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Comment by wkat4242 | Hacker News Reader

7 years yes but updates are few and far between. That matters a lot too. With Fairphone you don't get monthly security updates and timely major upgrades.

It's admirable that they go for longevity but irregular security updates doesn't really cut the biscuit for the more security-conscious customer. It's really just a matter of when they happen to get around to it.

Samsung is better at this IMO, while they don't do it quite as long they do maintain a decent cadence that they specify for each model.

Still it hurts me they supported my S8 for such a short time because it was my best phone ever. Since then they've really improved their game on the software side but not the hardware.

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> With Fairphone you don't get monthly security updates and timely major upgrades.

Hm, you do get monthly updates, but security updates seem to lag by a month. [0] Although it seems we're overdue for the July update.

[0] https://support.fairphone.com/hc/en-us/articles/440585822094...

It was definitely not this good during most of the FairPhone 3's life, I know a friend who has one. They also skipped some android versions entirely.

Oh wow, this seems much better than Samsung, they promise 5 years of security updates, but after the first year or so only every six months.

I have a Samsung S21 from 2021 and get both feature and security updates almost every month.

>With Fairphone you don't get monthly security updates and timely major upgrades.

As opposed to no updates at all? I'm still using Android 7.1.1 on a Motorola that not once got an update.

You people are never happy. Maybe if phones costed $10k a company could afford such a team of engineers to keep Android as updated as upstream AOSP

Security is topic that is definitely worth taking very seriously, and worse, it's in contrast with an industry fundamentally designed around planned obsolescence.

I don't have estimates, but I think it's safe to estimate that there are millions of otherwise perfectly valid phones that either are in use, with serious vulnerabilities (in particular, bluetooth ones) and are not going to be patched, or have been thrown away because of that.

As long as smartphone device drivers are proprietary there will be an upper limit of how much a phone can be updated. Not to mention that Android and iOS get more computationally intensive each version way quicker than Desktop OSs do. Windows 10 from 2012 and Windows 10 today basically run the same.

Sure, if most drivers were open source like on desktop linux we could tweak them to work with newer and newer Android versions, but what happens when AOSP gets a computationally expensive update (i.e. embedded ML voice recognition or realistic TTS)? then you would have to create custom versions of AOSP that only have the stuff a particular phone model can handle and this would create and unbareable ecosystem of poorly maintained distributions

> what happens when AOSP gets a computationally expensive update (i.e. embedded ML voice recognition or realistic TTS)?

You disable those features on lower-spec phones or fall back to a low-resource alternative. If I'm on an older device that can only run eSpeak instead of a more realistic but expensive TTS engine? Fine, I'll run eSpeak! You don't have to bundle everything together into an image for each device. If you want to disable stuff, do it at runtime.

Or if you really need to remove stuff due to storage limitations, have a small manifest that can be used to build an image with unused things excluded. This doesn't have to be "oh we need to make completely custom versions of the OS for each device", this is basically "install these packages, don't install these ones". Modularity!

What percentage of those will actually be exploited in the hands of typical users? There's not exactly worm grade exploits flying around for these devices.

Most of the vulnerabilities require you to be loading sketchy apps, many of these are checked on Play Store by scanners, so unless you get very unlucky or sideload sketchy apps, probably not a concern. Web view and most other network exposed components are updated from play store, since stagefright they sandboxed all codecs, etc.

It's really not that bad for a typical user to just run an unpatched phone, certainly better than a Windows machine with local admin where downloading and running one executable is all it takes. At least on an unpatched Android device they get some level of sandboxing.

I tend to agree here - of course security is a concern and the horror stories are just that, horrific, but how often (specifically on mobile) do they happen? And with such a significant amount of our personal data now on devices - photos, health, financial - if there were constant massive exploitation there'd be relentless pressure to improve.

> What percentage of those will actually be exploited in the hands of typical users? There's not exactly worm grade exploits flying around for these devices.

There have been large set of attacks against modems and media decoders that do not require any kind of app installation. iMessage is a constant source of iOS CVEs. Media codecs are a constant source of headaches in the Android world as well and they require a driver update to fix (since most of them are HW decoders).

Pretty much all of the big security issues in the last year required no user interaction on Android or iOS to exploit.

> What percentage of those will actually be exploited in the hands of typical users? There's not exactly worm grade exploits flying around for these devices.

In addition to the sibling post, Bluetooth is another attack vector.

A phone I had to abandon in the past was a Nexus 5X, which I believe has a set of very serious Bluetooth bugs. I don't remember the details, but they were very easily exploitable (as in: either doing nothing, or just keeping the BT menu in the foreground, which is a common operation).

"You people"?

Let’s not go down the “you people” route here.

You people = people who hold the same opinion as GP

It's not that difficult

It’s an antagonistic turn of phrase that’s not conducive to an atmosphere of high quality discussion. There are other places on the internet that are for that, not HN.

I am everything but a phone OS developer, but why is every android update breaking everything and why are android phones are so hard to update for the manufacturer? On windows and linux I can probably still run 98% of the proprietary drivers after OS and kernel updates.

The fact that only phone companies can update the OS on the device is a self-inflicted problem that doesn't have anything to do with phone cost.

200$ laptops can be updated without interaction with the manufacturer, there's no reason phones cannot be the same.

You can install other OS on the phone if you want.

