Fairphone, a small-time Dutch phone manufacturing company, has finally decided to stop updates for their successful Fairphone 2 model after seven years.
The company operates on much fewer resources, makes easily repairable phones and promises longer updates, much longer than that of the big shots of the phone market like Google, Samsung or BBK.
“Fairphone 2 has far surpassed our initial hopes to offer three to five years of software support, but in an ideal world, we would be able to support our devices indefinitely. The Fairphone 2 makes it clear how far we have come and how far we still have to go,” the company said on Monday.
Fairphone 2 uses Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 S0C. Qualcomm stopped the chipset support a long time back with Android 6. However, this did not stop the company, which then partnered with Lineage OS and ships Android 10 on the same device.
Fairphone 2 users can also avail of the Reuse and Recycling programme of the company, where they pay a €50 voucher on the Fairphone webshop for those who register their phone before March 21, 2023. The voucher can be used towards their next Fairphone purchase.
People can use the phone normally. However, the phone will not receive any updates in the future, security or otherwise. This means there will be no future updates to patch a bug. This raises some privacy and security concerns for the users.
Although the company will stop the updates after March, it has promised to keep an inventory of limited spare parts of the phone in reserve to help in keeping the hardware going. People can buy the hardware from the Fairphone online store.
Fairphone 4 is the latest offering of the company, which comes with Android 11 and dual cameras out of the box and is available in two models – 128GB storage, 6GB RAM (available in grey) and 256GB storage, 8GB RAM (available in grey and green).
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