Qualcomm wants to make it easier for OEMs to update Android

Over the past two years, Android OEMs have stepped up their efforts to keep older devices up to date with security patches and Android upgrades. Samsung and Google offer up to seven years of support for certain devices, a big change from five years ago, when two years of support was the standard.

Timely and widespread Android updates/upgrades are incredibly complicated with bottlenecks from multiple sources, but one of the cogs in that machine is the chipset vendors (Qualcomm, MediaTek, Samsung, etc.). As chips get older, the creators of those chipsets tend to move away from them in terms of support, making it more difficult for OEMs to keep device software up to date. Historically, this has been a big factor in devices only receiving Android upgrades once or twice, or never at all.

Luckily, Qualcomm knows this is a problem and is working to make it easier for OEMs to keep their products up to date. I recently spoke with Chris Patrick, SVP and GM of Handsets at Qualcomm, and he told me that not only is this a major concern for the company, but they also have an announcement coming soon to address the issue.

“It’s very complicated for the customer, the OEM, to get security updates, Android version updates and get them to all the end users,” Patrick said. “It’s actually very costly and very complicated.”

Patrick is quick to point out that he doesn’t believe Qualcomm is the primary bottleneck on this issue, and in any case the company has been working to mitigate the problem for quite some time: “One of the things we’ve been working on with Google and OEMs over the last couple of years is changing the structure of the inline code — changing the mechanics of how updates are performed.”

In theory, these changes should remove at least some of the friction OEMs face when trying to keep devices up to date. Of course, removing the bottleneck doesn’t mean OEMs will automatically catch up with Google or Samsung after seven years of updates, but it should make things at least a little better.

Patrick says this code optimization has been in the works for years, but it’s clear there’s a lot the company isn’t telling us yet: “We’ll be announcing later this year about some of the changes we’ve made to accelerate this and help the entire ecosystem keep Android phones up to date,” he said.

“Later this year” isn’t very specific, but there are only two other significant events in 2024 where Qualcomm will make such an announcement: IFA in September and the Snapdragon Summit in October. The former is a massive tech event attended by brands from around the world, while the latter is a Qualcomm-only event where the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 will almost certainly debut. We expect the news to be announced at the Snapdragon Summit, but we’ll have to wait and see.

Either way, hopefully these statements will help Android phones remain secure software-wise for much longer than they have in the past.