zlacker

>>skille+(OP)
I am still using my Pixel 3 (now without upgrades) without major issues. So, happy to see the new phones have longer promised update cycles. Hopefully Google doesn't clawback this promise in the future.

>>hcnews+39
Same here (well, a 3a)! This phone does everything I need, and then some. Granted, I'm relatively light user who mainly uses the browser, a chat app, and not much else aside from snapping a pic here or there.

I'm honestly confused about the lack of updates (I really only care about security updates). I run Xubuntu on a 13 year old computer, and I get updates. Is this just a cash grab from Google, or is there more to it?

>>H1Supr+bI
Until recently, Qualcomm provided BSPs (binary support packages) including the kernel for Google phones. For whatever reason -- possibly that their one and only corporate purpose is to sell as many chips as possible -- Qualcomm only briefly updated their packages for chips they no longer sold.

Google updates as much of the Android ecosystem as it can. First-party Play Store apps, system webview... if you look at the normally hidden system apps on your phone you'll see that the Android team has "unbundled" many parts of the formerly monolithic system to allow updates to as much of it as possible even if the kernel is marooned at an older version.

Unfortunately, some bugs are in the kernel or drivers, so there's nothing any Android OEM (including Google) can do if their chipset vendor won't do the (admittedly non-revenue-generating) engineering to update that firmware. And eventually the system itself requires newer kernel features, so there's a limit to how far back Google or other OEMs can reasonably backport a newer version of Android.

This is part of why Google's recent phones are based on Google-designed, non-Qualcomm chipsets. It was a truly Herculean effort to scrub the Pixel line of Qualcomm, and especially of Qualcomm's incentives to abandon still-good phone hardware in order to sell more chipsets.

Your PC's OS distribution is nearly totally open-source, and the economic incentives for the Linux ecosystem are completely different from Qualcomm's. That contributes to any given general-purpose computer's longevity if it runs Linux.