Hello everybody,
I have a question regarding the current patch levels of my Fairphone 5. Since I’ve only received it last week I am fairly new to this, so maybe it is already solved or not an issue at all.
So Google has put out new security updates for Android.
This means that now everybody (phone vendors and custom ROMs like /e/OS) can take them and put them into their own Android OSes, which takes different amounts of time depending on the vendor.
Google themselves and selected vendors with early access can be quicker with this, of course. And then LineageOS-based OSes like /e/OS might get them via LineageOS, so via an additional step inbetween.
This is something a bit different.
This is the security patch level of firmware for hardware components in the phone. These patches come from the vendors of the respective hardware components, mainly from the SoC vendor (System-on-Chip, most importantly processor and networking hardware), in your case Qualcomm.
These get incorporated into OS updates infrequently, as they arrive. In your case Fairphone gets them from the hardware vendors and shares them with /e/OS due to an official partnership.
More knowledgable users might add details or correct me.
