Hi all,
There are quite a few points coming up, and I just want to weigh in briefly:
- Fairphone as a company is still very tiny in the electronics industry. Our volume of 60,000 phones makes up something like 0.017% of MediaTek’s sales last year. Source: eetimes.com.
"The company [MediaTek] said it expects to ship more than 450 million chips for smartphones in 2015, an increase of almost a third from the 350 million units that MediaTek forecast for 2014.”
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My point being that Fairphone has very little leverage to make the case for upgrading to Android 4.4 or opening up the source code - but we are trying. We are still working to create a solution for ongoing software support. I wish there were more firm news to announce, but it’s a work in progress.
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Community beta testing: This was done as a way to validate our own testing, and to engage our community more. I want to make it clear bringing in the community is not a replacement for our own professional development and testing. (Though if a community member wants to apply for a position, we have a job opening still in the software team, and always open to applications by writing jointheteam[at]fairphone.com
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I’ve opened a new topic asking about the comments on that Heise article. I want to make clear, Fairphone is not a ‘business as usual’ phone company. We want to talk directly to our customers and community and be transparent about our operations.
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My personal opinion: The frustration of not being able to deliver on Fairphone’s ambitions for open software may be the biggest learning point for us all (the company and the community), as it reveals how complex and bureaucratic this aspect of the industry is.