Fairphone
It can. Android makers can actually support phones for quite some time. Fairphone has announced the end of support for his Fairphone 2 which will be in March 2023. That phone was released in his October 2015, so almost seven and a half years of updates.
Fairphone is a very small Dutch company that doesn’t have as many resources as Google, Samsung, BBK, and other big tech juggernauts, but they’ve managed to outlast them in their support programs. The company’s overall goal is sustainability, with easy-to-repair phones, available spare parts, and a long-term commitment to renewal.The Fairphone 4 comes with a five-year hardware warranty and six years of updates. and the company’s reputation means it can deliver. Sadly, the phone will only ship in the UK and Europe, and while the Fairphone 2 only promised “three to five years” of updates, it’s been blown out of the water.
Updating the Fairphone 2 has been a big undertaking for Fairphone, as it has largely been done without Qualcomm’s help. The Android update process typically has a chain of custody, with Google updating the Android source code, chip vendors taking that code and adding drivers and other binary blobs, and phone makers adding the chip vendor’s code. Get it and make it work. specific device. For Qualcomm, a shorter support cycle meant selling more chips, so they quickly pulled out of the process, making Fairphone updates much more complicated.
Fairphone
The Fairphone 2 features the Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 SoC, a chip that Qualcomm deprecated with Android 6.0. Perhaps first in his Android ecosystem, the lack of chipset support hasn’t stopped his Fairphone from partnering with LineageOS and shipping Android 10 on a seven-year-old device today. It’s not the newest OS in the world, but it passes all of Google’s Android compatibility tests. I’m sure there will be new amateur releases in the Android ROM community, but Fairphone’s Android 10 build is an official release as opposed to the “tell me what doesn’t work” standard of many amateur ROM releases. has reached the standards of
Fairphone didn’t give a reason why support would end in March, but it would have had to end support later this year if it were to stay on Android 10. Even Google plans to end support for Android 10 soon, as Google only supports security patches for his last four versions of Android.
Fairphone says that if you want to keep using the Fairphone 2, you do so at your own risk, as it quickly becomes unsafe. Fairphone says it still has a “limited” inventory of parts available on its web store and will offer a €50 credit toward a new phone if you send in your used phone by the end of March.
