Fairphone 3 gets seven years of updates, besting every other Android OEM
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
It's admirable that they go for longevity but irregular security updates doesn't really cut the biscuit for the more security-conscious customer. It's really just a matter of when they happen to get around to it.
Samsung is better at this IMO, while they don't do it quite as long they do maintain a decent cadence that they specify for each model.
Still it hurts me they supported my S8 for such a short time because it was my best phone ever. Since then they've really improved their game on the software side but not the hardware.
I don't have estimates, but I think it's safe to estimate that there are millions of otherwise perfectly valid phones that either are in use, with serious vulnerabilities (in particular, bluetooth ones) and are not going to be patched, or have been thrown away because of that.
Sure, if most drivers were open source like on desktop linux we could tweak them to work with newer and newer Android versions, but what happens when AOSP gets a computationally expensive update (i.e. embedded ML voice recognition or realistic TTS)? then you would have to create custom versions of AOSP that only have the stuff a particular phone model can handle and this would create and unbareable ecosystem of poorly maintained distributions
You disable those features on lower-spec phones or fall back to a low-resource alternative. If I'm on an older device that can only run eSpeak instead of a more realistic but expensive TTS engine? Fine, I'll run eSpeak! You don't have to bundle everything together into an image for each device. If you want to disable stuff, do it at runtime.
Or if you really need to remove stuff due to storage limitations, have a small manifest that can be used to build an image with unused things excluded. This doesn't have to be "oh we need to make completely custom versions of the OS for each device", this is basically "install these packages, don't install these ones". Modularity!
Most of the vulnerabilities require you to be loading sketchy apps, many of these are checked on Play Store by scanners, so unless you get very unlucky or sideload sketchy apps, probably not a concern. Web view and most other network exposed components are updated from play store, since stagefright they sandboxed all codecs, etc.
It's really not that bad for a typical user to just run an unpatched phone, certainly better than a Windows machine with local admin where downloading and running one executable is all it takes. At least on an unpatched Android device they get some level of sandboxing.
There have been large set of attacks against modems and media decoders that do not require any kind of app installation. iMessage is a constant source of iOS CVEs. Media codecs are a constant source of headaches in the Android world as well and they require a driver update to fix (since most of them are HW decoders).
Pretty much all of the big security issues in the last year required no user interaction on Android or iOS to exploit.
In addition to the sibling post, Bluetooth is another attack vector.
A phone I had to abandon in the past was a Nexus 5X, which I believe has a set of very serious Bluetooth bugs. I don't remember the details, but they were very easily exploitable (as in: either doing nothing, or just keeping the BT menu in the foreground, which is a common operation).
It's not that difficult
200$ laptops can be updated without interaction with the manufacturer, there's no reason phones cannot be the same.
But I of course agree with the overall point, that no interaction with the company should be necessary just to update the OS.
As far as I know, Pixels are the only ones that allow resigning the boot loader chain with your own OS though :/
This prevents all kinds of attacks where people could push things onto your phones OS. In desktop world, this is known as "secure boot".
Many devices will, however, only accept OS signed by their manufacturer - e.g. Apple iPhones/iPads will only boot an OS signed by Apple and noone else. This is why you can't ever run Linux on an iPhone or iPad.
In Android world, many manufacturers allow users to disable this verification (known as "bootloader unlock"). This allows running of non-manufacturer provided OSes (e.g. LineageOS, GrapheneOS, etc.). However, except for Pixels, they don't allow you to supply your own signing key to the bootloader, so you lose the security benefits of the secure boot chain and open yourself to big set of security attacks against your phone.
On a Pixel (at least some of them), you can provide your own signing key and reenable secure boot when installing another OS.
Link to the original announcement: https://calyxos.org/news/2022/04/01/fairphone4-oneplus8t-one...
Link to the feature removal by OnePlus: https://calyxos.org/news/2022/07/06/oneplus-android-12-reloc...
Curiously enough this feature does seem to available for the fairphone 4 too!
GrapheneOS never tried implementing this for OnePlus or FairPhone because it's not the only reason they stick with Pixels. The Titan security chip offers other benefits they want.
Not with a kernel that wasn't provided by the manufacturer you can't. This massively constrains your options. I can pull a Debian or Ubuntu image off their website and install it on any old laptop, but for phones you need an image specifically tailored to each device, and it'll only get kernel updates as long as the manufacturer continues to provide them since they're all bespoke kernel forks per-device.
Samsung or Google could support their device for 10 years, they just don't care because their financial incentive skews toward selling new devices. Which I suppose is part of reasoning for picking a Fairphone, you get use your device for longer, wasting fewer resources.
You see it with a lot of user-facing FOSS as well, like Thunderbird. The recent post about its latest update was full of people shitting on it over, in many cases, fairly trivial details.
