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Comment by jacek | Hacker News Reader

> They should switch to an SOC with mainline Linux support so you don't have to throw it out in three years.

Starting 20th of June this year (so 3 days ago) every new phone released in European Union will need to have software updates for at least 5 years from the date of the end of placement on the market. This might be the first one released under new regulations. Also looking at Fairphone's history it looks like they really support their phones for a long time.

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The problem is that it's not really up to Fairphone. Qualcomm and Google have to collaborate to provide the artifacts that Fairphone packages and signs for their devices. If for any reason they're unable or unwilling to do that there's nothing Fairphone can do. (and they have pretty consistently failed to do this after just a couple years. In the past it sounds like Fairphone has managed to hack around it with varying degrees of success.)

This is why using SOCs with poor support and closed drivers like this is a terrible idea.

It is for all the phones sold in EU. So Qualcomm has to provide them for all other providers too. They might release updates for Fairphone SoC as well.

I agree that the platform should be open. I played with PostmarketOS on one of my old devices and I really wish I could just install Linux on my other devices to make it really usable for the years to come.

I wonder if I am alone in thinking 5yr is way too short. It should be 10, if not 20 years.

This is software, not hardware. It is ridiculous to pretend it is ok for a phone to artificially stop being useful after just 5 years simply because the vendor won't give software support or even provide the necessary documentation, source code and keys for the community to do.

I agree with you, but still, 5y is better than nothing.

True, longer would be better. And if the platform was truly open, we could just treat phone like PCs. You can still install Linux on a 20 year old machine and it will work.

At least this is 5 years from "the end of placement on the market". So more realistically it should be around 7 years from release.

This.

Why can't we enforce that they mainline their hardware?

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