Latest news [11-07-2017] and FAQ - Fairphone 1 KitKat 4.4.4 update

No, it is not the power button and I am already on my third battery. It happens when the phone is lying on a table in front of me, or when I arrive home when it connects to my WiFi. The reboot sometimes takes up to 10 minutes. These are not hardware issues for sure.
IMHO, the bottom of this issue is that FP’s sustainable business model was always broken. They tried to make it work inside a planned obsolescence ecosystem (Android) and that starts by being very hard to eventually becoming impossible. We are watching it! live!

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It’s not always the software’s fault. Sometimes it’s just bad luck or a mobile operator that doesn’t care for backwards compatibility, for example in this case:

https://forum.fairphone.com/t/fp1-gps-activates-itself-when-mobile-data-connection-is-active-or-i-make-a-call/25541?u=stefan&source_topic_id=23037
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I don’t recall random reboots being a common problem on the FP1. And the forum doesn’t list it, either.

Are you really sure it’s not the power button?

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Yes, I am sure. Could you please explain why you are insisting so much on the truthfulness of my report? BTW, I have no hidden agenda here, I just have a phone that reboots on its own and found other people on this forum reporting strangely similar problems that started about the same time as mine. Also, I feel that the FP promise of a genuinely sustainable phone is slowly going down the drain, and I regret it.

@Luis_Quental_Pereira If you are looking for a solution to your problem, please go to that other thread or search the forum for alternative ways to solve the problem.

It doesn’t help anybody, if you post here. Nobody knows if the #kitkat update will solve any issues that people have reported.

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To everybody who wants to know exactly how #kitkat is coming along here is the up-to-date list of (critical) issues.
If you don’t mind those you can help testing.

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So, 2 months later there is no news?

The latest news are always here, for example:

The FAQ above is only a summary of the progress that has been made. Unfortunately as you can read in @jftr’s quote, the build is not booting atm.

What’s kind of nagging me is that it’s March 2017 now and we’re still waiting for Kitkat without any substantial news on progress or even bug fix patches for 4.2.2. It’s not just that we’re not getting a Kitkat update, we’re also not getting security updates for the OS any more. What stings even more is that FairPhone 2 is continually getting software updates and is currently beta testing an Android 6.0 update. Of course it was to be expected that updating FP2 would be a lot easier than FP1, but it’s getting a bit awkward now.

So what’s the hold up? In this thread I’m seeing 6 unfixed issues. Is that all that remains? Have they been working on just these 6 issues for the past 6 months? It sounds harsh, but if you can’t fix an issue in the past 6 months, why would you be able to fix it in the next 6?

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@Jerry, did you read my post above yours?

Blame Google! They stopped providing security fixes for Jelly Bean in January 2015.

Yes, there are a few issues (here’s a collection of those I experience(d)),
but the most work seems to be making 4.4.4 somehow to run. Fairphone received a port of 4.4.2 which already mostly works. But the work needed to upgrade from 4.4.2 to 4.4.4 seems to be harder than initially thought, because the source code is heavily modified by Mediatek and only remotely similar to upstream AOSP.
And I think there are too few people working on this upgrade.

Edit: The only issues that I would rate as so important to hold back the upgrade for now are the screen-stays-on-while-calling-bug and the battery level bug.

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That’s my impression too. Maybe @jftr can get some help after Marshmallow is out.

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Well, that’s a bit cheap. Android is an open-source project. Google is in no way required to publish any fixes.
Backporting them to versions as old as KitKat is pure generosity. Vendors could backport those fixes themselves if they really cared.

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That’s not cheap because AOSP sure is open source, but it is in no way free/libre. If Google wouldn’t be so prohibitive, vendors or independent developers could more easily push security fixes upstream.

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Vendors could do that. However, this

  1. is not always trivial, because code bases differ dramatically and
  2. is not enough since the code differs dramatically and issues that only exist in JellyBean are not fixed at all.
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But we got the Kola Nut update in Augustus 2015. I was hoping they would be able to gather any fixes made by communities in the 4.2.2 AOSP and merge them with FairPhoneOS or even backport fixes released for Kitkat to 4.2.2, but I see that’s not that easy.

My FP1 is still my personal phone but I had to move to another phone for work as some special apps was needed and demanded newer OS and more computing power. Well I knew the day would come. As I said, for personal use, I use FP1 but its becoming more and more unreliable. The phone wakes up very slowly, like its has something going on. I think its the newer apps that hogging it. Have not tried to rest it, no time. Facebook often crashes the whole phone so it has to reboot. Other apps, dear to me, don’t work properly any more. Its sad. I would love if this update saw the light. Maybe we can vote on what features that are to be prioritized? Is there a problem for the community to help out programming?

See

Is there a problem for the community to help out programming?

Yes, the drivers are still closed source so Fairphone is not allowed to publish them.

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You can replace the Facebook application by SlimSocial for example. It’s just a wrapper of the web version of Facebook.

That what I do for my FP1, I gain a lot of battery and memory.

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Hey there!
What is actually happening to the long promised update to Andriod 4.4 for the FP1? Is it not working or what is the problem? It would be very nice to get some updates from Fair phone about that topic!
Thanks.

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