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If a tiny vendor like @Fairphone can support their product with software updates for seven(!) years, don't tell me Samsung et al can't.
fairphone.com/en/2023/01/09/an

I had the same experience with #Jolla. I have the original Jolla Phone, which was released in 2013. Support ceased in 2020 — also seven years!

Big guys need to do better and need to be called out on their bullshit. Thank you to the underdogs for showing what's possible!

FairphoneAn Update on Fairphone 2 - FairphoneWell friends, it is time. *Cue the music* After an unprecedented seven years of supporting our beloved Fairphone 2, we will finally stop software support for the Fairphone 2. After March 2023, we will no longer deliver software updates for the Fairphone 2. This is an incredibly bittersweet moment: the Fairphone 2 has far surpassed […]
💙💛:~/eu/pl/priv$:idle:

@rysiek @Fairphone
If FOSS OS for desktops can run (the same version, without any modifications!) both on the latest models and on a hardware made ~17 years ago (my personal use case) , it means that for OS for phones such a lifecycle should be all the more possible. Only there is one condition - this is only possible for FOSS. Phone manufacturers should be forced by law to open source all drivers when they end official product support

@miklo@fosstodon.org @rysiek@mstdn.social @Fairphone@social.weho.st Just open-sourcing all the drivers would not be enough. Most Android phones made by big manufacturers today already have open-source kernels, and yet they can seldom be mainlined due to the absolutely huge amount of downstream patches applied by the SoC vendor. There are not even a handful of successes porting an out-of-date device to a newer kernel baseline released by the same SoC vendor. Yes, for Android there are still userspace "drivers" (HALs) that are not usually open-sourced along with the kernel, but if one cannot even update the kernel component, open-sourcing more of the userspace won't help.

@miklo@fosstodon.org @rysiek@mstdn.social @Fairphone@social.weho.st Making the matter even worse, modern phones have TEE which includes a bunch of blobs that will probably never be open-sourced and will be useless even if open-sourced. They (along with the early-boot firmware) are all hard-wired to trust only the SoC vendor's signatures (yes, often times not even the phone manufacturers can touch those) even when in an unlocked state, so unless they also release their private key, that part of your device will stay outdated forever.

@PeterCxy @Fairphone @miklo @rysiek outside of phones, there are plenty of examples when a hardware vendor releases a kernel that just works. The patches are unmaintainable and there's no architectural view or long term plans. There's a fuckton of ARM boards with this problem.