Most of the chips in a smartphone are made by Qualcomm, both processors and peripheral chips like 5G modem, LTE modem, WiFi, and Bluetooth. Qualcomm chips require proprietary binary blobs to function, and usually only have a support lifetime of about 2 years. They also only supply those blobs to the manufacturer of the device.
Like 90% of the blame here goes to Qualcomm AFAIK :/
Why is that? (Genuine curiosity)
Most of the chips in a smartphone are made by Qualcomm, both processors and peripheral chips like 5G modem, LTE modem, WiFi, and Bluetooth. Qualcomm chips require proprietary binary blobs to function, and usually only have a support lifetime of about 2 years. They also only supply those blobs to the manufacturer of the device.
Now I wish we had riscV mobile phones too…
Pine64 I think said they’re making the next Pinephone when they can make it RISC-V.
Which either means they’re enthusiastic about the pace of RISC-V development, or they don’t want to make a new phone anytime soon.