What this is really about is Qualcomm. They have inadequate competition and that allows them to abuse everybody else.

In a competitive market, open source drivers win. Look at the desktop market -- nearly everything is open source, and the biggest holdout is nVidia, because for a while there nobody was challenging them on performance. Now that AMD has competitive GPUs again, not only does that provide a competitive option with open source drivers, nVidia is now losing market share to them.

OEMs don't really like proprietary drivers. They're a pain. Whenever new driver versions come out, it becomes the OEM's problem to test and distribute them instead of having the Linux kernel team deal with that hassle. The open source drivers also generally have fewer bugs (because anybody can fix them), which leads to fewer support calls and more satisfied customers who make repeat purchases.

And customers naturally prefer hardware with longer hardware support, when it's available.

What we need is more competition for Qualcomm. Google could do that if they wanted to -- throw some money at making competing phone chips. Apple does it, why can't they? And then publish open source drivers and sell the chips to anybody.

We also have AMD as a dark horse now. The Ryzen 4000 series goes down to 10 watts -- it's so power efficient you could squeeze it into an Android tablet as-is (and then be a lot faster than most tablets), and it wouldn't take much on AMD's part to do something that could work in a phone. Android is an open source system with apps that run on the JVM, so the architectural difference shouldn't matter much.

Or we could get the antitrust authorities to stop letting Qualcomm buy every competitor that springs up, which they've been doing for years.

But you solve the competition problem and you get open source drivers. Along with all the other benefits of real competition.

Qualcomm has plenty of competitors. Mediatek, Allwinner, Samsung, Broadcom etc. They all have the exact same issues wrt. driver support: they do the minimum work required to bring up their board with one heavily-patched kernel version, and that's it. Allwinner now has quite decent support from the mainline kernel, but only because of 3rd-party efforts. It's not just Qualcomm: these problems are shared by every embedded SoC to date, with very limited exceptions.

The existence of other ARM SoCs doesn't mean they're competitive enough at the high end for the advantage of open source drivers to be the determining factor.

Meanwhile the low end is more sensitive to price than quality, so competition there pushes things towards things cut costs rather than things that improve the experience, or even things that reduce long term costs at the expense of short term costs.

> Android is an open source system with apps that run on the JVM, so the architectural difference shouldn't matter much.

Android apps run on ART, not the JVM (different bytecode, similar idea): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_Runtime

Many apps have native code as well, and Intel put a lot of time and money into automatic binary translation some years ago to make such apps work on x86 Android: https://www.anandtech.com/show/5770/lava-xolo-x900-review-th...

AMD might be able to build on that, but it was probably specific to Intel's mobile CPUs of the time (which didn't really succeed), and I don't know what's happened since.