Creating stuff that is usable, sustainable, ethical and affordable is very difficult and involves making hard compromises. It's always good to see people trying to do it and depressing when all they get is hate.
You cannot fight against planned obsolescence while supporting the same companies that enable it (Qualcomm with their proprietary drivers tied to ancient Linux kernels). The real solution is GNU/Linux phones relying on FLOSS drivers, which will receive lifetime updates. More details: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque....
Regular security updates are no longer a nice to have. They're a must. If a company can't provide that they have no business making phones.
Having said that it does look indeed like they've upped their game with the FP4 a lot.
Hm, you do get monthly updates, but security updates seem to lag by a month. [0] Although it seems we're overdue for the July update.
[0] https://support.fairphone.com/hc/en-us/articles/440585822094...
As opposed to no updates at all? I'm still using Android 7.1.1 on a Motorola that not once got an update.
I wish we built foundational mobile application ecosystem around web technologies [0]. That would have stripped down the phones' front-end and user-facing requiremnt to 'just be able to run web browser'. No bulky updates; no deprecations. In the normal course, the only thing that needs update/upgrade is the battery, every n years or so, n > 5.
[0] with the provision to extend functionality via native plugins, of course -- like the Capacitor framework [1] does.
Eating in terms of what?
Naturally they rather sell new devices.
GSI came later as Google decided to make way for most components to updatable via Play Store.
ART was the last one to make it on Android 12, specially since they couldn't ignore Java evolution any longer, as Java libraries started to become unavailable on Android.
Monthly security updates? Ha! I had no idea those were a thing until I switched to DivestOS for a while. FP just doesn't do that.
Apple supports devices for a lot longer because they get a lot of recurring and ongoing revenue from Apple services on Apple devices, so it's in their favour if devices stay usable for longer.
You can understand almost all decisions made by tech companies if you think along the lines of "how are they profiting by doing _______?"
14 results: https://www.gsmarena.com/results.php3?nHeightMax=132&nWidthM...
Answer, yes (but they're shit).
If you are okay with older phones, there is the Sony Xperia XZ2 compact, which is even supported by several custom roms and would then run Android 13.
Or there are foldables of course, like the Samsung Flip. That's at least small some of the time, and there are some alternatives where the small screen on the outside is big enough to be usable, like the new razr+.
Same thing with laptops, whatever I can't do on a 14", I also can't do on a 16".
They're saying that what they can't do on a 14" they also can't do on a 16". Those two inches don't help.
I understand the large screen appeal, there's a lot of folks out there now where they use their phone to watch shows and in some cases is their only computing device.
[edit]
There is also the Titan Slim. It's a 4.2 inch screen, but has a keyboard, making it narrow, but very tall (5.75").
And if you do go for the super tiny Jelly series, don't get the 2E; it's designed as a second phone and so is less well spec'd than the older Jelly 2 (or the upcoming Jelly Star).
Making pictures of my kids is what I do with my phone the most.
I've witnessed people who are unable to navigate when their phone shows SOS only. They were unaware that GPS does not depend on cellular Internet. People scoff at dedicated GPS navigation devices or paper maps as antiquated.
Fairphone could invest in rolling their own open color science but I doubt they have the money to do it and come anywhere near what Apple or the other big Android makers are doing.
Looks like if you want open devices running FOSS you'll have to live with shit camera quality, for now.
Unless Qualcomm is totally out to lunch. I dunno I haven't worked with their SoCs personally.
'Good' is relative. No doubt an iPhone's camera is better, but I suspect most people have no need for such high quality photos. They just want to take photos for themselves or social media. And for that the FF3 camera is totally good enough.
I would like to try out the recent Zefones and the nothing phone also seems good. But at the moment I have my Pixel 6a which is serving me well enough.
Are you talking about the default launcher? You can download dozens of different launchers on their app store, and install them with one click. Including Trebuchet, which is the default launcher on LineageOS, which is, at this point, de facto AOSP.
Alice is using a Pixel XL in 2023. Its last Android patch was in 2019, on Android 10, but she keeps up with play store updates. Other than this, she is reasonably security conscientious. She does not sideload strange apps, but could be tricked into visiting a malicious link before exiting out of it. She is not a high value target.
By 2024 Eve has hacked Alice's phone as a result of this outdated phone. What is the most likely mechanism?
Here are my speculations:
Visiting a malicious link at the same time there is a major browser vulnerability. This sandboxes the malware, unless there is a second vulnerability, a sandbox escape.
Receiving a malicious text message that exploits a Message app vulnerability.
Attack on the baseband processor.
Pleas correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see any of these as being very likely.
To me this is a ludicrous and premature claim. They can claim this AFTER 2026 gets here and their device still runs whatever Android looks like in 2026. And runs it well, with acceptable performance and battery life. Not before.