Serious question: Why can Samsung & MediaTek get around Qualcomm 5G modem patents - yet Apple can't?

Before you ask "Why?"...

...you should ask "If".

'Qualcomm announced a licensing agreement with Samsung that the company said stretches through 2023 and includes 5G technologies.'

Do any of them belong to a 'patent pool'?

I have to openly admit, time & again, you're more knowledgeable than I. *Who Owns Core 5G Patents?*

Given patents are holding Apple back (but not Samsung, MediaTek & Hauwei): "The issue with Apple's 5G chip being delayed is a legal matter over patents and a licensing agreement with Qualcomm and not because Apple's 5G chip development has failed in any way."

Let's start with the definition of a Patent Pool:

"Patent pools collect patents from multiple patentees and license them out as a package."

Digging into what the 5G patent pools are is a tricky area indeed.

The question is whether or not Samsung, MediaTek, & Hauwei own sufficient patents in those patent pools, or, if they license patents from Qualcomm.

Huawei is the leader in 5G patents, surprisingly, followed by Samsung: "Huawei is leading with the most declared 5G patents i.e. 3007 patent families followed by Samsung and LG with 2317 and 2147 patent families respectively. Nokia is following LG and secured the 4th position with 2047 patent families, while Ericsson and Qualcomm have 5th and 6th place."

However, Qualcomm must have some key patents since This says Huawei licenses the technology from Qualcomm (like Apple): "Both Apple and Huawei... entered into new multi-year licensing partnerships with Qualcomm and paid a hefty lump-sum payment as per the settlement agreement"

This also supports the premise that Huawei is the leader in 5G patents:

Notice though that Apple is clearly well behind basically just about everyone, even with the huge surge in patents Apple bought from Intel for about the price of yet another fully equipped modern aircraft carrier.

But, obviously, based on the Supreme Court ruling this week, there are at least two critical Qualcomm patents that Apple is _desperate_ to override.

There's a more detailed analysis of this week's Supreme Court decision here

which tells us that the two patents in question are the following:

1. (U.S. Patent No. 7,844,037 on a "method and device for enabling message responses to incoming phone calls"; originally obtained by Palm)
2. (U.S. Patent 8,683,362 on a "card metaphor for activities in a computing device"). Apparently both of which expire in August, 2029.

(As a related aside, that article says Apple is always behind in technology but that they advertise their way out of it, which is what Apple does now.

The interesting part of _that_ analysis was that even if Apple makes their own modems, Qualcomm can come after them for patent infringement, which supports my theory that the problem isn't that Apple failed - but that Qualcomm has the patents.

This article below also says Apple is always behind in 4G & 5G technology:

That still leaves Samsung, Huawei & MediaTek to be better understood as to how _they_ can make modems, but not Apple.

I'll dig into them directly, but I didn't see, on my first skim anyway, that the "patent pools" affected the companies we're speaking about.