So, a while ago I thought that the short device support offered by manufacturers was simple due to their laziness. However, when reading this post, I started to see things differently.
According to it, each manufacturer has to write and test it’s own Linux kernel updates. In Brillo, Google (and manufacturers) work together on one Kernel that receivers regular updates.
I assume as a result, only a few chosen manufacturers will be able to use Brillo - in contrast to Android, which allows more manufactures at a higher support-cost-per-device-rate.
Do you guys think I got this right, or am I missing something?
Well, basically he explains that in Brollo (Google's IoT Android) they switched to a LTS kernel which will reveice regular kernel updates in contrast to Android's rather fixed kernel.
One thing I'm not so sure about is the following though:
Is he talking about Google's Android developers or each manufacturer individually? If it is the former, manufacturers are still simply lazy/greedy, if it is the latter, they have a valid reason due to exponential effort growth for each device.
I don't think it's due to lazyiness but more about money. If they continued to offer support for a device for two years, their newer products wouldn't sell. We've seen this when Microsoft pushed out Windows 10 for example.. Sales for Tablet PCs, AIOs and laptops dropped to an all time low.
Same with Android, however Google combats this by releasing a product with every OS update. Manufacturers on the other hand don't care. They release one every year.
I think it's exactly what @Kat said. By only updating the device a handful of times, it sort of forces consumers to buy a new device if they want new features and bug fixes. If they don't update, they get stuck on older versions of the software with a lack of features.
Few things come into it. One laziness they don't want to support it after a certain time. That also means more money for them as they try to force you to buy a new device.
The next is hardware manufacturers, not the assemblers, the chip makers, who push out closed source blobs and also drop support for them, that can also force a phone company to stop supporting a device.
The stupid thing is if the code was all open there's be no loss of support. But no one wants to change it.
The whole thing is also completely unsustainable. The manufacturered 'lifecycle' of a device can go on forever.
Phones have the same issue as iot devices in that as soon as the manufacturer loses interest they become vulnerable hazards to the rest of us.
At the very least, binary blobs required for the function of a phone should be put into escrow to have the code released as soon as support is dropped.
But that will never happen, because no one wants to do anything about it, and the companies like their money.
Well Brillo seems to address this issue; every manufacturer seems to have to abide to certain guidlines and updates are released to the kernel upstream. This guarentes that every Brillo device runs on the same kernel.