this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2025
1032 points (99.3% liked)

Technology

68305 readers
4371 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 486@lemmy.world 1 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

I'm not sure why you think manufactuers of SoCs (or entire phones) - which aren't used by Google directly (as in: used by Google in their own products or sold by Google as their own product) - provide drivers to Google. They don't, because there is no point in doing that. This is not how the Android eco-system works or the business of selling those SoCs for that matter.

SoC manufactuers sell their SoCs to companies who want to build Android phones (or they build their own like Samsung). With those SoCs they provide a BSP (board support package) that includes all the bits needed to bring up a system running on that partricular SoC. Google has pretty much nothing to do with this, except that Google recommends a certain Linux kernel version (with a bunch of Android-specific patches) for a given Android version, which SoC makers often (but not always) use as the base for their customized kernels.

It is not like Google provides the operating system including all device specific drivers to the device manufacturers. They don't care about that at all. They provide AOSP (which is open source, so anyone can get that) as well as their proprietary stuff like Google Play etc. That's pretty much it.

There is a lot not to like about many Android phones (or rather smartphones in general), when it comes to their openness in regards to software. And it is perfectly fine to criticize those involved, but you should direct your criticism at the correct parties. Google isn't the bad guy in this instance.