Do those 7 years of updates come at a steady clip for the Android security patches as Google and Samsung mostly do it, or is it a patch here and there with massive swaths of time with no patches more like Motorola?
The former is progress, the latter is functionally not much better than every other OEM.
That is amazing! I had a Fairphone 1 and used it until the ‘on’ button broke which was about the only thing not available from the parts store. Now I have a Fairphone 3, have had it for a few years now. I might get the camera module upgrade as I still have an old one and it’s the only disappointing thing about the phone. I’ve been looking forward to fixing my phone because the modular design they made is amazing, but absolutely nothing has broken yet in my 3 years of use!
Here is a pic i done with the libre camera app on the FP3 with the newer camera module i did a few days ago without zoom at three mice
I think it is better to have a seperate camera but for the normal everyday use it is okay https://feddit.de/pictrs/image/73a201d7-8077-4082-ab69-3d058b20e4b2.jpeg
the thing is that the cam has no system that proccess the raw fotage to something better. A few years ago samsing and apple had the same camera hardware but the quality of the samsung pics where better because they had an better ai or something
This is awesome, but makes me salty. When I first heard about them I was stoked and wanted one. But at the time they weren’t selling in the US. I needed a new phone so I caved and went with Samsung for the s23. And recently they announced they’d be selling to the US. This is great but hind sight is 20/20…
I had the Fairphone 2 and I loved it. It was like Lemmy, you never really knew if it would work the next morning but the community was great.
After replacing the battery once, without any tools whatsoever, and upgrading the camera, with a small screwdriver, it lasted for more than five years.
Since then, I’ve had a company phone but when it breaks, I will check out Fairphone first. Of course there is no such thing as a sustainable, or “fair” phone, but at least in 2016, this was often discussed in their trancparacy reports? The official forum was also very aware. Some raw materials where sourced to the exact mine, others thei openly said they couldn’t control at the time.
Additionally, they offered the phone with root acces so trying out alternative os was never any problem. It’s the closest Ive ever been to a Google free life.
Reading through the comments, almost everyone missed the elephant in the room. The big problem with long term support is not on the phone or chip manufacturers.
…::: It’s GOOGLE! :::… Just compare the history of Android with Windows. Windows 10 is still supported for another 2 years, yet it was released in mid 2015. Every Windows 10 capable device is still receiving updates till then.
Contrast that with Android. Android 6.0 came out in October 2015. Yet very few devices from that era are supportable today. Why? A large part of that is based on Google’s never ending -> breaking changes <- and random new requirements that make older devices incompatible.
This got me personally when I bought a Sony Z3 with the intention of having a “future proof” phone. It was openly advertised as being a dev device for Android 7, so much so that a preview release was downloadable for it.
Only for Google to drop a new requirement for the GPU to have minimum OpenGL ES 3.1, while the GPU only had the instructions for 3.0. WTF?! I might add, the specification for 3.1 was only released to the public 2 years prior.
I seriously hope that some alternative to Android will establish itself again. We had Windows phone, which Microsoft utterly butchered. IOS is not an alternative as that’s tied to one manufacturer.
Yup. While I have a sceptical opinion of Ubuntu, it did find it sad that it didn’t gain any traction. A possible contender is still Tizen OS. It’s essentially an entire OS build around Chromium, while not owned by Google. Samsung use that a lot in their smart TVs.
Sure, it’s not as performant as running native Android.
But boy have we seen some massive improvements in browser tech and performance increases on mobile devices. Developing web-applications is certainly a ton easier than native Android and IOS. Wrapper toolchains like React Native aren’t helping much.
Unless you really need calls to some device APIs, there isn’t too much left that a Browser can’t do compared to what the native OS permits. I’ve been developing web-apps for robots and also developed equivalent native apps in Android. In the browser you now have access to some impressive 3d capabilities, which are extending further (BabylonJS). You’ve got the ability to interact with files via tool-chains that are not too dissimilar to what you see in native Android (Google has been clamping down file-system access to app devs quite heavily in recent releases). You can also gain decent API access to the devices battery and GPS status. Add some nifty UI libraries and you can provide a more pleasant experience, faster than with an actual native app. Even video streaming works remarkably well since you can interact with multiple cameras, microphones and even the screen (Google Meet does that).
It’s now that we’re seeing PWAs (progressive web app) to gain traction. I’m using Voyager for Lemmy, which works lovely in Windows and my phone.
In the browser you only miss on some native capabilities on some hardware component and a few legacy systems. Mainly serial communication and native UDP support. Although the last one will see some more improvements with HTTP3, which is gaining traction.
The one thing I wish google never did was introduce SafetyNet without enabling us a way to essentially say “I modified my own phone, so let me use my damn banking and tap-to-pay apps without issue” and reenable it.
