Not all of the big Android phone makers have announced their plans for the Nougat update, but if you look at Sony’s and Google’s and HTC’s official lists (as well as the supplemental lists being published by some carriers), you’ll notice they all have one big thing in common. None of the phones are more than a year or two old.

And while this is sadly the norm for the Android ecosystem, it looks like this isn’t exclusively the fault of lazy phone makers who have little incentive to provide support for anything they’ve already sold you. Sony, for instance, was working on a Nougat build for 2014’s Xperia Z3 and even got it added to the official Nougat developer program midway through, only to be dropped in the last beta build and the final Nougat release.

After doing some digging and talking to some people, we can say that it will be either very difficult if not completely impossible for any phone that uses Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 800 or 801 to get an official, Google-sanctioned Nougat update (including the Z3). And that’s a pretty big deal, since those two chips powered practically every single Android flagship sold from late 2013 until late 2014 and a few more recent devices to boot.

This situation has far-reaching implications for the Android ecosystem. And while it can be tempting to lay the blame at the feet of any one company—Google for creating this update mess in the first place, Qualcomm for failing to support older chipsets, and the phone makers for failing to keep up with new software—it’s really kind of everybody’s fault.

How an Android update is made

It’s a little outdated at this point, but one of the best illustrations of what goes into a major Android update is still this infographic that HTC put out a couple of years ago. Pretty early in that process, chipmakers like Qualcomm need to decide which of their products they’ll officially support. “Supported” chips get new optimized-and-tested drivers for the GPU, modem, and other important parts of the SoC, and the chipmaker will then provide that updated software as part of a generic board support package (BSP) distributed to phone makers. From there, that BSP, Google’s Android code, and whatever OEM-supplied apps and skins can all eventually be mixed together and sent out as an Android update, which can be issued as long as the phone meets Google’s compatibility requirements.

Part of the reason why the Android update mess exists is that all of these companies (plus your cellular carrier) need to agree to develop and release this update together—if anything goes wrong at any point in this chain, updates can’t happen, full stop.

Based on our own research (and conversations with parties that preferred not to be named), it looks like the biggest roadblock with Nougat on older devices is that Qualcomm isn’t providing support for the Snapdragon 800 and 801 chipsets under Nougat. When asked directly about support for these chips under Nougat, Qualcomm had this to say:

Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. works closely with our customers to determine the devices supported by various versions of the Android OS on our Snapdragon chipsets. The length of time a chipset is supported and the upgradable OS versions available for a particular chipset is determined in collaboration with our customers. We recommend you contact your device manufacturer or carrier for information on support for Android 7.0 Nougat.

This statement doesn’t deny that Qualcomm isn’t supporting these older chipsets under Nougat, but it also passes the buck along to its “customers” (i.e., the Android OEMs). In short, Qualcomm could provide Nougat support for older chips, but so few Android phone makers are actually asking for it that Qualcomm has decided not to go to the trouble.

Why is this a big deal?

This definitely isn’t the first time that Android hardware has faced an early death because of lack of hardware and driver support. 2011’s Galaxy Nexus had its life cut short when Texas Instruments, the manufacturer of its chipset, left the ARM chip market.

"It was a really extraordinary event," Dave Burke, a VP of engineering at Google and manager of the Nexus program, told Ars several months later. "You had a silicon company exit the market, there was nobody left in the building to talk to."

The difference in this case is that Qualcomm is not Texas Instruments. Not only is Qualcomm still alive and kicking, but it dominates the market for high-end phone chips in the US, something that was even more true two or three years ago than it is today. If you’re buying a high-end Android smartphone in the US, Qualcomm is nearly unavoidable.

This means that the company has an outsize importance in the Android update chain—if it chooses not to release drivers for a given chipset, it affects a lot of users. And it sets an example for other chipmakers, too. If the market leader doesn’t support its chips for more than two or three years, why should smaller players like MediaTek, Samsung, and the rest worry about it?

This sets off a vicious cycle—OEMs usually don’t update their phones for more than a year or two, so chipmakers don’t worry about supporting their chipsets for more than a year or two, so OEMs can’t update their phones for more than a year or two even if they want to. It turns the 18-month minimum target that Google has been silently pushing for the last half-decade into less of a “minimum” and more of a “best-case scenario.” And people who don’t buy brand-new phones the day they come out are even worse off, since most of these update timelines are driven by launch date and not by the date the phones were taken off the market.