• Jiří Král@discuss.tchncs.de
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    8 hours ago

    There are plenty of custom ROMs for phones where the chipset drivers are open (usually Qualcomm) and the phone has unlockable bootloader. If these 2 conditions are met in many cases the community is able to do better job of keeping the phone up to date with newer Android builds than the manufacturer itself. My phone would be stuck with Android 12 if I did rely on the manufacturer, but thanks to the community I run Android 14 with this security patch from this February and Android 15 is also available. The problem is of course that most users aren’t going to flash their phone with a new ROM on their own anyway.

    • Justin@lemmy.jlh.name
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      6 hours ago

      Males sense. Technically, all chipset drivers are required to be open source since Linux is hard-copyleft open source.