alt Hacker NewsThe recently released Fairphone 6+ runs on Android 16. I had to look that up on Wikipedia, their website doesn't even clearly state that. Android 16 is 14 months old at the moment. Android 17 was released to manufacturers 6 months ago and had a general release 2 months ago.
So why does a brand new phone run an operating system from over a year ago? Does it really take over 6 months to update a phone to a new version of Android?
How am I supposed to believe a company is committing to supporting a phone for a long time when at release it already runs outdated software?
Replies
I am a user. What does Android 17 do for me that 16 doesn't?
The Android version is clearly displayed in the article.
Certification takes time and probably overlaped with the phone development. Fairephone is small compared to e.g. samsung and they describe themself more "stable" and long-term support than bleeding edge.
I belive you are mistaken. Android 17 final was "released" 6-7 weeks ago.
But Google being Google, this release is pretty much useless until Samsung et al deal with all bugs and performance issues, which will take 2-4 months.
this is 100% in the hands of the SoC manufacturer.
Android versions are locked to kernel versions, which are locked to binary drivers to run your hardware. there's no way around that and you can't reverse engineer or do anything if you want that SoC vendor to continue to fulfill your orders (which you're already at the bottom of the fulfilment list because of low volumes)
Even worse: Google actually does four releases releases per year (major and QPRs), of which QPR2 is also provided to OEMs. Only Samsung and GrapheneOS roll out QPR2 releases.