This Android phone maker is giving 7 years of software support

Android ecosystem is currently dubbed as Samsung devices but there is a phone maker, which has even surpassed the Korean phone maker by giving 7 years of software support for its users.

We’re talking about Fairphone because it has announced new software support for Fairphone 3 until 2026. While the phone was actually launched in 2019.

The latest shocker from the company came after Fairphone made a tweet about the Android 13 rollout for Fairphone 3 and Fairphone 3+. Yet, the company skipped Android 12 for the same device due to some incompatibility issues.

Addressing the past challenge Fairphone wrote “You might have also noticed that we skipped Android 12 and went straight for Android 13. This has to do with the fact that the chipset manufacturer no longer supported it, so our amazing internal team has taken over software support”.

Fairphone also confirmed that the plan to support Fairphone was actually for 5 years, until August 2024. However, the company later added 2 more years to its software life cycle. Making it 7 years in total and taking the lifeline until 2026.

Longest:

Currently, there is no Android phone maker with such an extensive software update policy. Even Google’s Pixel 4 stopped fetching new updates after October 2022.

How’s that possible?

For example, Fairphone 3 was only able to support Android updates up to Android 11. Afterward, all of the work has been done by the phone maker to deliver more updates for the device.

Arstechnica has helped us to understand this situation here, for regular updates, Google rolls out new builds to the Android open source repository, then SoC vendors like Qualcomm take those builds to create a “Board Support Package (BSP)” for each SoC. It includes updated drivers, proprietary blobs, and all the other bits of code that make the hardware work.

Android partners usually start their work from these SoC-supported builds of Android, so they only need to add support for their additional hardware. With Qualcomm degrading support for the Fairphone 3 SoC, Fairphone had to do the BSP update work on its own. Fairphone is the only Android phone manufacturer that does this. Everyone else shuts down support along with the SoC vendor.

7 years is a massive after-sales software support and Fairphone is dominating the Android software criteria. Still, the phones will have to sacrifice ‘some’ Android functionality with the newest version due to SoC incompatibility.