In fact they’ve actively made safetynet more invasive by adding CTS profile matching alsongside basic attestation, with a system for telling what phones are compatible with the new profile matching so you can’t force disable it.
If they never added that I could’ve bypassed basic attestation and gotten google wallet back. But no. The most I can get back is banking and Pokemon GO. But there’s still a risk one of them will decide to use CTS and therefore making it impossible to use that app on my current phone, all in the name of “security”
It’s my phone, stop trying to smother my attempts to do what I want with it!
i use e/os, that replaces like everything google has like the google micro services with something else. Some apps, newer ones with more trackers, tend to break but it supports some phones from 2013. I suggest taking a look when you have phones that are not supported anymore
It seems to support Sony Xperia Z3 doc.e.foundation/devices
They stopped the OTA, since there are some issues with the fingerprint reader. No manual package so far as well. Explanations: forum.fairphone.com/t/…/97654
@pingveno That's true, but still, most people are thinking like me unfortunately. Fairphone needs to find a way to make the phone more appealing to the masses. If they success and people start addopting it, competitors would have to adapt. I don't know if I'm making sense, just looking at it from a John Doe perspective.
It is a valid reason from the OEMs because they have to rely on their chip manufacturers for security updates. It’s literally out of their control to do updates that long except when it comes to the OS.
Considering all the comments I’ve seen about their phone basically falling apart it kind of sounds like you should just get an iPhone SE and factor in a battery replacement after 3 years. Day one updates for 5 years and I am severely doubtful you’ll have as many hardware problems if you don’t damage it. Better camera, too.
The Fairphone 2 actually had 7 years of security updates before the support was withdrawn, so it’s pretty likely the Fairphone 3 will last at least 7 years, maybe even longer.
I guess having only one phone every year makes it immensely easier to support than having multiple models at every price range every year. Apple does it, why couldn’t Android phone manufacturers do it?
Also we need to consider how phone companies differ from Google and Apple. Those two also generate money off the users purchasing apps and etc, and they have the ability to push users to their services easier. Where as strictly phone manufacturers make money at the sale of the handset, so – as you put it – they’re incentivized to have as much penetration as possible by selling as many models they can.
Tho, I do think people are starting to care about support length as the phone market matures and people wait longer to buy their new phones. Which is why, I think, Android manufacturers are lengthening support (and not out of the goodness of their hearts)
Please educate me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t Apple’s model of continuing to sell older flagships, or even reusing old chassis and putting flagship chips inside them cost less money in the long run? I imagine the price for manufacturing the same phone 3 or 4 years later would cut down significantly, no? And by doing that, you also won’t need to spend R&D money on extra models.
Oh indeed! That helps as well. I imagine other manufacturers do this too, but I only follow Apple closely since I was a huge fanboy half a decade ago. So I can’t speak with certainty for them
Apple does it by introducing new models while lowering the price of older ones. That effectively covers the lower budget price tier while not having to make a whole new model for it.
It’s at least getting better. Samsung, who had a much wider range of phones, moved to 4 years of security updates. Pixels moved to 5 years. Too many other brands to list their support length too. Apple still beats them though.
Updates on a phone is a important topic. When i choose a smartphone i look for software support period. But i think software updates sometimes make graphical improvements and that causes performance decrease. Or the company wants to slow that thing down. Nowadays you can’t see the difference.
I think for the target market, it actually makes a lot of sense. Hardware from 2016 is still perfectly useable for most purposes, except that in the android world you might have a hard time with compatibility because the software is very old at this point, and the battery would be pretty shot. This phone has solutions to both of those problems.
My last phone I kept for about 5 years. I had two issues:
software support had ended
the battery was severely degraded
fortunately there was a local shop who’d replace the battery (it wasn’t a fairphone so I couldn’t do it myself). If it wasn’t for the software support I’d have gone that route and would be still using it now. It worked perfectly well for my use case. Unfortunately, I ended up retiring the phone and getting a new one.
The whole philosophy of Fairphone is keeping it as long as possible through long term maintenance and access to spare part for self repairs. Fairphones are “outdated” almost at launch in terms of hardware in comparison to most phones on the market because this is not what we (fairphone customers) are looking for.
Exactly! I don’t care that I don’t have the most modern gadgets on my phone, I didn’t have them before so I will not miss them. To me being unable to replace my battery or having to get rid of my phone because the OS is outdated is unacceptable and stupid and I will gladly sacrifice having a 1gigapixel camera or being able to take my phone in the shower.
what does oem mean in this case?? the OS is from microsoft/linux why do you want the oem involved? if we are talking normies you could update windows xp to vista andvista to 8 and then 10 then 11 using microsoft guided installers that are monkey proof…
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