I’ve got a Fairphone 3 and I’m wondering who’s responsible for its updates – does Fairphone create the updates and /e/ “edit” or “adapt” them or does /e/ create them itself? I mean: Is /e/ dependant on vendors like Fairphone or is /e/ completely independent? For example: Fairphone announced to release the Android 10 update for the FP3 in November/December 2020 – will this update be kind of “forwarded” to /e/? Or will /e/ have to create its own Android 10 update?
It’s the eFoundation who creates the update on the build infrastructure. /e/ is based on LineageOS and not on the Android provided by Fairphone.
So even if Fairphone has an Android 10 version, the dev team has to make /e/ compatible with LineageOS 17.1 (Android 10) on his side.
But since there is a partnership, I guess there is an exchange of proprietary blobs to make /e/ fully working on Fairphone’s hardware.
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I’m not sure this is the whole story. /e/ for the Fairphone 3 was available before LineageOS for the FP3.
In fact, the current unofficial LOS has based their work on the /e/ efforts, like the /e/ kernel tree having the full git history that must have been shared by Fairphone whereas the LOS community at that point was working with a simple source archive without history.
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Indeed it might not be so simple, I just remembered that the FP3 was the only phone with “IMG” before the zip file name, and there isn’t the “changelog” button so maybe it doesn’t come from the /e/ build infrastructure.
But what you said doesn’t enter in contradiction with what I said, it could just complete it. Let’s wait for a more detailed answer 