Where?

For the most recent example check out this Forum thread regarding the Fingerpringt sensor issues of the Fairphone 3(+) with Android 13, due to the sensor’s manufacturer having ceased support for the sensor and Google having updated its security policy.

I don’t believe that is legal. That’s just absolutely ridiculous.

Wow that is such a bad idea… I… I’m honestly speechless. Who thought if that? I mean…

To add to that, Fairphone is also regularly criticized that they’re struggling to keep up full support for devices that are just a few years old. But unfortunately most of their issues are not their but their suppliers fault. Once the manufacturer of a specific component stops Firmware support for that component, it gets really hard to provide fixes and support once firmware-related issues arise. So that’s more of a general smartphone-industry-problem, in that the life cycles of the ‘big players’ are much to short, giving hardware-manufacturers an incentive to stop firmware support for older components quite quickly.

I guess we have to differentiate between issues that Fairphone has control over, and issues that Fairphone is simply not big enough to solve on it’s own.

Yeah, I largely agree with that. With regards to the schematics it unfortunatrly appears they are unable to release everything due to legal reasons though.

I guess that’s also one positive aspect of Fairphone: They do officially cooperate with certain custom ROMs such as /e/os and IodeOS, and also make it significantly easier for not-officially-supported custom ROMs to exist.