Previously I’ve shared my thoughts and concerns on freedom in mobile operating systems. The Fairphone project unfortunately has a bad reputation in this area. Not because they don’t care, but because they failed to deliver on this promise in their first version. Other people involved in open hardware design for mobile devices saw it coming as they’ve been struggling with exactly the same issue for many years already. Especially for them it shouldn’t have been a surprise that a perfectly fine hardware platform would be kept from future firmware updates.
But as in any process of innovation, a new version allows for improvements. And so will a new upcoming version of the Fairphone. For months the Fairphone has featured several lengthy threads discussing alternative, generally more free operating systems. As I tried to state with a lengthy forum post there are multiple interest in strong conflict with each other. So even whether there will be multiple OS flavours or one for all customers is not yet decided. The great news however is that the Fairphone team have taken on this challenge, big time! I’ve had some email conversations with Kees Jongenburger and Joe Mier regarding further plans and options. But more importantly, they went looking for alternatives at the Mobile World Congress. Over the course of the next months the plans will be finalized, so I’d like to encourage anybody with relevant information to contribute to the discussions. Let’s make the next Fairphone far more fair.