Eight Years Of Updates Promised For New Android Phones

Qualcomm And Google Do The Right Thing

There are quite a few people that upgrade their phone every other generation or so but that number is dropping.  These early adopters should also consider this move as beneficial, assuming they pass on their old Android phones to friends or family members.  For the rest of us, the upgrade happens once our old phone stops charging or working correctly, and sometimes because the Android version can no longer be updated.  Until now, there was no way to really know how many versions of Android you could install before the phone stopped receiving OS and security updates.

Starting with the Snapdragon 7, 8 and the 8 Elite mobile platform, Google and Qualcomm guarantee compatibility for eight years of updates, and this should apply to at least the next five generations of Qualcomm silicon.  This will mean that those hand-me-down phones will remain secure for significantly longer than they do now, which is good news for everyone. 

The agreement is limited to high end Snapdragon phones unfortunately, budget level Android phones will not benefit from this agreement.  We can hope that pressure from consumers convinces Google and Snapdragon to expand this new guarantee to include more of their products.  We can also hope that this puts pressure on IoT manufacturers to do something similar, seeing as how those devices are quickly becoming the largest source of security risks we have to deal with.