alt Hacker News> I had a Fairphone 3, and after 5 years, /e/OS was outdated by 4 years w.r.t. the manufacturer updates
Mine is running /e/ and reporting Android 13, which appears to be the last one Fairphone support. /e/ said it was too difficult to support 14 with the kernel involved. It's had continual security updates apart from the Android version.
Edit: Murena make it clear which phones are officially supported and which have "community" support.
Replies
> It's had continual security updates apart from the Android version.
Nope, it doesn't receive most privacy and security patches. Users are being heavily misled about what's provided. First of all, the kernel is nearly entirely not being updated which is a massive portion of the privacy and security patches. Murena's devices have poor privacy and atrocious security including due to the failure to properly provide basic privacy/security patches. Their claims about what they provide need to be distinguished from what is actually provided. /e/ updates the patch level regularly to claim they provide the security patch backports but that doesn't mean they actually provided all of them. It's an arbitrary value and they don't set it accurately.
Fairphone 3 uses the end-of-life Linux 4.9 branch, Fairphone 4 use the end-of-life Linux 4.19 branch and Fairphone 5 uses the end-of-life 5.4 branch. Each was largely not receiving the upstream LTS updates while they were still provided but now they're not provided. An OS that's not receiving basic kernel updates is definitely not receiving security patches anymore, but they were largely never providing these updates in the first place long before the kernel branch or devices were considered end-of-life.
Similar to iOS and other operating systems, Android only backports a subset of privacy and security patches to older Android branches. Only Android 16 QPR2 has the full set of Android privacy and security patches. You aren't receiving all of the standard Android privacy and security patches if you're not on Android 16 QPR2. Many of the patches are also treated as optional and deferred as being mandatory far into the future. It's also worth noting the dates are misleading. Android's March 2026 security backported have been finalized for a while and up to August 2026 are available to ship by OEMs already but a lot more will be added to June 2026. February 2026 Android security patches are the latest with a public bulletin but not the latest available to ship.
Fairphone and especially /e/ also have very incomplete patches for firmware and drivers. /e/ also has major issues patching other components including the browser engine used by the OS for the WebView.
> Mine is running /e/ and reporting Android 13, which appears to be the last one Fairphone support.
This is not the manufacturer updates. I was talking about the manufacturer updates. I just checked and someone complained a few months ago and they updated them. Before that, they had not been updated in years on /e/OS, but they were up-to-date on Stock Android.
> Edit: Murena make it clear which phones are officially supported and which have "community" support.
I bought a phone to Murena, advertised by Murena, through Murena. It really felt like it would be officially supported, otherwise they should have made it clear that they advertise and sell something that they won't support, wouldn't you say? My feeling is that they just stopped supporting it after a while.
Also I would assume that "supported" means that it receives both the LineageOS updates and the manufacturer updates. Apparently they have a different definition of "supported" (which is fine, maybe it's just "we will continue sending you our own updates"). It's just that in my book, if I get more security updates with the Stock Android than with /e/OS, then Stock Android is more secure.