Pros and cons of buying a FP2

[Roboe]

@Narkha

Is Fairphone preparing a new surprise that could change my mind, like release a new core with better specifications?

How would we know, if it’s a surprise? Hahaha

Fairphone learned from its experience with the FP1. As you know, it lacked monthly security updates and upgrades (mostly because a non-friendly SoC manufacturer). For that, they chose Qualcomm for the FP2’s SoC. Thay way they can provide monthly security updates (and they do that for the two official OSes).

@Bas_van_Abel

This update will be the second major update to the Fairphone 2, but it will also mean that Fairphone is one of the few manufacturers on the market that released an update to Android 7 with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 chipset. Our work on this update will be publicly available and could, in theory, be adapted to the same chipset on other phones.

Furthermore, they upgraded to Android 6, and after some never-seen-before battle against obsolescence, they fought for providing Android 7. The scene looks quite different from the FP1-era.

(The following paragraph is opinionated because there are no fact about the future)

@Bas_van_Abel

Now, you may be wondering, “why not Android 8, ‘Oreo’?”. Android 8 and 9 are entirely new levels of complexity from Android 7, far more different than 7 was to 6. Therefore, attempting the upgrade to 7 was the best option.

Android 8 is not guaranteed (official statement quoted above), but you won’t be left back as with the FP1 because Android 7 is still pretty new. At the official Google chart of Android distributions, you can see that up to a 20% of phones still run Lollipop, so app developers won’t ignore 1 of 5 users, because that means a really huge bite to their income. Once the number of Lollipop phones decreases, you still have quite a margin, because there’s Marshmallow in the place of Lollipop then.

But the most important part for me is that you will still receive security monthly updates on your FP2! This is also unprecedented in the industry. Only Google did that in the past with their Nexus and Pixel families, but only for two years.