A quiet week for tech news, but there were various pieces of Android related bad news, and I’ll want to mention Apple’s tax issues.

Android woes

After last week’s release of Nougat, some new things came to light. I was pretty clear in my disappointment of various parties regarding their support of Nougat for newer phones, but this article from Ars Technica highlights another party: chip maker Qualcomm.

It seems that Qualcomm will not provide the necessary support for some of their older chips, despite that these were still being used in phones released as late as the end of 2015. According to the article this is a bit of a vicious circle: the device manufacturers don’t usually update phones more than 2 years old, so Qualcomm doesn’t bother either, which means the device manufacturers can’t update the phones. It’s not a situation that makes anyone look good, but I can highly recommend the article for all the details.

The big thing in Android news was exploding batteries from Samsung’s new Note 7. From everything I’ve read this seems like a really good phone, so it’s a shame for the people who bought it that it’s been recalled. There should be replacements showing up reasonably soon, but obviously for anyone who just bought it¹ this won’t do Samsung’s reputation any good. While I don’t care about how a huge corporation feels², I do feel sorry for the people who bought this phone and now have to deal with this³.

Speaking of phones, Google has apparently cancelled their project Ara. This was their plan to make a modular phone, that would allow you to change out bits and pieces to make a fully customized phone. To be honest, I’m not really surprised at this. While the idea is interesting, and I wouldn’t mind playing around with it, I don’t see there being a big market for it. It will be interesting for some people, but the vast majority of the market will likely prefer a more integrated design. Similar to how there isn’t a big market for modular laptops.

Apple taxes

It’s not just Android that had negative things this week, the same goes for Apple with regards to their taxes. As I’m neither a business analyst nor very good with taxes, I have no intention of going into this deeply. The short version is that the EU believes that Apple should pay more taxes to Ireland than they have, and Apple (and seemingly Ireland’s government⁴) disagree. Which side is right here is as usual in these case unclear, and it’s probably going to result in years of legal proceedings.

The amount Apple is told to pay isn’t even all that large⁵, but obviously they don’t want to pay it. Again though, it’s a huge company so there’s no reason to feel bad for them. While I don’t like paying taxes either, and they apparently followed the letter of the law, the truth is that there’s a lot of income they didn’t pay taxes on. It might be standard practice or good accounting, but that doesn’t make it right.