Android 16 for FP6

Discuss The Industry
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Continuing the discussion from Smartphones to get a new EU label in June 2025. How will this affect Fairphone?:

Fairphone has mentioned working on Android 16 for FP6

What Android version does The Fairphone (Gen. 6) come with?

The Fairphone (Gen. 6) comes with Android 15 installed. Android 16 is expected later in 2025.

I think this is extremely ambitious given all the ongoing issues with the support and the ongoing work with Android 15 for FP4, but just remembered @gigimava comment and realised they might not have any other choice.

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The teams for the devices are normally not the same, thus working on one device should have no impact on the work on other devices.

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I understand that. Still delivering a major update usually generates some extra pressure on the support.

Plus it feels like a significant effort to be supporting four phones in terms of security updates (that’s not A16 related though)

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The question is whether Operating System according to the regulation is Android or Android 15.

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I am inserting here some relevant passages but obviously I welcome any interpretations

  • ‘operating system’ means the general type of pre-installed software that controls the execution of programs and that may provide services such as resource allocation, scheduling, input-output control and data management; it is normally subject to regular updates leading to the establishment of a range of major and minor versions; it includes any pre-installed software applications which the user cannot uninstall;

    ‘security update’ means an operating system update, including security patches, if relevant for a given device, whose main purpose is to provide enhanced security for the device;

  • ‘corrective update’ means an operating system update, including corrective patches, whose purpose is to provide corrections to bugs, errors or malfunctions in the operating system;

  • ‘functionality update’ means an operating system update whose main purpose is to implement new functionalities;

Operating system updates:

(a) from the date of end of placement on the market to at least 5 years after that date, manufacturers, importers or authorised representatives shall, if they provide security updates, corrective updates or functionality updates to an operating system, make such updates available at no cost for all units of a product model with the same operating system;

(b) (…)

(c) security updates or corrective updates mentioned under point (a) need to be available to the user at the latest 4 months after the public release of the source code of an update of the underlying operating system or, if the source code is not publicly released, after an update of the same operating system is released by the operating system provider or on any other product of the same brand;

(d) functionality updates mentioned under point (a) need to be available to the user at the latest 6 months after the public release of the source code of an update of the underlying operating system or, if the source code is not publicly released, after an update of the same operating system is released by the operating system provider or on any other product of the same brand;
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