Android 6.0 Marshmallow / 7 Nougat for FP2?

Well, he sounds very confident that Android 7 will come to our phones. I hope more news are coming this year :smiley:

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I’m wondering why the information stands on a third-party website and @Bas_van_Abel did not inform us, the Fairphone 2 owners, at all.

Because we are not the owners of Fairphone.

I meant the device, not the company.

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Fairphone is very careful with its media strategy - announcements are made on the right time and platform to generate the greatest impact. An announcement on the forum would lead to many questions from forum users when it will come & complaints about ‘outdated’ Marshmallow.

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Hey people,

we are currently following up with the author of the article. It refers to a question for Olivier during our Camera Launch press conference in Berlin 2 weeks ago. Olivier verbatim said “we are looking into it”. That means that the FP2 is currently still officially limited to Android 6. That also means that - in the interest of software longevity - we are definitely looking into possibilities to provide software support for as long as possible. He was stressing the obligation we have towards trying to provide longer-living software solutions. The article took it from there and spun it further. Rest assured that you will get all relevant information from us directly.

I hope this has clarified the circumstances of this article. Why should we be bold and clear to journalists and secretive to you?

Best,
Daniel

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Wow - looking forward to seeing this happen.

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That really would be a change!

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Haha, not so cynical you @Quiss42 and @Heiner.
We had this discussion before and you can read how all the arguments went right here: Should FP announce early and sometimes get it wrong, or better not announce at all?

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You have a point there; yet, please let me direct your attention to this recent posting by @AlbertJP

That’s some kind of information not only many would have loved to get straight from the horses mouth, it even was asked for multiple times; addressed at you, if I do recall it correctly. :wink:
Could you at least confirm that info?

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No I can’t… I do not know where this comes from and I do not have such information myself.

I think the number was mentioned in a discussion where somebody wanted to give an example and used this hypothetical number to make a point.

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I am really considering getting the Fairphone 2. However, software updates are very important, especially with security. It seems to me there isn’t a clear OS update path on any of the Fairphone literature. I would therefore be concerned of owning one, as you would basically be stuck on Android 6 with very little in the way of bug and security patches. Personally I think Fairphone should aim at the higher end of the market and make the phone very capable, that way each iteration of phone (surely as few as possible to be more sustainable?) would have a longer OS upgrade shelf life. I guess what really needs to happen in this market is for standards to be created across all the phone companies to reduce the social and environmental impact of phone production. I am not certain one company on their own can bring about this change. Is fariphone working with other manufactures to try and bring this about?

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There isn’t a clear update path on any Android phone. Whenever G%§$e puts out a new OS version they basically decide which phones they deem worthy enough to be able to upgrade.

Afaik Fairphone hasn’t given up on upgrading to Android 7 - and technically it’s possible, see #software:alt-lineageos - but going against G%§$e isn’t easy.

Fairphone is currently rather thinking of going in the opposite direction and making the FP3 another mid-range phone like the FP1, so FP2 owners don’t through away their phones to buy the new model but rather wait for the FP4.
But you don’t necessarily need high-end hardware to upgrade to a newer Android version - you just need to be lucky to have picked the kind of hardware that G%§$e decides to support.

Yes Fairphone is working with other companies and strives to motivate them to change their bad practices.

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But Fairphone is concerned about security and releases security updates every month since the very beginning of the Fairphone 2. :confused:

Considering the performance of the Snapdragon 801 there isn’t anything the phone can’t handle well enough. For the future I’d rather look out for power savings and a bigger battery, but performance is clearly not a problem.

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Typically, performance is less of a problem, software support is. More expensive chipsets can make longer software support more likely, but that is not guaranteed. What’s more important is that the next Fairphone supports Treble, the new Hardware Abstraction Layer Google introduced for phones coming to market with Android 8.

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This is true from the traditional Android perspective, but considering what a chipset with mainline kernel support with a dedicated USB modem could achieve in terms of long-term support… I’d rather choose this.

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As far as security updates go Fairphone has been one of the fastest vendors WRT delivering security patches. The issue is that Google’s security fixes for older versions of Android is limited to two years after a new version is released IIRC; so it’s a mixed bag.

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Not necessarily. Looking at Google Security Bulletins for the Android Security Bulletins, they still include patches for Android 4.4 or 5.0 occasionally.

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I guess that’s that for this topic. :slight_smile:

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