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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So you say that Linux kernel doesn't support "driver code" properly?
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Linux kernel driver code mostly isn't tested or directly maintained. There are frequent API changes resulting in the driver code needing to be updated to continue building/running. It's one of the things that leads to the driver code rotting away without direct maintenance.
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It's often only tested years later due to most people using distributions with frozen package versions. The drivers being part of the official kernel doesn't in any way imply that they're going to keep working. It requires active testing and development to keep in a good state.
It's also certainly not implied that just because it's upstream, that there will be work on auditing and securing it. Most of the code doesn't have that happen. An upstream version of a driver developed downstream often doesn't even get the downstream security updates applied.