Are you sure? If I understood well the incompatible old devices are the ones from BQ, because of some closed-source issue.
As FP2 is compatible with both Halium-5 and Halium-7, I hope it should not be an issue to go to Focal 20.04
quote from Q&A 108
BQ devices future
Domubpkm asked to clarify what the future is for BQ smartphones like the 4.5 and tablets like the M10, once we reach 20.04? The problem with those early devices is they were ported by Canonical but the source code to the Android side remained with the vendors. We need to move media handling and sensor drivers for devices as we move to 20.04. We do have an absence of tablets in our line-up and that is something we probably need to look at, now that we have the GSI to make that easier. Moving to systemd in our rootfs will not play with the kernels of those older devices. Even if we could rebuild the kernel (which would be possible but would take a great deal of effort) we still would not have access to the Android tree.
As Marius said, we have a very small development team and we have to choose between maintaining how we are and moving forward to the future. We have decided to move forward by embracing 20.04 and that means we will have to leave some things behind.
UBP 5.1 is a slightly different case as it came after Canonical but it still lacks a lot of what we need. Where possible we can take devices forward to the Halium based 7.1 [thinking Nexus 5 and Oneplus One here] but if that turns out not to be possible those will also have to be dropped. If there are people in the community who want to keep the old stuff and are able to maintain it, they are welcome to do that but the core team does not have enough resources to do that.
The supply of working BQ devices [not meaning the Uplus…] is practically zero, so this is not about new entrants, only legacy. We know that the Volla phone has the number two place on our push server stats. That happened because you could buy it new from a store with UT pre-installed. Volla X is moving up fast for the same reason. Buying used you risk hardware problems and a tired battery.
We will not hurry to shut down server support for those stuck on 16.04 on older devices but we repeat what we have said before: it is time to get on the Android 9/10 train if you possibly can [and yes, we need some ported tablets…] 16.04 has some nasty security weaknesses, especially on the Bluetooth side. We really don’t want our user base to be open to those exploits but on those outdated phones we are in practice unable to protect you. Please move forward with us.
With Halium 9 (and even with Halium 7 to an extent) we were able to get improvements by swapping out droidmedia for example. With the adoption of systemd, we have kernel needs which cannot be satisfied by the old devices. Halium can evolve, while with old devices it was always about applying workarounds to get a fixed, unchangeable system to work. We have borrowed a lot from Sailfish and they have borrowed a lot from us. That is hugely beneficial but again we cannot get anything productive out of the redundant devices.
Android itself is a very fast moving target. If we fall too far behind we will find ourselves locked out. We must move forward all the time. Remember that we have supported these devices long after the manufacturer lost interest in them. The absence of LTE and 4G capability in the hardware [wifi bands too] is gradually making a lot of the older devices useless. When 3G switches off there will only be 2G, which is hopeless for most use cases. We need to be taking 5G seriously. It isn’t urgent yet but it is much better to get ready before it becomes urgent. “We don’t jump up the stairs, we walk up the stairs”.
Found some time to try the installation today. Here is what I found so far:
The UBports installer softbricked my phone at the first try, had to flash FairphoneOS again and then retry. Second attempt worked fine
There seems to be no charging screen. I wanted to turn of the phone and charge the battery to 100 % but when doing so the phone automatically boots to the bootloader after shutdown. (Also noted as “offline charging” in the “Fatures & Usability”-table at the website)
I am annoyed that you can only set PINs of a length of 4 digits.
Fingerprint is not working (Also in the “Fatures & Usability”-table at the website)
The phone is actually an excellent device for this. Having used UBPorts before on the Nexus 5 I can say this is a really nice experience on the Fairphone 3. There is some graphics tearing but it isn’t too bad. Battery life is also really, really good.
You can also install Android apps via Waydroid. This also works excellently as the Fairphone has the specs to pull it off, some minor bugs there also, and it isn’t 100% polished. I can use banking apps and other deal breaker proprietary apps using this.
All in all, the dev who ported it did an excellent job. The bugs are minor and the performance is stellar.
Ah, what a pity. That is one of the two Apps I absolutely need. The other one is the DB Navigator, but I guess if banking apps are working, that piece of crap will work, too.
Yes, but since the data partition with the user data is not doubled but shared, this would require the data partition to be used as is or be left alone and not touched by the second OS.
And I don’t know which other pitfalls of this approach might exist, apart from that an Android OS in case of an OTA update will attempt to install it to the currently unused (by Android) slot … https://source.android.com/devices/tech/ota/ab.
That’s great! have you try so far waydroid in particular with some “multisensors” game like Pokemon Go (gps, movement sensor, mobile data, online game account), etc? What kind of bank apps have you try? Than you!
Had one device with prior eOS, reinstalled current stock ROM (Android 11) but it gets stuck at boot (despite reporting success and ubuntu’s “installing updates”).
My other FP3 had Android 12 (LOS)and installed properly (success) as well but booted into LOS recovery, I did factory reset but alas, no cigar, booted into LOS.
Before and after I tried to find an Android 10 version for FP3 but that was a major fail nowhere to be found (guessing partitions are off, shame on FP here for not keeping older versions).
I would really like to try ubuntu touch but is there any failsafe approach, possibly without that overly self-confident installer?
PS: The installer shows “Formatting userdata partition” forever - not sure at all if it succeeded, no proper feedback.
PS2: The github reporting is pointless without an account.
PS3: The fileshare links are all dead (excuse me but WTF!)
but is there any failsafe approach, possibly without that overly self-confident installer?
