No one in the Android universe can hold a candle to Apple’s iPhone support, but there is one company that comes very close: Fairphone. Following in the footsteps of Fairphone 2, Fairphone 3 also gets Android-industry-best seven years of OS support. Fairphone continues to surround the big tech companies with more products than they do, and is doing so even in the face of vendors such as Qualcomm dropping support for key phone components.
The company announced today that Fairphone 3, which was released in 2019, was supported until 2026, making updates for seven years. The company also released Android 13 for the Fairphone 3. Google’s 2019 phone, the Pixel 4, ended support in October 2022.
Fairphone strives to make durable phones, make its products customizable and offer some online sales. Part of this constant work is a strong effort to keep Android updates running, even when Qualcomm drops. Important software support about SoC. Fairphone says the Snapdragon 632 SoC in the Fairphone 3 was only supported up to Android 11, so continuing to support the Fairphone 3 means upgrading automatically.
In a regular update, Google releases a new build to Android’s open source, and then SoC vendors like Qualcomm take those builds to create a “Board Support Package (BSP)” for each SoC, which includes updated drivers, proprietary blobs, and other code. they make the hardware work. Android phone manufacturers often start their work from supported SoC Android architectures, so they only need to add support to their accessories. With Qualcomm’s support for downloading the Fairphone 3 SoC, Fairphone had to do the BSP upgrade itself. Fairphone then only An Android phone maker that does just that. Everyone else closes the support along with the SoC vendor.
While seven years of updates is amazing, one thing you can call Fairphone for is that these updates don’t come often. The company skipped Android 12 to offer Android 13 because of all the “build your own BSP” stuff. Monthly security updates may not arrive regularly. However, the fact that Fairphone is doing all this with a fraction of the budget of the big companies shows that the reasons that Android developers make are not correct. Any company can provide extended support if they wish; they are all just content to force people to raise and generate e-waste.