Hi,
I am not a developer and I cannot say much about chipsets… As a standard user and reading this topic (and others, like Call for Beta Testers - Be the first to test a new update!), I guess that we can say that FP lacks man power and suffers from a sometimes elusive communication.
Nonetheless, when @kuleszdl talks about priorities in development, we shouldn’t forget about the Sailfish project as well (and some prospects with other OS). There will always be people complaining about something, it’s all about priorities, as you say. As a FPOOS user, I read a lot of comments of FPOOS users complaining about updates and bugs. Like you, I would personally be happy if FP would consider FPOOS as a priority over the regular Google OS. But other users (and sometimes even the same, including me), think that FP should put more time and efforts in the Sailfish integration. On the other hand, Fairphone is all about phones being fair. We could talk about fair software, of course, but at the beginning, it was all about conflict-free minerals. The goal is to offer conflict-free minerals phones to the most people, meaning that the fewest miners would work in bad conditions. As 95% of FP owners prefer the google OS, I understand why it is a priority.
Furthermore, we cannot fear the obsolescence of our FP2 and ask FP to give more time to solve the Android 6/7 issue, if this means that they have to neglect FP1 owners and thus make their first model obsolete.
I am not a developer and maybe you can see more efficient ways to develop FP1, FP2, FPOOS and Sailfish at the same time, but at the end, I guess that it is all about priorities and how much man power you have. The only thing that I would advice is to communicate better and to use more the community for testing and advice.
Another thought: do you think it would be better for FP to
- focus on selling a good smartphone with conflict-free minerals and a regular Android used by the most people
- facilitate the development of another OS (like Sailfish or ubuntu), maybe even delegate it
- and drop FPOOS?
I really like FPOOS and I am really happy to have this possibility as long as there isn’t a good alternative to Android, but maybe it represents too much work? With ubuntu or sailfish, FP wouldn’t depend on Android for all the security breaches etc. I don’t know how much work it takes to update FPOOS, given that FP must anyway update the regular OS, but I guess that it is still a lot of time and that they will always be running after the Android updates. Maybe another OS would not ask as many updates, and maybe the community of users of this OS would be bigger (not only on FP, but on other phones as well) and would be able to help more?