Google has officially retired the Nexus 5 off its support line after three years in the market in conjunction with the announcement of Android Nougat 7.0, while the Nexus 5 had great hardware and technically it should still be able to run Google’s most current Android OS without any issues, Google’s decision to stop supporting the phone could probably be more than just being a legacy device, and this may affect other Android smartphones that has similar hardware specs as the Nexus 5.
The affected hardware is assumed to be the Snapdragon 800 system-on-chip, which Qualcomm has stopped releasing drivers for newer Android versions. Android 7.0 introduces many major changes under the hood that leads to better smartphone performance, one of it being the support of the Vulkan API, a low overhead graphics API that will greatly improve graphics performance and quality in games, which could probably be one of the reasons that the Nexus 5 isn’t going to get support for Android 7.0, and this news would likely affect many other OEM devices that runs on the chip, the Snapdragon 801 chip could be affected as well as it has the same core of its predecessor but with a higher clock speed.
This assumption is made by Twitter user LlabTooFeR and reported by 9to5Google. Should this be true, there will be a lot of devices affected by Qualcomm’s decision to stop supporting the said chips, especially devices like the OnePlus X, Xiaomi Mi Note, ASUS Padfone S which are still a year old devices, custom ROMs will still make their way to these devices should there be community support but this would also mean that certain hardware will not work properly. Of course, the Snapdragon 800/801 are very old chips that should already reach its support lifespan, they may lack of 64-bit computing instructions, however they are still very capable when it comes to day to day smartphone performance. Therefore, its time to move on people.
SOURCE: 9to5Google
