Comment by Telaneo
10 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.
10 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.
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.
Oh for some reason I thought Fairphone does all this in-house, not that they just take Chinese ODM. It makes more sense now.
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It's not as though we're talking about a device with hardware specs locked behind an NDA and drivers that only support outdated kernel versions.
An incredibly incomplete port without many of the core security features and decent updates is not GrapheneOS. It isn't possible to bring GrapheneOS to Fairphone devices.
> It's not as though we're talking about a device with hardware specs locked behind an NDA and drivers that only support outdated kernel versions.
Fairphone 5 and earlier have an end-of-life Linux kernel. Fairphone 6 is approaching the same fate. None of their devices keep up with the incomplete security backports to older releases, let alone the full security updates via new major releases. All of their devices are missing important hardware security features which should be standard. They're repeatedly said they don't consider any of this a significant issue and have no plans to significantly change it.
Yes, I realize that the official stance is that it isn't grapheneos without the security features. That doesn't change the fact that someone who won't have the security features either way (and presumably doesn't care because otherwise he would switch to a different piece of hardware) might want the option of using a build of grapheneos that isn't officially condoned by the maintainers. (That's kind of the whole point of FOSS, right?)
I didn't realize fairphone was stuck on an EoL kernel. I guess that means that even if the build can be made to work right now (far from certain given an old kernel) it would likely break in the future.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49669636
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.)
Why? Because of drivers? Don’t they already have Linux drivers for the fairphone?
I wonder if fable or astra could wire everything up.
3 replies →
Yes, they can, but they have promoted /e/OS, and they have no ability to develop Android.