Fairphone

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Upgrade to Android 7 for FP 2 anytime soon?

Discuss Fairphone 1
#1

A warm hey to the fairphone community - and a question mainly addressed at the fairphone developers:

I have been using FP 1 for 3-4 years now, was mainly happy with it but always struggled with every upgrade of Android - particularly when the phone refused to upgrade and a great number of apps were disabled due to an outdated Android-system.

Now my FP 1 has died on me and I am considering buying FP 2. Seeing that FP 2 is running on Android 6 (Marshmallow) while the next Android version is already out, I am wondering when and how fairphone will offer the upgrade to the latest Android version for FP 2 and how the upgrading process will function.

Although this question is mainly addressed to the makers of FP, I’m of course also interested in recent user experiences with upgrades of Android versions! Thanks for any comments!

#2

There’s a long discussion at Android 6.0 Marshmallow / 7 Nougat for FP2?

If you don’t need Google Apps preinstalled, you can also use LineageOS (found here and here)

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#3

Hey z3ntu,

Thanks for your prompt reaction and the useful link to other threads. Stupid I didn’t find them myself… Anyway, the link to general discussions about Android 7/Nougat has been helpful and revealing - interesting.

Cheers, andu74

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#4

Please continue at the other thread. :slight_smile:

#5

Summarizing the gist of previous discussions: Google won’t support an official upgrade to Android 7 with the current chipset. So the Fairphone 2 will probably stay on Android 6 until it is no longer supported (with regular security updates) and then I see two options for Fairphone:

  • Upgrade the core module (seems unlikely)
  • Ditch Google support for the - then anyway outdated - FP2 and only upgrade FP Open OS to Android 7 (or later?) and/or promote the by then officially supported Lineage OS port (and/or other alternative OSes).

So all in all there are no guarantees, but the fact that Lineage OS (Android 7) already runs quite well indicates that what happened to FP1 will probably not happen to the FP2 any time soon.

And about upgrade issues: I remember back in the days whenever an FP1 upgrade came out us moderators were informed beforehand and often many of us (plus a lot of other helpful community members) were online for 24+ hours straight troubleshooting thousands of issues (mostly related to Google services).
With the FP2 updates still issues occur but you don’t even really see increased activity in the forum at all.

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#6

According to my research it is not obvious whether Google or Qualcomm are to blame for the Android-7-uncertainty

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