SOFTWARE LONGEVITY
A key ingredient to long-lasting smartphones
Software and Hardware:
Equal partners for longevity
THINK LONG-TERM
When it comes to longer-lasting phones, our repairable design often gets all the glory. But software is just as important in keeping our phones working well for the long term. Behind the scenes, the Fairphone software team is constantly focused on ensuring great functionality—now and well into the future.
REGULAR UPDATES
Our software team works round the clock to ensure bug fixes, security patches and other incremental improvements to your software experience in tandem with the latest Android releases. All of this to ensure your Fairphone experience is stable, secure and up-to-date always.
OPEN-SOURCE COMMUNITY
We are major believers in the power of open-source over here at Fairphone. We strongly believe that by publishing as much source code as we legally can, we can build trust with the community, support the software long after the phone is launched, and put users in control. Because if you can’t open it, you don’t own it.
EXTENDING THE JOURNEY
Your hardware is only as good as your software. If manufacturers truly believed in device longevity, they would ensure longer software support windows for their devices. With the Fairphone 5, we became the first to offer guaranteed software support for at least eight years, with five major Android updates. And a five-year warranty to boot.
Meet our
longevity
champs
Our software team makes it possible to support Fairphone devices up to 5 years longer then all other manufacturers. It is their hard work behind the scenes, day in and day out, that helps us actively extend device longevity. They are always looking for ways to change the status quo for good. Remember, longer device lifespans equals reduced electronic waste in the long run. Here’s resident software engineer, Karsten Tausche, explaining how we kept the Fairphone 2 going so long, software-wise.
How do we ensure updates happen?
We rely on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) for the latest OS builds. This comes not only from Google, but also from other hardware suppliers, companies and communities, as it’s an open source project. So everyone can also get involved!
We mostly do this alone, in conjunction with our partners and customers, but we’re also very active in lobbying for how other hardware suppliers can support us more. This also happens on an annual basis with every upgrade we do.
Our tailored software undergoes extensive testing. We need to comply with several different quality checks for our software to pass.
Repeat software adaptation and approvals for each update
Compliance tests ensure that the Android ecosystem is consistent, and apps work as they should.
We test internally, with our own development partners, with users and our community.
We ensure the phone works well for calling and network features.
Our best real-world example.
The Fairphone 2’s complete product cycle perfectly illustrates our approach.
7 years
In 2022, the Fairphone 2 received an update to Android 10. At the time, it was unheard of for an Android manufacturer to still be updating a handset six years after its original release.
5 years above average
It was a lofty goal. In 2022, the Fairphone 2 was the only phone with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 chipset that was still receiving active software support. Every other contemporary device with a similar chipset had reached their end-of-life five whole years ago.
480.000 tests
That’s the amount of tests our software team had to run to clear Android 10 on the Fairphone 2. Not only did they run all the tests, but they made sure the Fairphone 2 passed every one of them as well.
Keeping up to date
The Fairphone (Gen. 6)
Several system issues resolved. General UI improvements. Improved security patch level. Improved application loading times in certain scenarios. Added a notification glance feature
Several system and UI issues resolved. Several camera/video issues solved. General UI improvements. Improved security patch level. Simplified bootloader unlock process.
Improved low battery performance. Improved vibration settings. General UI improvements. Improved security patch level.
Fairphone 5
Updated security patch level.
Fixed an issue where the speed on navigation applications was glitching. Updated security patch level. Simplified bootloader unlock process.
Fixed an issue with ring vibration strength. Fixed a theme issue. General UI improvements. Updated security patch level.
Fairphone 4
Updated security patch level. Mobile network usability improvements.
Optimized background process management. Fixed speaker issue after reboot. Updated security patch level. Simplified bootloader unlock process.
Fixed boot issues on Android 15 and several other issues. Updated security patch level.
Fairphone 3
Updated security patch level. This is the final software update for FP3/3+.
Updated security patch level.
Updated security patch level. Simplified bootloader unlock process.