Hello developers.
I want to ask about these phones support. I see there is an official community build for S20 (thank you for that) and an unofficial build for S21. I am considering to buy one of them but I am not sure what I can expect regarding /e/ support in the future. Is there a possibility for long term maintenance or is it completely unclear for now? Is there a plan for them? I see that LOS has no support for S20 nor S21.
And S22 BTW?
Thank you very much in advance.
The developers don’t really visit this forum. We have an admin here that will sometimes forward questions to the developers and return answers.
In any case it looks like support fell off for late model Samsung phones. I don’t know why, Samsung may have removed the ability to unlock the bootloader like other makes have.
They do drop support for phones once they get too old. Based on the dates in the support list it looks like 8 years or so. There is an archive of old builds so you can still run an instance once a phone is no longer supported, but it won’t get any updates. Though there’s a guy here that posts updated unofficial builds.
They give you a heads up in the forum when they actually drop phones, but I haven’t seen any long term outline for ones they add. I think it’s safe to assume at least five years beyond the time-frame it was added to the list. That being the case, better to opt for a more recent addition.
Rather than a Samsung I would consider selecting a newer phone from the support list. Pixel and Fairphone are probably the most quickly supported but there’s a few other well supported makes there. Really there’s nothing so great about Samsung hardware that would exclude other makes. Personally Samsung is an avoid for me due to problems I’ve had with other products from them.
My experience with Samsung S-line is very good. I am running S10e right now and I am happy with it except for the camera, so I am considering a cheap upgrade of the hardware. Pixels are fine as well of course, but i prefer to have a max 70mm width of the phone, so only Pixel 8. S20 is much cheaper than that one.
As far as I know, you can thank our hardworking builder @ronnz98 for that.
For difference between ‘community’ and ‘unofficial’ check here:
Support is extremely uncertain on new Samsung models, even on the short-term !
Only consider using them if you got one for free through work, otherwise do not buy one as they do not support VoLTE and VoWifi because of the drivers not being open. This is already a major problem in many countries where you cannot pass phone calls on 2G and 3G network as those do not exist anymore, meaning that you cannot use Murean-samsung phones in those countries anymore…
As said above, only consider buying Fairphone 5 or maybe a second hand Pixel if you need something cheaper. The stability and the extent of the testing on those builds is much better than on any other model.
If you need VoLTE / VoWifi then Samsung is not an option unless there is an open source implementation in place which I do not see in the near future for AOSP custom ROMs.
Development of newer Samsung S models is not too bad, the S20 series is pretty stable and there is much development for S21 and S23 and even S24 Ultra development is in early stage. However S22 series seems to be dead in terms of custom ROM development