I love Fairphone’s promise, but execution is another thing. Fair warning here is that I’ve seen the experience with a Fairphone 3 up close, and it wasn’t up to my standards in terms of camera and software bugs (caller ID has not worked for months), let alone the barebones hardware they ship. I hope they get there, but the Fairphone 3 certainly wasn’t it for me.

What I don’t understand about Fairphone is how they will deliver these updates. Fairphone, like others, uses Qualcomm chips. Qualcomm supports their chips only for three years (four years for recent ones, but not the ones FP is using). This is what held Google back to ship reasonable security updates on Pixel devices so far. How can a small company like Fairphone convince Qualcomm to make more updates if Google couldn’t? Or will they just end up shipping incomplete security updates, like a community project?