Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by svpk 6 days ago
That's a pretty concrete list so it's unclear to me what you mean. They're also going to support some of the upcoming Motorola phones so it's not just pixels.

I think the short answer of what they'd need to do in a practical way is to release a phone that uses one of the latest Qualcomm processors (those have the required hardware security features), make sure they have at least 5 years of driver support and commit to keeping the phone up to date, allow for relocking the bootloater (they might already do that). And I think that's basically it, the Graphene project would be able to take things from there.

Realistically given that they tend to source older/weaker processors for reasons related to their goals it's unlikely they would source a processor with the required security features for their next model, but that's just a guess.

1 comments

We say 5 years in the requirements but we want 7 and are starting to expect it. Pixels have provided 7 years since the Pixel 8. Qualcomm provides 8 years of support for new platforms and non-Pixel OEMs are using it to begin claiming to provide 7 years of support. However, we need the updates delivered on time and not becoming less frequent over time. For example, Samsung moving to quarterly updates for older devices isn't what we expect.