> Pass a law that taxes Google punitively for each app sale on an unmaintained phone, and see how quiclky they'll find a way to support their phones.
Wouldn't the result of that, be that phones that get anywhere even close to being unmaintained would stop dead (or close to it), so Google doesn't get exposed to a problem?
To me, that doesn't sound better than the situation you're trying to fix.
Selling apps to the long tail of older phones is probably worth throwing some money in a maintenance team. Especially with phones having a 3 year shelf life.
As long as there is also a minimum support window, say 3+ years, and full specs and source are community released, then why not?
The important part could easily be ensuring that older hardware can be accessed. We need an end to binary blobs, or, to force long term blob support and updates.
I imagine a scenario where you pay $20 per year for support and updates for your old device, to a third party.
Or of course, there could be foundations, compile it yourself, etc too.
But if the environment is the reason, why not share the load?
Manufacturers publishing code, sources, and docs is not trivial in of itself.
I'm not a fan of it, because that basically means that Google asks the community to take up the bill for a service they sell at extraordinarily high price.
I know that's the case for lots of open-source software, but since we're coming to that topic, Google's open-source policy that produces software that is either tightly aligned with their own interest (Chrome) or barely usable without their proprietary ecosystem (Android) is shameful. Quite frankly, I would much rather see open-source communities work on linux phones, no matter how useless that may be.
Another reason I'm not a fan of it is that if Google is allowed to transfer their responsibility to a community, I'm willing to bet that their initial support duration will drop even more, and that any issue will be blamed on open-source maintainers, log4j-style.
> But if the environment is the reason, why not share the load?
Does Google share the profits? Is their Android business barely profitable to justify getting free labour?
> will be required to unlock bootloaders and publish technical specs
is probably sufficient motivation. There's no way Apple would be willing to do that. Google might be, but they might have a lot of resistance from Qualcomm and possibly mobile carriers and other partners.
That is imo a bad fix, because it would be very easy for Google and Apple to make sure the technical specs are unreadable and the bootloaders complicated to use, without much recourse for the lawmaker.
Comparatively, it's much easier to make a law targeting the stores that's hard to avoid.
Yes, indeed. But that is a massive footgun to use, and it creates a direct incentive to have longer service durations.
It is likely that Google would stand to make more money by offering longer service duration for their OS, and by demanding phonemakers to maintain their firmware.
I guess the info we need to see whether this would be a good decision or not is how much money Google makes from selling apps to phones 3 year and older.
I'm sure that, was such a law allowed to pass, lawmakers and prosecutors would magically find a way to express their dissatisfaction if Google was trying to skirt the law in such a crude way.
My bet would be on Google successfully lobbying to kill the bill in the first place, or to cripple it and make it irrelevant (for instance with a long grace period that always gets extended).
> lawmakers and prosecutors would magically find a way to express their dissatisfaction if Google was trying to skirt the law in such a crude way.
Depends on what the law makers actually want. Enough legislation is passed just do they can tell their voters "look, we did something" without actually hurting their corporate buddies.
Pass a law that taxes Google punitively for each app sale on an unmaintained phone, and see how quiclky they'll find a way to support their phones.