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I want a phone I can actually fix, and Fairphone’s record growth shows the world does too
(www.androidcentral.com)
this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2026
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Yes and no, Fairphone has actually managed to reverse engineer some of the drivers for its old phones to provide android upgrades years after the component manufacturers have dropped support. The Fairphone 2, for instance, received a little over 7 years of support and 4 major version upgrades, skipping one on the way. For the Fairphone 5, they've promised 10 years of software support, and judging by their track record, I believe them. They also open source as much as they can and even give instructions on how to build the OS yourself.
Of course, open source drivers would be better, but that doesn't exist at the moment, unfortunately. At this point, Fairphone is one of the companies that comes closest (with Shiftphone being a close rival).
Isn't that illegal?
I tried to find the article on it, but it was a while ago that I read, so I honestly don't know 100%...
But I doubt it would be illegal, as a company they're not small enough to fly under the radar and not big enough to flagrantly break laws and get away with it. Two possibilities that come to mind (and both may be true:
they did it via black box reverse engineering. That has less issues legally, since you're not trying to decompile someone else's code, but looking what that code does and trying to recreate it
the Linux Kernel's GPL gives them certain rights in that area
Fingers crossed