Fairphone - Technical details, links and Q&A interaction with Fairphone [26 Jul 2014]

[haiag]

Is the Fairphone vulnerable though the AOSP browser bug?

Are there plans for a security patch?

Regards

@keesj Sry, I did not linker you here.

Sent from my FP1 using XDA Free mobile app

 

[Unrelashade]

Hi haiag,

I guess yes, because afaik there is no patch for this security hole. Just don't use the AOSP browser (Firefox is a great alterative) and you'll be safe.

 

[Schnuerschuh247]

Thanks guys. I added your problems and workarounds (and reminders).

About the notification light. This is really bad. If the Fairphone is plugged, it's ok if the notification light is on. It should blink at least, if there is another notification like weather warning, e-mail, messenger, flight reminder... @haiag do you know if the LED light is a multicolor LED? If so, have you tried one of the apps to setup the notification light? As I am on custom ROMs and their notification LED settings are enough for me, I don't know about these apps, but heard about Light Flow Lite - LED Control, maybe this can help you. Also, it's possible that there is a module for the swiss knife app/framework Xposed, doing the same. If it works for you, tell us, thanks.


Requests to Fairphone

I managed to get my FP-Notification-LED to display multiple colors by using the lights.default.so from this thread: [MOD] Multicolor Notification LED

The device used there is something completely different, but it utilizes a MediaTek65xx chipset, so I gave it a shot. I copied the file via terminal directly on the phone, which in hindsight probably wasn't that clever, because it crashed the phone. After battery removal and reboot everything worked fine though. Using LED-tester, I was able to generate 7 colors (yellow/orange and magenta/purple are indistinguishable, the rest works fine). I am using GravityBox for my notifications, which works just fine with the new colors.

Do this at your own risk. It definitely proves that colormixing on the FP is possible though.

 

[benkxda]

In the blog entry Our approach to developing the next Fairphone, Fairphone talks about the success of the first Fairphone and about the next Fairphone, which is in development and is expected "after summer 2015".

But the interesting part at least for me comes down below in the comment section.
I found some posts about Ubuntu and Sailfish OS, not about Firefox so far. This was supposed to be supported in the first Fairphone, but that's way to far away, no Sailfish OS/Ubuntu Touch/Firefox OS available. And the most upvoted post is about support for the first Fairphone, which still stays (and will stay) at Android 4.2.2.

Many people (incl. my brother, owning one of the first 100 Fairphones) don't care about the Android version. One Fairphone owner told me, his car is more than 5 years old and never ever got a software update and still works. Well, that's what he thinks. Software updates for newer cars are common and are done usually during maintenance at your car dealer. And ask BMW, it's really necessary. Cars are getting more and more connections, like Bluetooth, WiFi and mobile data connections.

But mobile devices are different. They don't only have more connectivity (like NFC, wireless charging, USB port...) which are more or less publicly accessible but they are almost online all the time, where cars (usually) are offline after you shutdown the engine. And there are apps as well. Older Android versions (to be correct, it's about the Android API level) are not supported by newer apps. For example, the app Ampere (great ampere charging meter by @nihil0) requires Android 5. Another example is Android Wear (Android smart watches) which requires minimum Android 4.3. A colleague solved this problem by buying a new phone, but that's not really a solution in my opinion. What will Fairphone 1 customers do next year, when their most loved apps require Android 4.3 or even 4.4 or they can also not run the newest must-have-app?

Beside compatibility to apps and their new possibilities, there is another big issue, at least for me and for sure for a lot here on XDA, maybe not for the mass of Android users: Security. You may heard of the WebView compontent and its security flaws and some of the recommendations to avoid WebView by installing Chrome/Firefox/Opera or any browser not using the WebView rendering engine. This workaround is not 100% save, because some apps like music players could stay offline for basically just play music but they get album images, information about the interpret and other stuff from online using the WebView component. And not to forget, the ad frameworks usually take advantage of the preinstalled WebView components to display ads.

Fairphone explains their point of view in the article Our approach to software and ongoing support for the first Fairphones. They write quite a lot, also about open source and root access. Actually the open source part is nice, they even released their own software like their Launcher and the widget Peace of Mind. The Fairphone Launcher was compiled by @LuLeBe and is now available for many other devices. Peace of Mind was developed even further by @mudar1488, was a portal post and is available as Peace of Mind+ also on Google Play.
And root access can help Fairphone 1 users to stay a bit more secure by using a reliable firewall (available on Google Play) and only let apps go online which really need to go online. With that, you also can stop ad frameworks displaying ads with the WebView component. Another step would be an ad blocker, which also kills almost any ad, even within apps, which need to be online. As ad blockers were banned on Google Play, use another app store, like F-Droid.

I hoped that there will be a post requesting ideas what the next Fairphone (Fairphone 2) really needs, like a "we would like to get"-collection with discussion about what is more important and where the priority is high to include. I didn't see something like that yet.


