I wonder what this will mean for custom roms. Mediatek are among the only chipsets with available microcode and therefor e.g. supported by OpenWRT, which gives me hope.
Mediatek has been making phone SoCs since forever now, they have two lines - Helios and Dimensity. They’re used in many phones, usually on the lower end. Even Samsung uses them. Both lines have abysmal custom rom support compared to Snapdragon phones, so I don’t think you can hope for much there.
But is that because it’s difficult or because it’s in phones people don’t care about.
The latter, almost everyone wants to use a phone with a qualcomm chipset, because most app and game developers almost never bother to optimise their software for mediatek processors.
I think it could be because about 10 years ago, mediatek didn’t really have any SOCs that could compete with the qualcomm flagships, therefore confining themselves to the budget phone category. Which is what earned mediatek SOCs the reputation of being slow.
That started to change with the release of their dimensity line of SOCs which matched or in some cases even surpassed the performance of Qualcomm flagships but the public perception of mediatek has only recently started changing. Hopefully we see more people buying mediatek SOC based phones so developers have some incentive to optimise their apps for it.
I’d argue it’s little bit of column A little bit of column B, MediaTek are notoriously slow in releasing their kernel sources, hampering custom ROM development for devices that are using their SoCs.
Would you want to run OpenWRT on the phone? If yes, why? I’m genuinely interested in examples of actual use cases.
Or are you hoping something new will emerge that takes advantage of the MediaTek chipset, similar to what OpenWRT already does for routers etc. but with a slightly different, smartphone-focused approach?
I was just trying to say that i hope that the creators of custom roms will still be able to do their work, which i don’t take for granted. Google doesn’t make their money with the phones themselves but with the data they get from the os thats running on them.
The CPU is still Google’s Tensor, and the modem on current Pixels is already a blackbox that custom ROMs interact with using binary blobs ripped from the official ROM. There isn’t much that could get worse with this change.
Oh bullshit. Google is charging as much as Apple. They are making money off of the phone sales.
OpenWrt mentioned!!!
also I feel like google knows they’ll lose like 25% of their phone market share if they dont allow custom ROMs on pixels. No one’s buying a pixel for the “status” and it is not a budget device by any means.
I buy it for the camera, best Android camera imo.
