Hi everyone,
We realize that the situation for those affected by the Caller ID and Adaptive Brightness issues has been quite frustrating. So, we’d like to share some updates and a bit more information in this post.
We can now confirm that our next software update will be released early November. This update will include a fix for the Caller ID issue and we’ll reverse the recent changes made to Adaptive Brightness.
Some of you have asked why we could not release the fix earlier. We found the root cause, but it is modem related, so the release process is more complex. We needed to do more tests and do the full cycle certification process (not only the Google Certification, but also the Operators Approvals process). Rolling back to the last working version, including the security update(s) means that we would still have to do the full cycle of tests and approvals.
Testing a new release means proceeding with some internal tests, running internal CTS (Compatibility Test Suite), and doing field testing in some specific countries to run non-regressions test cases. We haven’t done external beta testing for the Fairphone 3 (other than network compliance), but taking into account our own research and feedback from the community, our plan is to implement a beta testing program when we roll out Android 11. We are also aiming to do a staged roll out for Android 11.
To shed some light on how to go about applying new security patches for a new release, these are the steps involved:
- We get the source from Qualcomm/Android Open Source Project
- When a new security patch comes, it is based on the original Qualcomm/Android Open Source Project source, so we cannot directly apply all the changes in a simple manner.
- After resolving the conflicts, we have to test that it should not have any regression compared to the previous version.
Splitting security updates from application updates is technically doable but the cost would be significantly more, so for now we are combining both.
Hopefully this clarifies the process up a bit more. Once again, thank you very much for your feedback and sincere apologies to all Vodafone Germany users who have been affected by these issues.