Update on Android 14 for Fairphone 3(+)

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Kind of. Without support of the hardware manufacturers, it stays an half baked and not completely secure solution.

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Thanks for let us know the why

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I’m using Android 14 on my Fairphone 3+, available since May '24 on iodĂ©OS. They do act commercially - they sell rebranded versions of Fairphones with iodĂ©OS preinstalled.

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Requirements for the certification of Android devices

https://source.android.com/docs/compatibility/14/android-14-cdd?hl=en

There are many requirements that a mid-range device from 2019 simply cannot meet!?

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They might tell you it is not possible if it is not possible. Would you prefer that they lie?

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Sorry, but I don’t get, what you are trying to tell me.

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Blockquote
We wanted to give you an update on Android 14 for Fairphone 3. After extensive research, we have made the difficult decision not to upgrade the Fairphone 3 to Android 14. The legacy Linux kernel (4.9) used in the Fairphone 3 poses significant challenges for the upgrade. It currently offers limited support for Android 13, and would not support Android 14 at all. We invested considerable time and resources into exploring ways to integrate the new Android system with the existing kernel, and even contemplated upgrading the Linux kernel itself. We also engaged in discussions with Google Android Engineering. Ultimately, we concluded that these options were too complex to implement and did not offer a reliable solution for our customers. Additionally, since software support for the Fairphone 3’s chipset was discontinued in June 2021, pursuing this project would present a high risk to our Fairphone 3 users.

So, I bought my FP3+ on april 2021. The software support for the chipset was discontinued on june that year? Can you please explain how it is possible to make a sustainable phone that has discontinued support while people could buy it?

It is beyond me that this company can advertise sustainable products without the software to support it.

Blockquote
Our primary goal remains to maintain secure and reliable functionality for the Fairphone 3 for as long as possible. The Fairphone 3, launched in 2019 with Android 9, has since received three Android upgrades, excluding Android 12. The standard end of life for Android 13 is set for 2025. In line with our commitment to device longevity, we’ve added one more year of security maintenance, extending it to 2026. This will provide a total of seven years of software support for the Fairphone 3, a commitment we are dedicated to fulfilling.

No. It does not fulfill your promise to have software support for 7 years. It is pretty much a blatant lie to everyone buying the FP3+ later in product life. I am not even beginning on the software updates of my FP3+ because it lags continuously behind the monthly security updates of Google. I am on the beta team and that means that I’m pretty lucky to have the security updates before most of the people.

In hindsight: I will never have suggest this phone to anyone. I will continue to use my FP3+ but it will be the last time I will buy any of the products.

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Since the time that Fairphone started it was close to impossible to find a chipset which would have a support by its vendor for more than a couple of years. It was like that for FP1 up to FP4. Only for FP5 they found a chipset that originally was not intended to be used in a customer smartphone but rather for industrial applications which often require longer support. That has never held back Fairphone from providing software updates on top of the not anymore maintained platform. You can’t solve all problems at once unfortunately, but that was the best they could do at that point in time.

On the other hand releasing a new phone every year would contradict Fairphone’s goals, too, which is why they only do smaller updates like the Fairphone 3+. This is why the FP3(+) was in the market 1.5 years after release and you could buy it. Around the release they promised 5 years of support which you’d still have if support ends in 2026 and you bought it in 2021 (wasn’t it cheaper than the original price then already?). The quoted 7 years of course count from the release and I think it’s fair to state it in that way. An additional note like “last buyers would still get a software support of 4-5 years” could of course be added.
Only in the recent years, vendors like Sony or Samsung state that they have a software support of 5-6 years - and they never add “from the date of purchase”, but this is always counting from the release on. So is 7 years unfair for a phone from a time when other vendors still offered less? Is 5 years unfair if the phone model is not brand-new when you buy it?

I understand your frustration. I was not happy with the end of the official SW support and later with the inability to update to more than Android 11 with custom ROMs for my FP2, but with all our will to act sustainably, we need to watch the boundaries of what is possible.

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This is absolutely right, and I completely appreciate the rock and the hard place that Fairphone appears to be between. However, two observations

  1. Fairphone didn’t choose to stop software support for the SoC, Qualcomm did. So although Fairphone on their own can’t change the problem at hand, the wider industry can
but won’t.
  2. It’s completely unacceptable from the industry to be in a position that because active support for an SoC ended, that we can’t update it’s kernel anymore. A modern Linux kernel still boots on machines from 20 years ago, and only now is there some talk of deprecating the old old stuff. This inability to update the kernel is an unwanted side-effect of the downstream kernel development model that SoC vendors like Qualcomm use for their SoC support, and it amounts to planned obsolescence. Which is why I’ll keep challenging it, here and anywhere I see fit.

I honestly think Fairphone should use it’s clout to start demanding better upstream kernel support from SoC vendors for future generations of phones, and force them to reduce the downstream patches required to turn an upstream kernel into an Android kernel - so that rebasing to newer kernels becomes not just feasible but easy enough to be a routine job as part of the system updates.

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Those versions of Android do not support some security features. You can’t pay with NFC, store train/metro tickets, use some banking features, use fingerprint login on some apps
 The main official FP OS can’t afford to miss those.
When you buy a Fairphone with /e/OS, iodeOS, etc
 You know what you’re getting into. It means you did some research and chose to use that OS instead of the official one.
The vast majority of Fairphone buyers are using the official OS and didn’t make that choice. You can’t remove features with new updates.

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Those are mostly due to google “integrity” checks to ensure the device is “safe” from any unwanted modification.

Ofc you need to root your phone to pass it on a third party rom/old phone

which just compromise the whole security aspect of it and makes it useless in terms of safety and only makes it another way of screwing you over.

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