The question is not, what they miss, the question is if they would be willing to get the technical information and invest the time to flash FP Open OS plus Open Gapps. Most people I know just don’t care enough to invest the effort.
Yes, that’s true. Still, how long will Google support a main version? Two years? This might be too short for an ambitious lifetime. Don’t get me wrong, the idea is great, but still we’re at the mercy of fast revolving hardware and software. As FP already realized, they are too small to influence these big players. Well, until now. With all that media attention and acknowledgements maybe there’s a chance to get to people and decision takers…
It’s very simple. Most people are consumers, not tinkerers. While it might not be too difficult to learn to flash opengapps and what not to get the phone behaving like any other consumer Android phone most people won’t bother. That’s the truth. And that’s the strength of Fairphone. They produced a mass (compatible) product that’s also fair, which is a strong selling point for many. But not strong enough to drve into flashing, trouble shooting and living Google free. This will not happen.
In few words, the SoC snapdragon 801 of fairphone 2 is not support by official CTS of android 7 a due to of missing support of OpenGL ES 3.1. The fact is that no phone using the snapdragon 800 or 801 (the 801 also uses the adreno 330 GPU) has been announced to support android 7.
So it is not possible to officially port android 7 to fairphone 2 and this is the reason for which has been selected android 6.
However, by using the open source version of fairphone 2 OS together with open gapps, it will be possible to port also android 7 to fairphone 2 since other OS like cyanogenmod 14.1 aka android 7.1 are compatible with old devices with lower specifications than fairphone 2.
KitKat was released on 31st October, 2013. If we assume a life cycle of 2,5 years, support should have stopped by 31st April, 2016, which it didn’t.
It’s really hard to predict anything here so it’s even more important to push the alternative projects like Cyanogen Mod, Sailfish OS and Ubuntu Touch.
The question is not, what they miss, the question is if they would be willing to get the technical information and invest the time to flash FP Open OS plus Open Gapps. Most people I know just don’t care enough to invest the effort.
Sad, maybe… but true.
Yes, that’s true. Still, how long will Google support a main version? Two years? This might be too short for an ambitious lifetime. Don’t get me wrong, the idea is great, but still we’re at the mercy of fast revolving hardware and software. As FP already realized, they are too small to influence these big players. Well, until now. With all that media attention and acknowledgements maybe there’s a chance to get to people and decision takers…
Exactly, this is the point. The only way to extend the lifetime of fairphone 2 to at least 5 years is to have the ability to upgrade to latest OS version since the hardware is enough for 90% of users.
Since fairphone is to small to influence big player, it should go on by itself. How? By developing the open source OS version updated to latest version of main android and by creating a simple procedure to switch from closed source OS version to open source OS version.
It’s really hard to predict anything here so it’s even more important to push the alternative projects like Cyanogen Mod, Sailfish OS and Ubuntu Touch.
Yes, a porting to cyanogemod could be very useful and maybe also ubuntu touch.
Earlier this year there were lots of discussions about this. Then, FP said they weren’t pursuing this because they had not enough resources. Time changes, the idea of the sustainable phone is strong, let’s see with what they come up by the time Android 6 is on our phones and they have to followup somehow. By that time a working cm and Ubuntu also might be reality
Now that is interesting! I searched the internet a bit and it seems, the Z1 will at first just recieve an open beta version of Android 7 at the end of January. Some websites write as if will definitely get a final version, but some are writing that it’s not quite clear, wether or not the phone will just stay on an open beta version (maybe because of this Google compatibility thing).
It would be nice to have an official announcement from Fairphone especially because the lack of Communication is the biggrst issue of a lot of people here. De security is very late this month so maybe 6 is really coming .