Fairphone suggests Qualcomm is the biggest barrier to long-term Android support

Enlarge / The Fairphone 2 and its many modules. (credit: Fairphone)

Fairphone-the sustainable, modular smartphone company-is still shipping updates to the 5-year-old Fairphone 2. The company won't win any awards for speed, but the phone-which launched in 2015 with Android 5-is now being updated to Android 9.0. The most interesting part of this news is a video from Fairphone detailing the update process the company went through, which offers more transparency than we normally get from a smartphone manufacturer. To hear Fairphone tell the story of Android updates, the biggest barrier to longer-term support is-surprise!-Qualcomm.

Fairphone wants consumers to keep their phones for longer, creating less e-waste and carbon emissions via modular replacement parts that are easily upgradeable and repairable. A big challenge for designing a long-lasting phone like this is software support. Even if Fairphone wanted to support a phone forever, Android software updates do not work that way, and major OS updates normally rely on a relay race of companies that all need to hand-off a build of Android before it reaches your phone.

We've gone over this before, but let's do a quick recap of how Android makes it to your smartphone. First, Google releases builds of AOSP (the Android Open Source Project) to everyone. This doesn't run on a phone yet, though. First, your SoC (System on a Chip) manufacturer (usually Qualcomm) has to get hold of it and customize Android for a particular SoC, adding drivers and other hardware support. Then, that build goes to your phone manufacturer (Fairphone, in this case) which adds support for the rest of the hardware-things like cameras, the display, and any other accessories-along with built-in apps and any custom Android skin work that the company wants to do.

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