In what may be the most dramatic change in recent years when it comes to the Android system, Google has announced 4 years of support for device updates starting next year.
This is Google’s collaboration with Qualcomm and therefore in the first phase will be supported devices based on the new Snapdragon 888 chip that will be launched in early 2021. Google will provide at least another year of system updates and security updates, but it also depends on the various manufacturers decide to continue to maintain Their devices.
Google has been working for the past year to improve the system and the process by which manufacturers are required to perform the updates in order to reduce it and prevent development and implementation in each re-release. This is part of the Treble project in which it breaks down the Android system into a number of separate units, so that in the future updates can be made in a much shorter working time.
The collaboration with Qualcomm is done at the level of the company’s chipset, so presumably all Snapdragon processors that will be launched next year can support 4 years of updates. This is a first step to ensure faster updates, in an attempt to bring support to devices on the market similar to what Apple is doing today with iOS. Apart from Qualcomm, other manufacturers are also targeting, and it is likely that we will hear more about this later.
More about the project on the official Android blog.