Fairphone 2

> Edit: I see lineage has a ROM for FF2 giving it Android 8.1. That wasn't there when I used my FF. It may have given me a good experience. The LineageOS 16 OS is based on AOSP / Android 9.x Pi; not 8.x Oreo. That was LineageOS 15. (We also don't use the acronym "FF"; we use the acronym "FP".) > I had a fairphone about three years ago (I'm guessing fairphone 2). [...] There were no custom ROMs for it either - hopefully there are now. I have a Fairphone 2 (FP2) for 4 years, and what you say is untrue. There have been alternative OSes for Fairphone for ages. Fairphone delivered a version of FPOS called Fairphone Open. It is Android without OpenGapps. The OSes which have been around the past 4 years on FP2: * SailfishOS (community edition) * FirefoxOS [now defunct] * Ubuntu Touch * LineageOS (for approx 2-3 years?) * /e/ (more recent, but also a newcomer) * PostmarketOS (more recent) Source: [1] Especially the SailfishOS port has been around for ages, by community member mal (who now works for Jolla). Ubuntu Touch I'm not sure about when that was released, but it was the main development device for UT. Assuming good faith on your behalf, are you sure this was 3 years ago? From the information you post, it was likely 5 years ago or so, and a Fairphone 1. [1] https://forum.fairphone.com/t/operating-systems-for-fairphon...

I have the Fairphone 5, for which they picked the IoT equivalent of the mobile chipset so they could ensure 10 years of driver availability from the vendor (8 years of majors + 2 of security patching IIRC). Fairphone 2 came out in December 2015 and saw the last release in March 2023. That's 8 years of software updates when Android devices from that era barely got 3, and you had to pick the flagship. Kernel updates used to be bound to Android versions because of how the kernel modules development was handled, not really limited by the company or the hardware. I owned a OnePlus 5 and the custom ROM was stuck with older kernels for a while too, until the community stepped up to port it, because there just wasn't an easy way to build kernels with updated custom vendor modules for the hardware. Google addressed at least that part thanks to the Kernel Module Interface (read e.g. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/09/android-to-take-an-u... ). So newer kernels may still lag a bit based on the manpower available and priorities, but they should be easier to do. Now that replacement cycles have become longer because hardware is good enough that you don't need to change phone every year, and Android supports KMI and other features that make maintenance easier, more vendors decided to extend support, so at least there's some more choice. From the environment point of view, I can now finally easily repair my phone. A friend of mine always had bad luck with pixels, so bad that he went…

I don't get this either. My OnePlus 7 also has a glass back. These thin, fragile phones all require a case (making it thicker and hiding the sleek looks) to protect them, and my glass back still broke despite the case. What's the point? I'd rather have a sturdy phone that doesn't require a separate case. In fact, the replaceable body of my old Fairphone 2 is a much better idea.

I found that my Fairphone 2, even after I considered it obsolete for my usage, was an easy trade-in at a price point that could only be explained by the person caring about keeping it around for a good while.