OS Upgrade - Volunteer Testers Required - Next Set of Devices for OS Upgrade

/e/OS Smartphone Operating System Testing
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All : Sharing the points and some of the possible solutions that got discussed this week by the /e/ team on the subject of Device support, upgrade and porting

Device Porting

  • On the PinePhone porting, we may have to port it directly to Android 10 / LOS 17.1 This is because we found that there are issues in porting it to Pie.
    • This may also require the porting of the /e/ Source code to Android 10 or LOS 17.1 :slight_smile:
  • Porting more newly released devices to /e/ ROM

Handling the Supported device list

As you may be aware we have 93 devices on our supported list as of today. While having such a long list of devices sounds good on paper there is a need to understand that the quality of service provided is more important that just quantity of devices serviced.

With this in mind - we will be coming out with a list of devices that we will support.
For now lets classify the devices that will be in the list as

  • A : Devices already on Pie - no change here they will continue getting support
  • B : Devices to be upgraded - where upgrade is required from Oreo / Nougat to Pie
  • C : Device to be dropped - devices with 0 download by users in the last couple of months or serious build issues. This will be determined by taking stock from Gitlab.
    The decision to drop some devices is also based on the facts that their Vendors have stopped
    supporting them. Which means:
    • No vendor patches
    • If currently on nougat then no security patches . Backporting of security patches is not a
      long term solution
    • No support for hardware parts in case of any damage
    • Some have partition size issues which prevents building a ROM with the full compliment of /e/ apps . This also prevents us at the moment from building ROM’s for them as part of the dev builds.

That being said the source code for all devices will be available on the Gitlab and interested users can still download and build unofficial ROM’s for their devices.

Solutions being discussed / planned / implemented

  • We are trying to check if instead of regular builds we can have a GSI for such devices. Users can get the /e/ experience and use their old devices while they last.

  • Adding SE Linux enforcing, Device encryption and Bootloader locking as a part of the OS installation experience. Activity of integrating this has been taken up separately for time with a dedicated developer.

  • We will be having a few more rounds of discussion in the next week, before we finalize what would be the course of action to take. This will be updated to all users on this thread.

We welcome your feedback on these points. We will take them into considerations before we finalize our plans.

Hope to arrive at a decision and share the future device support, upgrade and porting plan of action by the end of next week on this thread.

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