fgeiger

Fairphone employee here. As I just replied to a different thread: We are trying (and struggling) with continued software support for our five year old Fairphone 2. The Android 9 is currently in beta and my colleagues are trying to address the last remaining issues for Google certification.

For details read https://www.fairphone.com/en/2020/06/18/fairphone-2-gets-and...

Fairphone employee here.

I totally agree with your assessment. So does Fairphone. That's why we trying to address both issues with a modular design for ease of repairs and long lasting software updates.

Have a look at our current effort to bring continued software updates to our five year old predecessor Fairphone 2: https://www.fairphone.com/en/2020/06/18/fairphone-2-gets-and...

If you have a Fairphone 3 already, you can install /e/ OS and try for yourself: https://doc.e.foundation/devices/FP3/

Apple does a much better job in keeping devices alive for longer than Android OEMs in general. Having full control over hardware and software and focusing on few devices helps there.

In Android land, this is unfortunately different. Longevity stands and falls (mostly the latter) with the (lack of) support of the chipset vendors such as Qualcomm and Mediatek. If they stop supporting a chipset, all devices built on them can not be properly supported anymore.

Just think of all of the unreported and unfixed hardware and software vulnerabilities in proprietary components. It is impossible to maintain a device without the chipset vendor's involvement. Apple, on the other hand, is its own chipset vendor.

The Android supply chain needs a drastic make-over to come anywhere near that.

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/

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.

What is the advantage over using `git subtree`?

I found Hetzner's domain robot to be easy to use and cheap: https://www.hetzner.com/registrationrobot

The major downside is the limited range of TLD's it allows you to register: .de, .com, .net, .org, .info, .biz, .eu and .at (other domains are available through Hetzner's normal webshop)

With domain robot have full control over handles, name server entries, auth codes, etc. Annual fees are low (from EUR 3.28 to EUR 12.90) and don't increase year over year. The only additional cost are if you use their name servers (0.50 Euro/year).

Automation is only available through email interface.

I used to have a similar scheme for passwords. It only works well as long as one uses the same pattern for all passwords though.

This starts to break once you want to or need to change a password. I had to abandon the scheme once haveibeenpwned.com noticed me of a breach including one of my passwords. I could either remember a new pattern for that one site or change passwords of all my sites.

I chose to do the latter and used random passwords created by a password manager. That way I avoided running into the same problem again.

Pipelining.