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Comment by bserge | Hacker News Reader

Thanks to the mentioned LineageOS team (and many other developers at XDA forums) this otherwise "enormous undertaking" is relatively easy.

Android 9 works flawlessly on many SD 801 devices. I believe it's the last version of Android to see such active development on this 32-bit SoC.

I've just installed it on my old HTC (which was also stuck at Android 5 and apps last updated ~2 years ago, even the autocorrect stopped working), and it's surprisingly usable.

Increasing the minimum CPU frequency and boost time makes it feel much snappier, and everything works as it should, even Google Assistant with hotword activation. Some overclocking should provide even better performance, but it would likely need a new battery.

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Fairphone employee here.

> Thanks to the mentioned LineageOS team (and many other developers at XDA forums) this otherwise "enormous undertaking" is relatively easy.

You would think so. In fact, we also thought so, when we had started our work on Android 7 for the same device a while ago.

Unfortunately, it shows that Lineage OS is by and for tech enthusiasts. There are several issues that break using this for production devices. There are a lot of stability issues that that the regular Lineage users put up with because they care more about the control they get than stability. However, the same instability is prohibitive for releasing this to regular less tech-savvy users.

The worst problem, however, is that the Lineage OS community only develops and tests with "userdebug" builds. Unfortunately, regular "user" builds don't even compile and if they do, they do not run properly. That has huge security implications (SE Linux rules, root access, etc) that we could not ignore.

That being said, having the work of the Lineage OS community available did give us a leg up. Open Source is great.

Thanks for your work on keeping up maintenance of the Fairphone 2! And of having made Fairphone Open available on it; I know usage is probably not high enough to make it happen for the Fairphone 3, but with Fairphone Open available I had no reason at all to consider Lineage, and the peace of mind it gives me is way beyond what I expected when I first installed it.

Thank you for your kind words.

It is true that we do not have an Open alternative for Fairphone 3 yet. I don't know if we will ever release one. However, I truly believe that the cooperation with the /e/ foundation [1] gives our users an even better option. /e/ do a much better job at providing a good open source OS than we could ever do because for us it always was and would be a side project.

1: https://doc.e.foundation/devices/FP3/

Yep, I was a little worried about the /e/ account and all that, but after reading someone else's account here, that sounds like it might fulfil the same goal for me, so that's something to look forward to.

But only after my FP2 dies, of course. Which hopefully won't be anytime soon.

Interesting, thanks for chiming in!

My project, DivestOS, offers -user builds of Q for the FP2 with some hardening on top. See for example [1]

Getting -user builds of LineageOS does have many hurdles and it definitely impacts some devices more then others. Some devices even have their SELinux policy relying on neverallows. But it is managable.

[1] https://github.com/Divested-Mobile/DivestOS-Build/blob/maste...

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