This device is going to get at best around 2 years of proper security updates due to using an SoC launched in late 2020 with 3 years of support. They're claiming they'll be providing something they won't really be providing without doing the work for it.
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Isn’t the point that they have actually done this with past devices and spares and even upgrades to modules are available
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Sure, they've provided hacked together major version upgrades years late without most of the security updates.
For past devices, they've provided delayed privacy/security updates for at best around 2 years which gets cut off with the death of support from the hardware vendor(s).
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How does that make them an industry leader? Apple has been providing 6 years of proper privacy/security updates and major version upgrades.
Compare that to 2 years of often late privacy/security updates and very delayed major version upgrades. Android 9 is from mid-2018...
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Fairphone 2 came out in 2015. Android 9 is from 2018. Them updating to Android 9 in 2021 is really just doing 3 years of support very badly rather than having 6 years of updates as they want to portray it. It's a failure, not a success. Makes no sense. Compare to iPhones...
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Compare anything to iPhone and updates are poor, but I don’t want Apple. This is Android. Ethos of Fairphone isn’t same as ethos of Apple. Fairphone are trying, I’m sure in future things will improve; just like 10 yr old laptops can run Linux and still be secure so will Fairphone
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Using Android isn't a reason for the lack of long-term support. It doesn't place limitations on that and isn't the reason for it. Comparing to Apple is entirely fair and Fairphone doesn't compare well to vendors shipping 3-4 years of proper updates according to schedule either.
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Compare the products and decisions made for them with the rhetoric and it doesn't hold up. Claiming to be offering 6 years of support while only being in the position to do it properly for 2 years and likely not even executing on that well is dishonest and is pretty much a scam.
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> just like 10 yr old laptops can run Linux and still be secure so will Fairphone
This simply isn't true and isn't how things actually work. On a 10 year old laptop, where exactly are you getting updates for the firmware, and who is maintaining the driver code, etc. properly?
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How about on a 2-3 year old laptop that's not a Macbook or Chromebook? Where are you getting the firmware updates and other support?
Most laptops have terrible hardware/firmware security from day one with blatant vulnerabilities and then don't get much support for it at all.
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Also, in what sense are those traditional OSes secure when they pretty have have no privacy or security model with everything having full access without user control over what software can do or access? The expectations for mobile devices are much higher than they've been there.
Mobile phones are expected to have well sandboxed apps, IOMMU isolation for hardware components, full verified boot for firmware/OS, memory safe languages for most of the high-level OS, modern mitigations throughout OS/firmware, etc. Proper firmware updates are part of that too.
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The expectations are totally different. If you ignore all the baseline requirements and try to apply the monthly patch level model to laptops/desktops in a much more lax way, you still end up being quickly unable to keep raising patch level since hardware quickly loses support.
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