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Comment by Telaneo

9 hours ago

It's because Fairphone doesn't fulfil GOS's hardware requirements. If Fairphone addresses that, there's no reason for GOS to not support a Fairphone device.

8 comments

Telaneo

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microtonal  30 minutes ago

I don't think they can, even if they wanted to. From the GrapheneOS device requirements:

Device support code updated to new monthly, quarterly and yearly releases of AOSP within several months to provide new security improvements (Pixels receive these in the month they're released)

Fairphone's hardware and software is developed by a Chinese ODM (T2Mobile), who even have difficulty pushing out monthly patches very timely. They don't even do QPR2s, major Android updates are very late (usually almost a year), they rarely do driver firmware or kernel updates. There is no way they could fulfill this guarantee unless they started doing software development in-house and paid Qualcomm for monthly firmware updates.

fc417fc802  8 hours ago

I don't understand the issue. If Fairphone wants GOS can't they just compile it themselves with whatever unsupported hardware based security features disabled? Ditto for any given end user. It's not as though we're talking about a device with hardware specs locked behind an NDA and drivers that only support outdated kernel versions.

  • Telaneo  8 hours ago

    Simple. Fairphone doesn't want GOS.

    Forking GOS and porting it to a new device is a huge and unreasonable ask for an individual user. Even less so when you include the fact that you'll need to keep it up to date.

    • fc417fc802  8 hours ago

      I understand that bringing AOSP to an unsupported device is a huge endeavor. But fairphone already has the driver situation sorted out. What's the complexity here? (Genuine question, I'd like to correct any misconceptions about the android ecosystem that I have.)

  • imkac  6 hours ago

    Yes, they can, but they have promoted /e/OS, and they have no ability to develop Android.