Please correct me, if I’m wrong. Ain’t it so, that almighty Google decided to make a list of conditions a phone has to comply to to be considered worthy i.e. supported for “Nougat” (Android 7). That’s a general decision, made while the hardware essentially would be good enough to run “nougat”.
Well, just searched the forum again and it might be the SoC manufacturer Qualcomm as well:
Still, if a company is going to bind itself even more and tighter to another company like Google, they will ultimately be dependent on their decisions. And that could easily mean LOS, Ubuntu, Sailfish or what ever happens to come the way, will become more unlikely or even impossible for the Fairphone. That’s what I would call a no win situation for Fairphone.
And just as an afterthought:
Never touch a running system.
I don’t need every new version of Android, as long as the one I am using now (even the old one on my FP 1) is doing all I want. If the security is kept up-to-date, all’s fine.
Compared to my windows laptops: I hardly ever changed the OS version on any of them; no matter how aggressive Microsoft tried to make me. So, why should it be so important for a phone to me, if it’s not for security reasons or if I am really missing a feature.
“Give me all that’s nice to have” - at least to me - is not what Fairphone is all about.