Drop Fairphone OS and Fairphone Open but support LineageOS

Hallo Fairphone @Douwe,
I know that topis was discussed in several threads such as
Will LineageOS be officially supported?
Fairphone 2.1 - with support for Nougat
But I have to ask again why isn’t Fairphone not dropping Fairphone OS and Fairphone Open and fully supporting LineageOS as it shares the same ideals as Fairphone Open but it is away ahead in regard being up to date.
I’m asking as I’ve learned today that BLOCKS (btw. I’m still waitng for may watch but they doing a hard but great job) is going to do more or less exactly this by founding the project OpenWatch.
They are going to cooperate with

Team Carbon as well as some of the team behind Lineage OS

what allows to use software dev. resources in much more efficient way. That would enable Fairphone to shift manpower from software to hardware and sustainability promotion.

stefan

Hey Stefan,

Thank you for your question. As said in one of the topics you linked to: at Fairphone we are very impressed by the work of the community and we believe that their work is a huge contribution to the longevity of the Fairphone 2. Successful alternative OS’s for the FP2 will enable users to keep the phone longer and prevent ewaste.

That said, there are currently no plans to support LineageOS officially. The team has their hands full supporting the existing two OS’s and has no resources to support another one. Let alone the required pressure it would put on the legal, product, communications, marketing and support team if Fairphone start supporting a third OS…

But to explain a little further: the Fairphone ships with Android with Google services. If you want to sell many phones in order to achieve impact in the supply chain, there is currently no other option. The majority of people expect a standard OS that works out of the box with the apps they use and need. If we look at the number of people that currently use alternative OS’s on their FP2 it shows that 95% stays with Fairphone OS.

Making Fairphone Open is a small step for us from Android GMS and put little pressure on the teams capacities. Supporting a whole new OS, like LineageOS, is really no option.

4 Likes

Then why not ask in one of them?

PS: Okay the two topics you mentioned are closed already. So are many others.
I reopened this one as it was closed prematurely anyway (6 months after it was started instead of 6 months after latest reply):