My little Moto E is a bit more than 4 years old, works fine but has no more OS support and battery is now less powerful… Looking for second hand devices, I saw FP2 absolutely news, for moderate prices…
What about long time support (LTS) with Fairphone ?? From factory (5 years) and from /e/ ???
I saw known pseudonyms on FP forum, but I ask here 'cause both hardware and softwar/e/ support seem to be important to me, for a long daily use…
Yes, of course. But my question was about opportunity of buying a brand mew FP2, much less expensive. And reading around and around, I saw that Fairphone has already stop FP1’s support…
I can’t see a way to buy a brand new FP2. New FP2 have been sold until 2018. Refurbished models until 2019. Currently new sold model is FP3.
SOC vendor support for FP2 has been stopped about 3 years ago. So this is limiting the possibilities of FP to fully support the device for a longer time.
Continue to read in the FP forum or in the blogs on the FP website to find enough reasons for that.
Agreed.
Fairphone really went to great lengths to bring Android 7 to the Fairphone 2 without Android 7 support from Qualcomm for the Snapdragon 801 SoC, and get a Google certification for that (the only Snapdragon 801 device for which this was done as far as the internet tells me).
Then Google stopped security update support for Android 7 from November 2019 on.
How Fairphone want to proceed now with software support is unclear. There was no official “We will backport everything we need ourselves.” commitment, and there are no monthly security updates anymore at the moment.
Realistically, I personally am only waiting for their official announcement to drop software support because it simply can’t be done any longer.
Of course, that shouldn’t concern /e/ support for the time being, because /e/ is not based on Fairphone’s official OSes.
Hardware-wise, Fairphone announced over a year ago that they acquired enough spare parts to support people needing them for at least three years, but predicting demand is not exact science, and so the improved camera module is out of stock already (explanation).
Be aware that Fairphone never managed to get consistent part quality out of the factory. There are a lot of Fairphone 2s out there which work totally fine (like mine), but then there are also a lot out there with modules not behaving as they should.
Sure, you can easily exchange the modules yourself (which is really, really cool) until you perhaps get to a well working Fairphone 2, but that would mean getting (mostly buying) more parts.
Furthermore, it turned out over time that Fairphone overdid the easy repairability a little to create a real showpiece (admitted by founder Bas van Abel in an interview) … so the connections between the modules can become a problem over time, so that even perfectly fine modules start to not work perfectly fine together.
In short: To get on the Fairphone 2 train right now is a little late, I would advise against it, unless you really have fun tinkering with the phone, possibly ad nauseam . (But, to mention it again, mine works totally fine for about 3.5 years now.)
Maybe they should announce that caused by Google having dropped Android 7 support they can’t support FPOS or FPOOS for FP2 any more, but that with the /e/ partnership they recommend the users to move to /e/ OS. So their FP2 can then run Android 9 including monthly security updates
And maybe with @Ingo_FP_Angel hopefully soon experienced with FP3 easy installer he’ll even manage to port easy installer for FP2
. (But, to mention it again, mine works totally fine for about 3.5 years now.)
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