Fairphone is a smartphone company that makes environmentally friendly handsets that are made to last long. This is why they are still shipping updates to the 5-year-old Fairphone 2. They may not get any awards for timely updates, but their phones that launched with Android 5 are now updating to Android 9.
The company has detailed the update process it goes through to bring long-term support to its phones. Further, Fairphone has also claimed that the biggest barrier to Android updates is, in fact, Qualcomm, the company that supplies chips to the entire Android smartphone industry.
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Android updates have to go through a number of steps before making it to your phone. The update is first released by Google, which cannot run on phones yet. It is then handed over to chip makers (usually Qualcomm) which add drivers and hardware support.
After that, the phone manufacturers (like Fairphone) add other hardware support, for instance, cameras, displays, and other accessories. The phone makers also add built-in apps and any custom Android skins they want to do.
Fairphone said that it has been incredibly difficult to roll out Android updates as Qualcomm drops support for older chips. However, the company was able to work around the lack of Qualcomm support through Lineage OS, which is Android’s biggest custom ROM project. Even though these updates were not as polished as stock Android, Fairphone was able to deliver updates for up to 5 years and more to its phones.
As for its more recent phones, Fairphone wants to update them to at least Android 11 but has said that it could prove to be difficult as Qualcomm continues to drop support for chips. This means that these updates will have to rely on the Lineage OS path once again.
The company want to set an example with this achievement and has said that:
We are proud to show the industry that, even with our small team, it’s possible to support your phones longer.
