Google and Qualcomm announce one of the most important news for the Android ecosystem of this 2020 that we are a few weeks away from saying goodbye: four years of updates.

Until now, Google and many of its partners offer three years of Android version updates and security updates, but starting next year we could add another year of updates.

Four years of updates starting in 2021

Three years ago Google attacked fragmentation with Project Treble. It separated the layer of the operating system from the implementation of the provider to speed up updates, ensuring that the processors would be compatible with the last three versions of Android (three years) but now a change will allow mobile phones to receive soon four years of updates and four versions of Android.

Until now, an SoC manufacturer had to create multiple combinations of implementations for its new chips and previous releases. The result was that in three years after a chipset was released, the SoC vendor would have to support up to 6 combinations of OS framework software and vendor implementations, multiplied by dozens of different processors.

To reduce engineering costs and improve upgrades, during this past year Google has worked with Qualcomm to solve this problem, and what they have done is remove the retroactive requirement of the processors since they had the mobiles. Now a single SoC implementation will support four versions of Android. Processor manufacturers will no longer have to create update implementation for each new version.

This novelty will take effect from the new SoCs that go to the factory market with Android 11, starting with the Snapdragon 888 along with the new processors that Qualcomm begins to launch on the market.

With this change, future Pixels should have four years of updates. Surely more manufacturers are encouraged to extend their support for their mobiles for another year.

What is still a mystery if in the future mobile phones with processors from other manufacturers such as MediaTek O Samsung if they will also support four versions of Android. For now, Google has only confirmed that only Qualcomm processors will offer four years of updates, which is with the manufacturer that they have implemented this novelty.

Via | Google