No one within the Android ecosystem can maintain a candle to Apple’s software program help timeline for the iPhone, however there may be one firm that comes the closest: Fairphone. Following within the footsteps of the Fairphone 2, the Fairphone 3 can be getting an Android-industry-best seven years of OS help. Fairphone continues to run circles round big tech firms which have much more assets than it does, and it is doing this even within the face of element distributors like Qualcomm dropping help for the cellphone’s core elements.
The firm announced today that the Fairphone 3, which was launched in 2019, has had its help prolonged to 2026, making for seven years of updates. The firm additionally simply launched Android 13 for the Fairphone 3. Google’s personal 2019 cellphone, the Pixel 4, shut down help in October 2022.
Fairphone strives to make sustainable smartphones, designing its merchandise to be repairable and in addition providing alternative components on the market on-line. Part of that sustainability mission is a fully herculean effort to maintain the Android updates flowing, even when Qualcomm drops important software program help for the SoC. Fairphone says the Snapdragon 632 SoC within the Fairphone 3 was solely supported as much as Android 11, so persevering with to help the Fairphone 3 meant doing the upgrades all by itself.
For the traditional replace course of, Google releases a brand new construct to the Android open supply repository, then SoC distributors like Qualcomm take these builds to create a “Board Support Package (BSP)” for every SoC, which incorporates up to date drivers, proprietary blobs, and all of the other bits of code that make the {hardware} work. Android cellphone producers normally begin their work from these SoC-supported builds of Android, in order that they solely want so as to add help for his or her extra {hardware}. With Qualcomm dropping help for the Fairphone 3 SoC, Fairphone needed to do the BSP replace work by itself. Fairphone is the solely Android cellphone producer that does this. Everyone else shuts down help together with the SoC vendor.
While seven years of updates is unimaginable, the one factor you could possibly ding Fairphone for is that the updates do not arrive at an everyday cadence. The firm really skipped Android 12 to ship Android 13 because of all that “construct the BSP your self” work. Monthly safety updates most likely do not arrive that recurrently both. Still, Fairphone doing this with a fraction of the funds of bigger firms reveals that the standard excuses Android producers make aren’t legitimate. Any firm may provide longer help if it needed to; they’re all simply content material forcing folks to improve and creating e-waste.