A year ago, Qualcomm announced a phone that it plans to sell to Snapdragon superfans around the world, which wouldn’t be a weird thing to type, because such a thing can’t exist, can it? Putting that thought aside, the phone was only produced in limited quantities by ASUS and its price of $ 1,500, making it a purchase that (appropriately) would never consider.
Unfortunately for those who have bought one and claimed that you are a superfan of a mobile chipset maker whose chipsets you use due to monopoly in the US, your $ 1,500 phone is not getting great support. Some people who own a “smartphone for Snapdragon Insider” (yes, that’s the official name) have taken to Reddit in recent days to ask if their really expensive phone has been abandoned.
The question was justified when you consider that the phone last received an update in March that only brought the device up to the January 2022 security patch. It’s June now and the phone is still in that same January patch.
To make matters worse, the phone is running Android 11 and I have no reasonable response to the news except to ask you to trash that thing today and unsubscribe from the Snapdragon Insiders program immediately. It’s unreasonable. Google is about to release the Android 13 to the world in a stable format and still Qualcomm, which has this single phone to update for which they wanted $ 1,500, is behind two versions of Android.
Qualcomm has been monitoring the situation since then and is promising another update on June 20. They further suggest that they continue to publish updates every 2-3 months thereafter. No words shared on Android 12. When the first announcement, Qualcomm Committed 4 year “regular” security updates. I estimate 2-3 months can be considered regular.
One could possibly blame ASUS for the slowness, because it’s a phone made by them and then branded by Qualcomm, but that’s really Qualcomm’s problem. There is no excuse for such an expensive phone that it should rarely see updates and then hook off.
// XDA