To me, it’s more about the non-existent communication and the odd priorities than it is that we’re x months behind on security updates. Overall, I’ve had a pretty bad experience with my FP4 so far, and I think it largely boils down to priorities.
They can release a kick-ass, stable experience that will make the users see Fairphone as a good choice for the average user.
Or they can release bleeding edge security updates and give Samsung a run for their money as the fastest non-Google OEM.
Currently they are doing neither, and the only indication that they are even trying is by a user now called “anonymous” followed by a bunch of random numbers which by itself is a pretty bizarre naming convention for a former Fairphone employee.
Call it whatever you want, but in my eyes Fairphone has made a “promise” to keep the phone up to date, and being 3-4 months behind regularly isn’t how the average person would take such a “promise”. I’m personally completely uninterested in feature updates as they bring almost nothing that interests me, but being a year and a half behind on those aren’t optimal either. I’m happy to see that they’ve improved with the FP5 for that, however. Qualcomm might very well be the devil when it comes to feature updates, but I don’t see how they could be with regards to security updates.
As I wrote above, they essentially have to pick a road. Fast updates or stable updates. Currently they have chosen to drive off the road instead.
I’ve never owned a FP3 but apparently they never fixed a WiFi issue with it causing some people to dump their devices, and they failed to announce to people that the fingerprint reader would stop working for some bank apps. Convenient of them to leave that out of the change log. Hmm.
I’ve never owned a FP5, but they removed the AoD instead of fixing the issues with it or heck, even force-disabling it for all users and forcing them to manually enable said feature with a warning.
But I have owned a FP4 for the past 3 years and I’ve never had these many issues with a single phone before. Camera issues, GPS issues, screen brightness issues, bootloader issues, battery issues. The list goes on.
Would people be posting here regularly if this was the one issue we had with our phones? Honestly I doubt it. As is evident with the absolutely hilarious “Fairphone’s next chapter starts now” thread, I think the security updates are just the tip of yet another iceberg that Fairphone doesn’t seem to be doing anything about.