The requirements for devices in the EU will apply from June 20, 2025. The European Union has been pushing tech companies to be more transparent with...
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 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 even if it is possible the ARM ecosystem unfortunately relies on the hardware manufacturer to keep the drivers and everything up to date (to work with the latest OS realease) and not on the OS distributor like most x86 ecosystem does, so you are lrobably right ARM is kind of cursed in this way. I know there are also drivers on x86, but the whole nature of things much more open. Correct me if I am wrong.
The kernel is open-source AFAIK, but anything built on top of it is part of AOSP which is licensed under Apache 2 and allows for proprietary modifications to be redistributed. To be honest I don’t know how this licensing stuff works exactly.
There are no nearly custom ROMs for phones with mediatek processors AFAIK because the drivers are not open-source. Either that or there is a legal issue with modifying and redistributimg the modified drivers.
I think that boils down to how ARM chipsets don’t support mainline Linux. You need lots of patchsets which break over time.
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 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 even if it is possible the ARM ecosystem unfortunately relies on the hardware manufacturer to keep the drivers and everything up to date (to work with the latest OS realease) and not on the OS distributor like most x86 ecosystem does, so you are lrobably right ARM is kind of cursed in this way. I know there are also drivers on x86, but the whole nature of things much more open. Correct me if I am wrong.
Males sense. Technically, all chipset drivers are required to be open source since Linux is hard-copyleft open source.
The kernel is open-source AFAIK, but anything built on top of it is part of AOSP which is licensed under Apache 2 and allows for proprietary modifications to be redistributed. To be honest I don’t know how this licensing stuff works exactly.
There are no nearly custom ROMs for phones with mediatek processors AFAIK because the drivers are not open-source. Either that or there is a legal issue with modifying and redistributimg the modified drivers.