Cough, cough. Seems like someone have not read the clock bug thread. I tried. I will tell you one thing only: time services are part of the Qualcomm proprietary parts. BLOBs. End. We can’t fix it, Fairphone should, and there has passed eight months already.
Also, as a power user of Android, a developer and a person with deep understanding of Android (which is built on top of Linux but it never was anounced as GNU, Google tricked all of you, as always), I feel insulted when the bunch of bug my FP2 suffer for is reduced and simplified to “buggy apps installed” or “pushed the limits of the phone”. I indeed pushed the limits for my former Nexus 4 or my ZTE Skate, but not for my FP2. I also don’t run any buggy app, but my phone register a 20% of battery drop as “Android System”. Come on, Patrick. We all support the Fairphone project, but their product is far from perfect. Don’t be political or religious here.
(Also, I have physical access to two other FP2. My FP2 is not the only bugged)
I really hope that with the Marshmallow update Fairphone successfully fix this unpleassant issues and their build proccess too. Unifying FPoOS and FPOS codebases would improve their workflow, efforts, working hours and their users lives. Long live Fairphone!
Ehm, yes - got me…just wanted to test how attentive you were… I did not go through the full thread and there are several concerning a clock issue.
I see, well those BLOBS are delivered by the chip manufacturer Qualcomm afaik. So its initially their mistake. The provided SDK is relying on these BLOBS but cannot be used to fix errors in them unless someone has access to their source. (I hopefully got it now).
I also don´t think the product is perfect or close to, but as I am hardly experiencing troubles I am wondering how come other users encounter so many massive problems having the same product as me. This is my first smartphone, so there is not much experience with.
A humble developer chiming in here to just offer a couple of points of view. While I haven’t worked much with Android, I’ve recently done development and coordination of moving a project from a legacy version to a new architecture requiring rewriting of a whole lot of code. From this experience I can offer a couple of observations:
It’s a heavy burden to work on two versions at the same. Even if they’re similar, switching the context all the time is time and brain consuming.
It’s often much easier to fix issues with the old version when porting the features to a new version. You can see how something you hacked together in the old version didn’t quite work out and have a chance to reimplement it properly. This leads to the new version having a better architecture and being of much higher quality. In a way you can see the old version as an experiment that allowed you to gain knowledge and expertise on how to do things better in the new version.
Maybe FPOS and FPOOS development can be unified to the same codebase in Marshmallow, which makes things way easier for further development. That’s at least something I’d try to work on.
Moving to a new version provides a natural opportunity to further improve processes, which include source code management, issue handling, building, testing and everything else related to the development.
Fixing known issues while porting changes to a new version is often easier than trying to add more hacks to the hacky old version. If not for any other reason, because you’ll have to test the features anyway. I’ve no idea how hacky FPOS 5.1 is, but generally this is often the case.
We don’t have nearly enough information on what’s happening with the development of FPOS to actually answer the question in the thread title.
It’s probably incredibly hard for FP to tell us how far the Marshmallow development is. My first estimates in the forementioned project were wildly off, and in the hindsight all the work on the old version while the new version was being developed added heavily to the burden of porting them to the new version. And it’s very easy to overlook how much work there’s still left to do.
The less you customise the base software, the easier the upgrade obviously is, but even if FPOS is not too very far from AOSP, there can be e.g. new requirements on the build environment, drivers etc. that cause a lot of work to be spent on upgrading stuff auxiliar to the actual code (“This requires GCC version x and make y.* but please avoid version z of a tool because, while it’s the default one in a recent Linux distribution, it has a serious bug”).
To summarise, I’m not too worried about FP not giving us updates on the progress. I’m sure they’re concentrating on what makes the most sense considering everything the know. Your mileage may vary of course.
