Why no updates in over a year? FP4

It has been over a year since an update was available for my FairPhone 4 with e/os/. I am currently on version 1.17-s-20231109350748-stable-FP4 which was updated Novermber 9, 2023. I keep checking for updates, but there are none.

Recently, with the App Lounge outage, the patches for.that were for much later uodates of e/os/. I moved to Aurora updater as a result, but it is frustrating to not have an updated operating system. v.1.17 is quite old.

Are there plans to ship.an update for this operating system? Is it a dead end?

Regain your privacy! Adopt /e/OS the deGoogled mobile OS and online servicesphone

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(Hi Brad, I’m the one who suggested to you to ask here :slight_smile: )

I hope others here have more ideas, but my only one so far: Have you emptied storage and cache of the App Lounge app? Settings > Apps > All apps > App Lounge > Storage and cache This would reset the App Lounge.

EDIT: Nonsense, of course :see_no_evil: :face_with_open_eyes_and_hand_over_mouth: Still too much in the App Lounge issues train of thought. :roll_eyes:

You seem to have missed the Android version upgrade to Android 13 (T).

As a first step you might try Issues with the Updater and a solution.

If this is unsuccessful the method to do the manual upgrade was recently given here 2 identical FP4's one is stuck at e os 1.21.1 - #6 by piero

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If you bought your device directly from Murena you could contact help desk if you can’t solve it by yourself

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Hello,
same issue here.
I followed the links above. I downloaded the ZIP to the SD card and booted into recovery mode.
However, the recovery updater complains a wrong signature for that file.
What did I do wrong?

The link was based on the OP saying 1.17-s-20231109350748-stable-FP4, but specifically stable.

Are you sure you were running FP4 + stable and not dev?

It is exactly the version you stated.
No dev.

Firstly this error has been known to occur falsely.

It would be good to know if your bootloader is locked or unlocked.

Here is a choice of updater ROM with md5sum.

I suggest you check the md5sum on a PC before use, then use a different install method.

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Just to be sure I understand these instructions correctly:

1: All I need is the zip file for the latest release, either on the device or on a connected PC with ADB
2: In contrast to the installation instructions, I should not unpack the zip file and run the installation shell script (which writes all the contained image files to the device and deletes all user data), but instead simply trigger the “update” mechanism, which knows what to do with the zip file and will leave all user data untouched.

Is this correct? I’d rather ask three times because I have a phone here that is used for work, and while I know how to make a backup, that phone needs to be ready to go every morning, so if I accidentally delete user data, that would mean a night shift restoring everything, in combination with a significantly-decreased panic threshold before the next system update. I would really like to avoid that.

P.S.: I failed to apply the above procedure (and also Pierro’s version) yesterday, to a ShiftPhone6MQ (axolotl), failing with signature check failure, although I could verify the checksum on my PC with no problem. I managed to upgrade the phone by unpacking the zip file and changing the installer shell script to delete no user data. The script for the FP4 looks a little different, and I really don’t this thing to depend on my own Bash skills. I hope that explains why I’m a bit nervous about upgrading in the suggested way. How can I be sure it won’t delete things?

P.P.S.: The phone is a FP4 from Murena, specifically chosen to avoid this kind of manual troubleshooting … I’m okay to do this for my own personal phone, but this is not something that should interrupt work. Sadly, I have not been able to find any helpful information beyond some mention that Murena Fairphones had an automatic solution, but found no pointer as to how to make that happen. Maybe I overlooked something important? Helpful input welcome.

It is always recomended to make a backup,
but there is yet no backup solution proposed for non rooted phone…

The expected “automatic OTA update processs” on “official device” reproduce the “manual update process” described above.
no data wipe is expected… If you don’t apply any factory-reset.

Update: I tried updating by copying the zip file over, and wouldn’t you know it, the recovery updater rejects the file signature (error 21).
If I tell it to go ahead anyway, I get this

Installing update...
E:Failed to find update binary META-INF/com/google/android/update-binary

And yes, I did check the zip file’s checksum on my PC, and it matches.

The signature mismatch could be caused by the recent rename of the “stable” branch to “official”

Correct me if I’m wrong, but is the signature not supposed to be independent of the filename? That is: anyone can sign any file with a valid signature, as long as they have a valid key pair and nobody changes the file or its name after it’s been signed.

Either way, the update fails even if I tell the phone to ignore the signature, which still leaves me without a known way to update – any suggestions?

Is the update more likely to work when pushed via ADB instead of copying the zip file over and trying to install locally on the phone (i.e. method 4 instead of 2 or 3)?

Sorry, that sentence is a bit mangled. Are you saying that the automatic process downloads the zip file, boots into recovery and then applies the update, without user interaction?
Given that doing the process manually fails on my end, what do I need to do to try the automatic version?

The cool thing about automatic things is that they don’t give me a chance to make mistakes. The bad thing is of course that they don’t give me a chance to correct them, either, but I’d really like to give this one a try, and I’d like to be reasonably sure that it “just works” next time, too.

you have joined a thread where people were hoping to recover from the situation of failure to update for over a year … was this your situation?

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Yes, exactly, that was my situation, with two phones. I managed to sort one of them (Shiftphone 6mq) out myself, but the FP4, which was supposed to be the easier one to upgrade, is resisting all attempts so far.

It seems that all the relevant information is kind of scattered all over different forum posts here, and some of it is implied and not explicitly stated, or available elsewhere and assumed to be known. For that reason, I tried to get some more explicit information in an existing threat rather than opening yet another new threat and spreading the puzzle pieces even further for the next person with the same issue…