This is a tricky one. I am 100% on board with transparency, but I feel that sometimes we should simply be a bit more patient. Mind you, the release notes for Android 7 have been available since release last November or December, and I always had the impression that FP has been on the ball with this one. I agree that updates on existing issues would be much appreciated, but (overstretched) devs will have to balance their time well between talking about issues and just trying to fix them. If there’s nothing to report, there’s not much point in stating that explicitly on a regular basis. Perhaps we should just be a little more patient and trust in the competence on the team. The expectation has always been one update per month, and now that the Android 7 upgrade is out the door I will personally feel that, despite the list of regressions, this is a reasonable expectation. That being said, I encourage Fairphone to keep us informed if they choose to diverge from the monthly update schedule this January.
On a slight aside, if I may take the freedom to vent a little bit: based on my personal observations, it is increasingly looking as if the Android 7 bug tracker is being mistaken for a first line customer support channel. Issues aren’t properly scoped, duplicates are reported every other day and multiple problems are aggregated in a single report. For a developer, having to spend a lot of time filtering the signal from the noise makes it less appealing to communicate in the first place, especially if work needs to be done. I applaud the transparency potential of the bug tracker, but it should be used responsibly and with the knowledge that most problems do not require developer intervening. Bugging developers for these issues rather than the community or customer support agents will direct their valuable time away from software improvements, holding back progress for everyone.