Hi everyone,
/e/OS remains excellent for privacy, but I’m concerned about the delay in security patches — and comparing the same device with its original OS makes this pretty clear.
On my Fairphone 6:
Under /e/OS 4.0: Android patch dated June 1, 2026, but vendor security patch dated December 5, 2025
Under FairphoneOS (official): security patch dated June 5, 2026, updated monthly
The vendor patch level covers sensitive low-level components (firmware, modem, drivers), and it’s currently 6 months behind what Fairphone itself publishes for the exact same hardware. So this isn’t a manufacturer limitation — it’s a delay in how /e/OS integrates those patches.
Is this a known issue? What’s the process for integrating vendor patches for the Fairphone 6 on the e Foundation side? Is there a roadmap to close this gap?
The security patch of your faiphone is the same no matter whether you run /e/ OS or stock android, the discrepancy between the two dates : 1June and 5June is just a glitch, the safety patch is the same and is updated at the same time, sometimes /e/ OS is even updated first
Regarding the firmware version, there are two things to take into account:
The firmware version of a stock Fairphone on Android might actually be the same as the one of /e/ OS. If you check you will probably observe that.
The firmware update is most of the time not very important safety-wise. Those low-level drivers do not evolve much, if at all, after a smartphone release. What is somewhat more important is the android safety patch, but even regarding this one, people make far too much of a fuss about it. You are pretty safe about most threats regardless of how up to date you are, what matters more is that your profile is not individually targeted by a state because of your personal activity (like a journalist). A sound and careful use of internet like using mostly open source apps, or even better: using mostly web browser pages, will protect your data much more than an up to date safety patch.
Finally, /e/ OS and Murena have been wrongly and persistently accused of delayed safety update. They have addressed this topic and proven several times that they actually update the safety patches faster than most vendors. Those attacks were sometimes a disgraceful attack from competitor Graphene OS who was jealous of the better and more consistent offer of Murena (avanced privacy, app lounge, etc)
Fror the FP6, Vendor SPL is updated to 2026-06-05 (FP6.QREL.16.82.0.20260529172407_WS1F) on A16, which we will release before end of this month
If you want to try out A16 early, you can enroll into /e/OS test channel and from developer options and refresh the updater to receive the update.
