Over in stock Fairphone OS land, they’re having a nightmare where (as I understand it) if your FP5’s fingerprint sensor is faulty, their build of Android 15 won’t boot. (Because Android 15 is supposedly stricter about the state of the fingerprint sensor than previous versions.)
See this Fairphone forum post and surrounding megathread, and their current A15 release notes.
So if you upgrade to stock-Fairphone-OS A15 with a fingerprint sensor that’s already faulty (even if you weren’t using it and wouldn’t have noticed), your phone is more or less bricked (but maybe you get to roll back your OS to a working one via the A/B mechanism); and if your fingerprint sensor breaks some time after you’ve upgraded to Android 15, your phone is bricked at the next reboot.
Fairphone had started rolling out A15 as an over-the-air update, which together with the fingerprint sensor’s tendency to break (many reports on their forum and this one) and Fairphone’s well-documented current customer support woes, has led to a situation which does not spark joy.
My question for this forum: can we expect any of this trouble with the /e/OS Android 15 builds for the FP5? Will they share the same strictness about faulty fingerprint sensors?
There’s a community /e/OS build of A15 already, which presumably some brave souls are already running.
I don’t suppose someone here has an FP5 which they’ve upgraded, which is known to have a broken or intermittent fingerprint scanner, and can say one way or the other?
(I was going to see if I could get an /e/OS A15 build on my new FP5 before bringing it into use… but maaaaybe for now I’ll stick with A13 or A14 and count my blessings)