The project, developed in partnership with veteran free software developer Rob Savoye, aims to create a fully free and open mobile platform, from the firmware to the operating system.
The project, developed in partnership with veteran free software developer Rob Savoye, aims to create a fully free and open mobile platform, from the firmware to the operating system.
I’d rather see a stable OS and ecosystem for good, Free apps that we can flash onto existing devices. I’m quite happy with my Fairphone (repairable! modular! ethical!) and we know that building and marketing a device is painfully expensive.
Let’s make Debian or Arch just work on most phones instead of trying to compete in a saturated market.
Wonder why that’s extremely rare on ARM devices, especially those with modems, and rarely works beyond proof of concepts on some very specific devices? Its not like you’re the first to have this idea.
How old is your oldest working fairphone? I’ve heard too many bad things about software atrophy to declare it a success yet.
I’m using a Fairphone 4, which is 4 years old at this point (October 2021) and I’m still quite happy with it, but I owned the Fairphone 1 and 2 as well.
In terms of software atrophy, they do offer support for your device for 5 years, which is better than most, and because of its open nature, it’s generally well supported by alternatives like Lineage or Calyx, but yeah, I’m still on Android 13. While I still get regular security patches and haven’t really had a need for an upgrade, there’s no denying that the FP4 is behind.
Of course, it’s also easily repairable, supports an SD card and replaceable battery, so that’s a tradeoff I’m happy with.
Do phone calls and RCS work 100% of the time? (I really hope the answer is “yes” because I really want to get out of the closed source ecosystem.)
You have no idea how any of it works, do you?
Fighting closed source drivers, blobs, configurations, entitled users who want everything to work perfectly is not a child’s play. Having control over the whole device like this project is huge.