It’s all about the FP3 now, way more PR gold in that
Still, the S9 is being sold directly by themselves from the beginning and still running the outdated android oreo. It’s disrespect for all their backers and customers that bought it from them thinking they’d get a device that was going to be updated when other devices they don’t even sell are currently running more up to date android versions.
That’s really sad, the same with their S7 still stucked on nougat (no OTA update) for the people who bought it from /e/
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Any official update / response @Manoj ? I am interested in buying the S9 and switching over fully to /e/ - but if it’s being left behind I am not even going to bother anymore. I tried /e/ with an Essential a short while ago and I don’t want to have another negative experience.
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The issue for us still remain how to safely update the OS with an OTA build. There is a test build of the S9 on /e/ Q which one of our developers has been using. The updater does not allow for a upgrade … if you try it an error pops up… Something like this
If that is not bad enough look at the url in the error , it takes you to a page on the LineageOS wiki
On that page you are warned that the updater has blocked a version upgrade and proceeds to give you information about how to manually upgrade.
A sizable group of our users who bought from the eShop do not have the skills to install the device themselves. They would prefer to have someone do the installation for them. We have to solve this bug with the updater first. The easy installer is an update option but that needs to be tested.
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Thank you for the response @Manoj - when do you think this will all be sorted out for the S9?
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The issue with the updater has been around for a long time. A developer had worked on it for sometime and got some success in updating one of the Samsung devices. In that he was able to get his test phone to update OTA. Due to lack of resources to carry on the effort it was dropped. I can check on the latest status of this effort and revert by early next week.
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Thanks @Manoj , you’ve been helpful. Does /e/ honestly plan to continue updating/supporting the S9 at this point? It’s the latest Samsung device /e/ sells in their store and seems like a popular choice. Or are the Fairphone and other devices higher priority?
I’m not trying to pester you and really like the idea of /e/, but as you may understand I’m trying to make it work for me as best as possible for my situation - and knowing that ____ device will be at least supported on some level makes switching over to /e/ more attractive.
There are two categories of devices in the eShop.
The brand new phones and the Refurbished ones.
All our Samsung model are refurbished. The availability of these phones depends on the vendor being able to source them for us in large quantities and in A + quality.
The other set of phones the brand new one include the FP3 , FP3+ and soon to come GS290.
For both categories of phone we will provide support as long as we have users. There is no difference in priority for either of these phones.
The only pain point we have at this stage is our inability to upgrade the OS OTA for our users. This has tied up some of the initial users on nougat build. The lack of security or vendor patches for nougat is another issue which makes us look at an OS upgrade.
How to achieve that with minimum discomfort for the users is what we need to address.
In the previous post I have commented on the development effort we tried on this.
The Easy Installer is another option we are looking at to ease the task of OS upgrades.
Since the easy installer concept is working,
a dirty flash upgrade feature without loosing data is a very good option as OTA is hard to obtain.
If that is the solution you choose to address this problem, could you please share a guide about how to do it?
Is it really a safe way to upgrade without risks to lose data?
The easy installer is at this link - I will be trying it once I obtain an S9:
https://doc.e.foundation/easy-installer
Hopefully it will work for me, as the other /e/ install guide(s) I’ve read for the S9 look very convoluted, compared to the Lineage install I just did on my Essential, but that’s a different story.
@Manoj thanks again for the forthright information.
I agree it’s pretty bad to not ship up to date devices… assuming someone has flashed lineageOS and TWRP before, how hard would it be to do so on a fresh new S9 phone, regardless of the devices shipped by /e/? I’m wondering if it wouldn’t be easier for me to just get the device from a corner electronics store instead of going through the trouble of getting an (outdated) one here…
Last time i tried to flash LOS on a Samsung device (a samsung tablet), I couldn’t get root in the bootloader, so I didn’t get very far… how are things nowadays with Samsung phones?
thanks
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https://doc.e.foundation/easy-installer
The official documentation is not relevant, but good source of information :
https://doc.e.foundation/devices/starlte/install
yeah so I’m familiar with the “stock” flashing instructions. my main problem happens when the procedure deviates from there. i don’t exactly recall what the problem was but I couldn’t sideload TWRP last I tried… i got the OEM unlock, but it would complain about the signature being wrong.
i suspect that recent phones and tablets have protections about that kind of stuff, which is why i’m asking.
Don’t use sideload for installing TWRP, flash it with
$ heimdall flash --RECOVERY twrp-3.3.1-0-starlte.img --no-reboot´
sideload is for installing the system.zip if you choose this method.
yeah well, that works super well when Heimdall works. Not so much when you’re not supported. 
Out of the easy installer,
it seems there are two specifics additional steps for the /e/ installation on the galaxy s9 :
after flashing TWRP
reboot to TWRP, do the wipe things,
and before installing the /e/OS_build.zip.
You have to install :
no-verity-opt-encrypt-samsung-1.0.zip
and
VENDOR-27_ARI9.zip
Now you can install the device specific image of /e/OS
build for the ROM of your specific device from :
Thank you for your answer. Yes, I’ve used it to flash a S8 and it worked well.
My concern is that I know how to use it to install /e/ from zero but not how to use it to simply upgrade it without any loss of data.
Just don’t format or wipe /data and /internal storage
Only wipe /Dalvik Cache and /Cache