I always say, if someone wants to know every single detail of my life, they can already achieve this, so why bother. In the meantime, I donāt do online shopping on my phone, nor let them send emails to my device. This actually is because I do not want to be pestered by advertisement mails on my phone. But if it improves my security, even better so!
This worries me a bit. I do not use a mobile banking app on my phone, but occasionally let them send a smsTAN to my phone. This is only valid for 5 minutes, so probably not very risky.
Donāt have Google Apps installed! It corrupts the system far too much, the FP is less buggy without it!
Well, I use my mobile banking app only because my bank uses two codes authentication (one as login password and one for operations involving payments) and sends me another OTP code by SMS when I have to do fund transfers, otherwise I wouldnāt use their app.
Although the question could be extended to my laptop or desktop PC and all that involves devices with firmwares and network connections, but I think this would be an endless paranoid loop (I for sure donāt want to buy IoT enabled devices as soon as I canā¦)
Me too! very happy with F-Droid and BlankStore for those apps I cannot find elsewhere than Play Store.
Bye!
That is right. However, as stated in other threads and here, no really free and usable smartphones exists at the moment. And in the same way the Fairphone tackels conflict-free or fair minerals and production on step at a time they are adressing the software problem as well. Even projects like Firefox OS and Sailfish OS rely a lot on closed source software ā be it device drivers and other binary blobs in Firefox OS or even most parts of the user interface in Jolla. Even now, some Firefox OS devices face the same problems most cheaper Android devices face: They are no longer supported with software updates.
If you want as much updates as possible, even major OS releases, a Nexus, Firefox OS developer device or and iPhone might be your best option currently. Fairphoneās options are limited due to resources and market impact with such a small number of devices. And even much larger companies are having the same problem.
I do not think Fairphone has failed because missing software updates. It might have been a mistake to choose Mediatek, but nobody knows if another chipset would have make any difference. I am pretty sure Fairphone will be more careful in this regard in the future. But i do not want to forget why i bought the Fairphone. Free Software was never a promise and not a reason for me. It might be that it is the best match for the Fairphone and i would really love it, but i do not want Fairphone to lose their focus.
It would. My previous phone was a HTC Desire. It was only supported by HTC until Android 2.3. But they provided a tool to unlock their bootloader. Based on these things, a wide variety of ROMs existed. At the end, I could even run Android 4.4 quite well.
The HTC Desire was released in March 2010. In 2015, my 1 year old Fairphone is still stuck on Android 4.2. In the case of the HTC Desire I finally replaced it because the hardware had reached its end of life (GPS was dead, storage was way too small). I would not like to see the Fairphone end just because the OS cannot be upgraded.
And itās not just about having the lastest OS. In my case I simply want support for Bluetooth LE. A lot of devices donāt work without the new Bluetooth standard. And the Mediatek Chipset supports Bluetooth LE. Therefore the OS used on the Fairphone is even incomplete when comparing it with the hardware capabilities.
Itās not. Itās just juggling with dependencies.
Can we depend on Google to fix the bugs in a ālegacyā OS? (Btw, Android 4.2.2 just turned 2 years old) No we canāt, since they said they wonāt.
Can we depend on Firefox/CM to write a better code? No, I donāt think the googles devs are worse than others.
Can we expect Firefox/CM to be better supported? Yes, but only if they got complete access to the code. If there is a part that is provided compiled only (drivers, firmwares), then the support will be incomplete and is expected to be dropped about the time one of the compiled objects cannot be linked in the updated OS.
This comes down to the old question: Can we expect MediaTek to un-jail the code for our chipset? No. I donāt think theyāll release it, ever. They did announce it several times already, so I think they just canāt. My fear is that itās because the code is very buggy, very messy and/or contains backdoors. In any case releasing the code would have a major impact on the company. So theyāre going with the small impact of me(us) having next phone not MTK based.
Itās not about āas much OS updates as possibleā or having āthe latest OSā. Itās about being up-to-date, related to security & compatibility.
Just the same as we canāt use Windows XP; itās not being updated and hence insecure to use (for whatever what purpose). A pity to see my āfairā phone having such an unfair short life; really the very last thing I expected when joining the project.
Basically, itās about both. But the security is the minimum requirement.
Btw, I donāt agree with you about XP. Since Windows is considered unsafe in general, there is some good software (and a LOT of bad one) to protect your computer. As a professional user my OS is protected not only by Microsoft via updates, but through multiple layers. Ideally, the attacker has to know what protection I use, which version of what software, to launch a successive attack.
Android rely only on itself for protection. I even think that Android is not designed well to support 3rd party protective layer. It may not be even possible without a major change.
To sum it up: an unsupported Windows will never be as bad an unsupported Android. I even feel safe to run XP (64 bit) on my i7 machine.
It corrupts the system far too much, the FP is less buggy without it!
(I for sure donāt want to buy IoT enabled devices as soon as I canā¦)