Fairphone suggests Qualcomm is the biggest barrier to long-term Android support

Fairphone-the sustainable, modular smartphone company-is still shipping updates to the 5-year-old Fairphone 2. The company won't win any awards for speed, but the phone-which launched in 2015 with Android 5-is now being updated to Android 9.0. The most interesting part of this news is a video from Fairphone detailing the update process the company went through, which offers more transparency than we normally get from a smartphone manufacturer. To hear Fairphone tell the story of Android updates, the biggest barrier to longer-term support is-surprise!-Qualcomm.

I thought this was common knowledge in our little corner of the world. Qualcomm has almost a monopoly on the mid-to-high-end smartphone world when it comes to SoCs, and they have a long history of cutting off support for chipsets well before those chipsets become unusable.