But I of course agree with the overall point, that no interaction with the company should be necessary just to update the OS.

> You can install other OS on the phone if you want.

As far as I know, Pixels are the only ones that allow resigning the boot loader chain with your own OS though :/

You can use "fastboot boot" from an external trusted device to boot a known-good kernel.

I'm not really familier with the terminology, so maybe you can enlighten me. You can install other operation systems on the Fairphone, but I don't know about resigning the boot loader chain, but why does that matter?

Android devices use dm-verity to make sure that the OS hasn't been tempered with - bootloader checks signature of first stage bootloader on flash and that one checks the next stage all the way to kernel and contents of the flash.

This prevents all kinds of attacks where people could push things onto your phones OS. In desktop world, this is known as "secure boot".

Many devices will, however, only accept OS signed by their manufacturer - e.g. Apple iPhones/iPads will only boot an OS signed by Apple and noone else. This is why you can't ever run Linux on an iPhone or iPad.

In Android world, many manufacturers allow users to disable this verification (known as "bootloader unlock"). This allows running of non-manufacturer provided OSes (e.g. LineageOS, GrapheneOS, etc.). However, except for Pixels, they don't allow you to supply your own signing key to the bootloader, so you lose the security benefits of the secure boot chain and open yourself to big set of security attacks against your phone.

On a Pixel (at least some of them), you can provide your own signing key and reenable secure boot when installing another OS.

Oh yeah, okay, that pretty silly that you can't do that. If you install a custom OS you're most likely the type of person that cares a lot about security, so not being able to enable secure boot seems weird.

OnePlus did allow that in fact. CalyxOS was working to implement this functionality, but then OnePlus suddenly removed this feature from their latest update :( The two things were probably not related by the way, because that was also the update where they basically made the OnePlus phones an OPPO with some branding on top (ColorOS faked as OxygenOS). It was really the point where OnePlus as an Enthusiast brand died and is now just an OPPO marketing scheme.

Link to the original announcement: https://calyxos.org/news/2022/04/01/fairphone4-oneplus8t-one...

Link to the feature removal by OnePlus: https://calyxos.org/news/2022/07/06/oneplus-android-12-reloc...

Curiously enough this feature does seem to available for the fairphone 4 too!

GrapheneOS never tried implementing this for OnePlus or FairPhone because it's not the only reason they stick with Pixels. The Titan security chip offers other benefits they want.

Fairphones do, too.

> You can install other OS on the phone if you want.

Not with a kernel that wasn't provided by the manufacturer you can't. This massively constrains your options. I can pull a Debian or Ubuntu image off their website and install it on any old laptop, but for phones you need an image specifically tailored to each device, and it'll only get kernel updates as long as the manufacturer continues to provide them since they're all bespoke kernel forks per-device.

I'm pretty sure the Fairphone 3 lets you install other OSes. It may be that they all suck though.

I've used DivestOS on my FP3+ and was pretty happy with it until I needed to use an app that crashed if no Google Play Services were present. I'll probably return to it soon now I don't need that app anymore.

You could buy FP3 new with /e/, though I installed it myself, currently on Android 12, last update June 15.

My old iPhone X that’s now a video player for my kids is 7 years old and receives updates as usual. It did not cost $10k.

What's Fairphone's revenue again?

There a pretty interesting take away here: Fairphone is a fairly small company with limited financial resources, yet they manage to support their device for 7 years. Why is it then that Samsung can't do 10 years?

Samsung or Google could support their device for 10 years, they just don't care because their financial incentive skews toward selling new devices. Which I suppose is part of reasoning for picking a Fairphone, you get use your device for longer, wasting fewer resources.

I doubt fairphone or framework will survive long enough to fulfill these promises. It’s a good bet for them to make. If they go under just write up a “sorry guys the world is mean and we meant well” apology page. If they succeed they’ll pass the job to some cs intern.

Fairphone is already 10 years old and getting more attention than ever, but I see your point, they are significantly higher risk than other high profile phone makers.

I can see why you are being downvoted, but to be honest I kind of share your frustration. It seems like the same community that regularly complains about the prevailing phone ecosystem will also dismiss any attempt to improve it if it isn't perfect or doesn't have all of their personal favourite features (and at a low price, too). Like how the Fairphone is apparently literally unusable because it doesn't have a 3.5mm headphone jack.

You see it with a lot of user-facing FOSS as well, like Thunderbird. The recent post about its latest update was full of people shitting on it over, in many cases, fairly trivial details.

Creating stuff that is usable, sustainable, ethical and affordable is very difficult and involves making hard compromises. It's always good to see people trying to do it and depressing when all they get is hate.

> It seems like the same community that regularly complains about the prevailing phone ecosystem will also dismiss any attempt to improve it if it isn't perfect

You cannot fight against planned obsolescence while supporting the same companies that enable it (Qualcomm with their proprietary drivers tied to ancient Linux kernels). The real solution is GNU/Linux phones relying on FLOSS drivers, which will receive lifetime updates. More details: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque....

I don't agree. In this day and age a phone needs to be secure more than ever. It's no longer just a slab to make calls with. It's my bank account, my transit pass, all my private thoughts.

Regular security updates are no longer a nice to have. They're a must. If a company can't provide that they have no business making phones.

Having said that it does look indeed like they've upped their game with the FP4 a lot.

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