Android updates are increasingly supported on top-of-the-line, high-end or upper-midrange devices of all brands, but lower-midrange and especially entry-level phones are having a much more difficult time. However, Qualcomm wants to do everything it can to change that.
The release of updates is very dependent on the maker of the chipset in your phone, as that company still has to actively support the SoC, and for most cheaper versions the support period ends much earlier than for more expensive ones, perhaps understandably. Even at higher price points, the frequency of updates is not always what it should be – monthly security updates, for example, are only delivered monthly by a handful of brands.
This is where Qualcomm comes into play. According to Chris Patrick, SVP and General Manager of Handsets at Qualcomm, the company is working to make it easier for OEMs to keep all their phones up to date.
This is what Patrick said Android Authority:
It’s very complicated for a customer — an OEM — to get security updates, to get Android version updates and then push those out to every end user. It’s actually very expensive and very complicated. One of the things that we’ve been working on with Google and the OEMs over the last few years is to change the structure of inline code — to change the machinery for how we do those updates. You’ll see us make some announcements later this year about some of those changes that we’ve made to help facilitate that and help the entire ecosystem keep Android phones closer to the latest.
Patrick says this has been a big problem for Qualcomm for a while, which is why the company plans to announce something to address this issue.
Unfortunately, no further details are available, so we don’t know exactly when to expect such an announcement. But given that Qualcomm is holding its annual Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii in October, we’d assume that’s when the announcement is most likely to happen.
Of course, that doesn’t mean everything will magically change for all devices from the next day, but it does give us some hope that updates will be available to all devices in a more timely manner.