Installing Fairphone OS on rooted device

Help Fairphone 3
1

Hello!

I have a slightly stupid question, but I’m stumped trying to find an answer.
I recently bought a FP3 and after checking that it doesn’t find any new updates, I unlocked the bootloader and rooted it with Magisk. Now, after searching the forums I finally found out, that there’s a newer software update. I’m not quite sure why my phone is stuck on February patch (131) (I read that there’s an issue with Vodafone ones and my provider is partnered with them), but I only put in my SIM after everything was set up.

My question is, if I want to install the Fairphone OS, according to this link, do I need to relock the bootloader or what?

2

Hi there!

I don’t understand why you would want to install Fairphone OS if you already have it on your FP3.
Can’t you just update it the regular way?
Or (if I’m starting to undersdand correctly) if you would like to update to the last version and there are issues with it, perhaps you could wait a little more to see whether these issues are solved?

Please correct me if I understood wrongly your question.

3

I am unable to update it the regular way, my phone doesn’t recognize there are newer versions. The official support page that I linked mentioned installing an updated version of the OS to manually update it.

4

Well then I think the answer to your question is no. I don’t see why you should need to relock the bootloader.

5

  1. It isn’t mentioned there, so it shouldn’t be necessary.

  2. This install method gives you the option to keep your data, while relocking the bootloader would delete it with a mandatory factory reset … so relocking being required wouldn’t make much sense.

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6

I have used the manual installation tool provided by Fairphone once after my Ubuntu Touch porting attempts had failed miserably. And in fact the bootloader was locked after the script had finished.

Not sure if it helps much, but the output of this command looks like “oem 8901_lock” can be performed by the tool:

$ strings FP3_flashall | grep lock
./linux-x86/fastboot oem 8901_lock
./linux-x86/fastboot oem 8901_unlock

Edit: this seems to be somewhat different than “oem lock”, see Device stuck in fastboot mode after oem re-locking

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7

Well the official support doesn’t assume that you have unlocked bootloader or rooted phone, it assumes you have a normal phone. Either they haven’t thought about mentioning whether it affects bootloader or it just doesn’t affect it and they thought it’s not worth mentioning. If you look at Ingo’s reply, it apparently does lock it and that does not surprise me. I just thought I’d ask before trying, because maybe it would brick it.

Anyway, thank you to you and the others for the input. I’ll give it a shot.

8

That’s jumping to conclusions. That the tool apparently could do it doesn’t automatically mean that it does in each case. It can’t offer to keep your data (which it does) and run either lock or unlock commands, which both force a factory reset and delete the data.

Why would they assume or not assume anything here?
They also have an official guide how to unlock the bootloader, and under normal circumstances you shouldn’t need to reinstall the OS from scratch.

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