Fairphone 6 is switching to a new design that's even more sustainable

They should switch to an SOC with mainline Linux support so you don't have to throw it out in three years.

Which SoC should they switch to? Google's Pixel phones for Android 16's release just updated[0] their kernels to 6.1, which means the bleeding edge kernel version for Android phones is a release from December 2022. What Qualcomm SoCs are supported by this kernel, and how fast are they?

[0] https://www.androidauthority.com/pixel-linux-6-1-android-15-...

If the drivers were upstreamed it would be supported by the latest kernel.org kernel even before release.

AFAIK outside the Pinephone and Liberem 5 no hardware manufacturers explicitly target this and only 10 year+ old Qualcomm (other vendors such as Freescale tend to behave much better) SOCs have open source graphics drivers because the SOC vendors themselves often refuse to support their own hardware.

Google is able to do this because they build their own SOCs (probably because they got tired of being jerked around by Qualcomm) but still don't merge their stuff upstream (or at least they don't last I checked.)

> They should switch to an SOC with mainline Linux support so you don't have to throw it out in three years.

Starting 20th of June this year (so 3 days ago) every new phone released in European Union will need to have software updates for at least 5 years from the date of the end of placement on the market. This might be the first one released under new regulations. Also looking at Fairphone's history it looks like they really support their phones for a long time.

The problem is that it's not really up to Fairphone. Qualcomm and Google have to collaborate to provide the artifacts that Fairphone packages and signs for their devices. If for any reason they're unable or unwilling to do that there's nothing Fairphone can do. (and they have pretty consistently failed to do this after just a couple years. In the past it sounds like Fairphone has managed to hack around it with varying degrees of success.)

This is why using SOCs with poor support and closed drivers like this is a terrible idea.

They intentionally chose a Qualcomm QCM6490 for the FP5 instead of the rumoured Snapdragon because Qualcomm will offer longer support for that chipset (which is supposed to be used for IoT/industrial applications). We don't know what chip is in the new one yet, all we have is rumours, but I wouldn't be surprised if they pulled the same "Snapdragon but industrial" trick here.

Many mainline supported SOCs are unavailable to a company like Fairphone, which only produces a tiny amount of phones (less than 50k for the latest and greatest model). CPU manufacturers aren't going to waste time sending their top-end chips to some small company when Samsung can pay more per CPU and can take shipping containers full of them. That's also why F(x)tec phones come out with such outdated processors. Small companies will have to make do with whatever niche products are for sale in low quantities.

Android 16 uses the latest LTS branch of Linux which is 6.12.

It is for all the phones sold in EU. So Qualcomm has to provide them for all other providers too. They might release updates for Fairphone SoC as well.

I wonder if I am alone in thinking 5yr is way too short. It should be 10, if not 20 years.

This is software, not hardware. It is ridiculous to pretend it is ok for a phone to artificially stop being useful after just 5 years simply because the vendor won't give software support or even provide the necessary documentation, source code and keys for the community to do.

Fairphones have never been like that. Eg FP3 got 7 years of updates (extended from 5 promised at launch).

I agree with you, but still, 5y is better than nothing.

I agree that the platform should be open. I played with PostmarketOS on one of my old devices and I really wish I could just install Linux on my other devices to make it really usable for the years to come.

True, longer would be better. And if the platform was truly open, we could just treat phone like PCs. You can still install Linux on a 20 year old machine and it will work.

At least this is 5 years from "the end of placement on the market". So more realistically it should be around 7 years from release.

This.

Why can't we enforce that they mainline their hardware?