And since the camera improvements were mentioned, that’s something that can make a huge difference to a non-technical user. You know, there are probably quite a few FP users that don’t have any of the common issues discussed in these forums, and they’ll appreciate improvements in photo and video quality. I’m actually one of them. While my phone has a badly fitting old-style cover and I consider myself a heavy user, I’m still pretty satisfied with the phone. Well, I’m currently avoiding using anything that requires the proximity sensor, but then again I also have Greenify installed mostly because of Spotify that would otherwise kill the battery pretty quickly… And none of my phones or other devices to that matter have been perfect. I’m hopeful to find many of the forementioned issues fixed in Marsmallow, but even if they still exist in the initial versions, maybe the groundlaying work will allow them to be fixed quickly after that.
Concerning ugly hacks: I assume there are many, as for example native Dual SIM support was only introduced into Android in version 5.1. It should be much more stable in Android 6 and 7.
Those binary blobs are also present in FPOOS. I never tested the stock OS, but I think, the only difference is that google services stuff. All custom rom developers release their rom without gapps, because of the terms of service. People flash gapps on top of their open OS. And they survive OS updates.
I did not get, why FP has to develop 2 branches with open and stock. And why there are such differeces of bugs? It’s just with or without google.
And why is there a completely different version numbering between the 2 branches?
Explain this to me?
I have a FP1, so I’m not directly affected by the choice “Bugfix vs. Version Update”. And thus, you could easily ignore my opinion.
The thing is, if my FP1 breaks down, I would probably not buy the FP2 if it was still on Lollipop. At the moment my FP1 is almost exactly 3 years old and I would like to use my next phone at least that long, too. But running with an OS that’s near the end-of-life when I buy it? Without the new Marshmallow rights system? With a manufacturer who doesn’t provide OS upgrades? I think not.
Another problem with the FP2 that I would have if I had to buy a new phone:
It has the specs of a three years old phone and still costs more than 500€.
(At least, if I remeber correctly. Nothing happens for me when I click the “View all specifications” link at https://shop.fairphone.com/en/ .)
The SoC Snapdragon 801 is from early 2014, but it is perfectly able to run Android Marshmallow (see other phones that have been upgraded). I’ve heard that Marshmallow is even more resource-efficient. No problem here in my opinion.
I think so, too. Even the Samsung Galaxy S3 is supposed to be snappy on lineageos 14.1 (in the near future I’ll see that myself as I’ll upgrade my wife’s S3 to that version). Only gripe i have with the disk os development, but i said that in other threads already, i think it might be easier for Fairphone to switch to lineage los ( née CyanogenMod) as the development might be faster and it might be cheaper easier to stay up to date. But i don’t know anything about the inner workings at Fairphone so i might be wrong as well…
I don’t disagree with you that the FP2 is a great phone now and likely next year, too.
But if I bought something new for that price it would have to last longer than two years.
And seeing that Nougat isn’t officially supported because of some missing graphics features doesn’t give me much hope in the long term.
But luckily, I don’t have to make that decision (now). I’ll try to keep using my FP1 as long as possible. And hopefully there’s a new motherboard for the FP2 or a FP3 then.
Gxxgle doesn’t officially pester AOSP with their “Services”, but they will still work. Fairphone could at least port FP Open to Nougat and offer a Gxxgle Services installation widget like with FP1.
This is what i meant. The raw power of fp2 will be enough for quite some time, if DB the S3 runs L nougat fine. Well, except maybe for some 3D games to come…
I honestly suggest that you don’t buy a Fairphone 2 for 500€ in 2017. It’s just not worth it. Buy yourself a OnePlus 3T to get way superior performance and support Except you have the money and seriously want to buy a Fairphone and support them (which is a great reason)
Honestly If someone only cared about perfomance, the FP2 would be inferior in 2015 as well. But I myself couldn’t recommend a company that incentivised customers to smash their old phone as a marketing gag. That goes a little bit too far
I did not go through the full thread and there are several concerning a clock issue.
Except you have the money and seriously want to buy a Fairphone and support them (which is a great reason)