But keep in mind that it’s not just about the light bulb industry. The sugar industry diverted the reason for diabetes toward fat with the same will to fool consumers. And with the unregulated capitalism free to do whatever it takes to squeeze out as much as money from us, why would they stop ? Asking regulation to protect consumers ? It’s socialism ! A bill for right to repair ? It’s IP and consumers’ security at stake ! Any lenience toward citizens’ emancipation from these tricks it deemed to fail regarding the other news here around. That’s why I keep it to my Android 4 and Android 5 phones which are 10 and 5 years old. And still works (thanks to replaceable batteries). And no problem with security (so to speak) since I’m off the grid.
Also the Oil and Gas industry and global warming. Exxon-Mobile knew for decades about the effects of fossil fuels.
Someone pointed out, in the US, every solution must be consumption based or it goes nowhere. Buy this to solve that! We’ve internalized consumption to such a degree that we can’t imagine a world without it.
If you’re concerned, I’ve got a 12 step program which will help. Click on the link below and BUY! BUY! BUY!
Yep, planned obsolescence is a complicated thing. It takes a lot of money and resources to build things like a factory and keep it staffed and running with people. Then there’s also profit.
Yet, net profit of most firms is generally < 20%. It just takes a lot of money to keep things going.
I personally think initiatives like the fairphone are absolutely great. I hope they continue to expand and take on more downstream components and work with like minded manufacturers. I hope those kinds of businesses are successful.
As much as planned obsolescence annoys me as a consumer, there's always the other side of the equation that producers/workers need their livelihood too. They will do what they gotta do to keep their jobs flowing and I wouldn't fault them one bit.
Where the government steps in in terms of right to repair laws.. is another complex matter.
Yamin,
We can put on the old philosophy cap: what if vehicles/devices/appliances/etc were so good that they realistically could last a lifetime. I’m not saying they do of course, but just as a thought experiment how would society and economics work in such a case?
There would be far less demand for workers, which could lead to mass unemployment, and that seems bad in the contexts that we’re familiar with…. but the need for employment goes down as the need for factories to satisfy short product cycles becomes obsolete. If somehow society could shift to focusing on efficiency instead of profits, we would find that a 40 hour workweek is way more than necessary and that a lot of jobs are totally redundant and ultimately not even productive. It would be very realistic to put modern technology to work for us and to bring the workweek down to <10 hours a week without sacrificing any of our material needs.
Our world has so much inefficiency by design to justify everyone’s job. As it stands today, efficiency deprives us of work. And since we live in a work-centric culture, this is often construed as a negative. It doesn’t have to be this way though and it’s not that hard to envision a number of ways that society could realistically promote efficiency over work, especially with technology.
If we want to advance as a species it behooves us to start considering alternative economics that don’t have us working needlessly for work’s sake. Alas, the difficult part is solving greed, which encourages people to work themselves to death even though they’re not more productive than their efficiency-minded counterparts.
If world was efficient and companies were not reinventing the wheel over and over again (look, rounded corners) we would be living in space stations and exploring the galaxy already, like promised since the 50s. But no, we have to provide the same job to people, over and over again, not allow them to do something else more creative. It has to be “profitable”. But to whom really ? Those to minimum wages, exploited, with no health cares ? That’s what planned obsolescence is for ?
The title here suggest bad intentions on behalf of Qualcomm. I have not heard that in the video.
Not supporting older hardware is an unfortunate effect of cost. I’m not keen on this effect but any vendor who supports their devices longer than the competitors will make his bottom line harder. You can only change that by changing the global industry attitude.
So the barrier, in my opinion, is not Qualcomm but this industry attitude. But this whole argument is not part of the video, it’s something you added to it.
DannyBackx,
He doesn’t dwell on it, but he actually does say it in the video around 5:17…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcLmQp7ZdGU
Also regarding costs for extending software support, there’s certainly some truth to it, but the expense is a drop in the ocean when you’re talking about hundreds of millions of devices. If small team can do it without proper documentation, so can qualcom. As described in the video:
Qualcom could easily hire a couple developers to double/triple the product lifetimes without even flinching. The real problem, the one that capitalism does not have a good solution for, is that hiring even just a single developer to extend the life for their chips can and likely will cost the companies billions in lost sales of new products. The cost of lost sales dwarfs the cost of extending support. Unfortunately corporate incentives are so screwed up that they reward corporations that contribute to environmental wastes and practice planned obsolescence 🙁
I won’t argue about your cost comment. You may be right about the ratios of the cost of a small team vs. the large number of devices.
The other comment I do disagree about. They chose a chipset (and thus a vendor) several years ago. He names it. Had they chosen another one, then he would now have named that other one. This doesn’t make Qualcomm the cause of this issue.
The Raspberry Pi is built on Broadcom silicon because that’s what the team had a link with (were employed by). Does this make Broadcom a good guy ?
DannyBackx,
Well, the point isn’t so much about blaming qualcomm specifically. Qualcomm makes the news due to its dominance, but in fact qualcomm is only part of a widespread problem that affects our manufacturing industries at large. Companies like qualcomm could make a huge difference with a little investment, or even just throwing the FOSS community a bone and have us do the work for free, literally. The main obstacle is that extending upgrade cycles goes against a manufacturer’s financial interest to have a rapid upgrade cycle. I don’t know how to fix this, at least not without artificial market intervention, which is never popular.