Android updates are increasingly supported for longer and longer periods of time on top of the line, high-end, or upper-midrange devices across brands, but lower-midrange and especially entry-level phones have it a lot harder. Qualcomm wants to do all it can to change that, however. The issuance of updates is very dependent on the maker of the chipset in your phone, as that company has to still actively support the SoC, and for most cheaper ones, the support window ends much sooner than for more expensive ones, perhaps understandably.
Even at higher price points, the cadence of updates isn't always what it should be - monthly security updates are only provided monthly by a handful of brands, for example. So this is where Qualcomm comes in. According to Chris Patrick, SVP and General Manager of Handsets at Qualcomm, the company has been working on making it easier for OEMs to keep all of their phones updated.
Here's what Patrick told Android Authority : It is very complicated for a customer — an OEM — to get security updates, to get Android version updates, and then get it to every end user. It’s actually very expensive and very complicated. One of the things we’ve been working on for the past several years with Google and with the OEMs is to change the structure of inline code — to kind of change the machinery for how we do those updates.
You’ll see that, later on this year, we’ll make some announcements about some of those changes we’ve made to facilitate thi.