What is your thought on Fairphone 1 and the save use of the device for the users? Do you wish an idea collection request for the Fairphone 2 from Fairphone as well or is there some collection out there?

 

[haiag]

I managed to get my FP-Notification-LED to display multiple colors

by using the lights.default.so from this thread: [MOD] Multicolor Notification LED

The device used there is something completely different, but it utilizes a MediaTek65xx chipset, so I gave it a shot. I copied the file via terminal directly on the phone, which in hindsight probably wasn't that clever, because it crashed the phone. After battery removal and reboot everything worked fine though. Using LED-tester, I was able to generate 7 colors (yellow/orange and magenta/purple are indistinguishable, the rest works fine). I am using GravityBox for my notifications, which works just fine with the new colors.

Do this at your own risk. It definitely proves that colormixing on the FP is possible though.

I would like to get this functionality via the next update.
For me it would bring a much functionality as I have all the colors used by more than one app.
I would even like to manage different colors for different people on the same messenger e.g. Telegram

In the blog entry Our approach to developing the next Fairphone, Fairphone talks about the success of the first Fairphone and about the next Fairphone, which is in development and is expected "after summer 2015".

But the interesting part at least for me comes down below in the comment section.
I found some posts about Ubuntu and Sailfish OS, not about Firefox so far. This was supposed to be supported in the first Fairphone, but that's way to far away, no Sailfish OS/Ubuntu Touch/Firefox OS available. And the most upvoted post is about support for the first Fairphone, which still stays (and will stay) at Android 4.2.2.

Many people (incl. my brother, owning one of the first 100 Fairphones) don't care about the Android version. One Fairphone owner told me, his car is more than 5 years old and never ever got a software update and still works. Well, that's what he thinks. Software updates for newer cars are common and are done usually during maintenance at your car dealer. And ask BMW, it's really necessary. Cars are getting more and more connections, like Bluetooth, WiFi and mobile data connections.

But mobile devices are different. They don't only have more connectivity (like NFC, wireless charging, USB port...) which are more or less publicly accessible but they are almost online all the time, where cars (usually) are offline after you shutdown the engine. And there are apps as well. Older Android versions (to be correct, it's about the Android API level) are not supported by newer apps. For example, the app Ampere (great ampere charging meter by @nihil0) requires Android 5. Another example is Android Wear (Android smart watches) which requires minimum Android 4.3. A colleague solved this problem by buying a new phone, but that's not really a solution in my opinion. What will Fairphone 1 customers do next year, when their most loved apps require Android 4.3 or even 4.4 or they can also not run the newest must-have-app?

Beside compatibility to apps and their new possibilities, there is another big issue, at least for me and for sure for a lot here on XDA, maybe not for the mass of Android users: Security. You may heard of the WebView compontent and its security flaws and some of the recommendations to avoid WebView by installing Chrome/Firefox/Opera or any browser not using the WebView rendering engine. This workaround is not 100% save, because some apps like music players could stay offline for basically just play music but they get album images, information about the interpret and other stuff from online using the WebView component. And not to forget, the ad frameworks usually take advantage of the preinstalled WebView components to display ads.

Fairphone explains their point of view in the article Our approach to software and ongoing support for the first Fairphones. They write quite a lot, also about open source and root access. Actually the open source part is nice, they even released their own software like their Launcher and the widget Peace of Mind. The Fairphone Launcher was compiled by @LuLeBe and is now available for many other devices. Peace of Mind was developed even further by @mudar1488, was a portal post and is available as Peace of Mind+ also on Google Play.
And root access can help Fairphone 1 users to stay a bit more secure by using a reliable firewall (available on Google Play) and only let apps go online which really need to go online. With that, you also can stop ad frameworks displaying ads with the WebView component. Another step would be an ad blocker, which also kills almost any ad, even within apps, which need to be online. As ad blockers were banned on Google Play, use another app store, like F-Droid.

I hoped that there will be a post requesting ideas what the next Fairphone (Fairphone 2) really needs, like a "we would like to get"-collection with discussion about what is more important and where the priority is high to include. I didn't see something like that yet.

What is your thought on Fairphone 1 and the save use of the device for the users? Do you wish an idea collection request for the Fairphone 2 from Fairphone as well or is there some collection out there?

I also do not like the actual situation with the webkit-bug and other problem with an out-of-date system. Normal users won't do anything for their security... With the next update, the AOSP-Browser should get deinstalled and instead FF should get preinstalled with imported bookmarks (IMHO).
Some heartbeatdevices just work with 4.3+. A friend of mine with a FP has this problem and he's not that of a technical nerd, but he's not satisfied with this update-problem.

This "we-would-like-to-get" thing should be really used like when the design was choosen by the user.
Also I think the information about the ongoing development wasn't perfect with FP1. This whole 1GB/13GB partition thing would have been much more easy, if FP hat communicated this while having the prototypes...
So they wouldn't had to get a way to "repair" it afterwards...

 

[chrmhoffmann]

Fairphone should use Qualcomm. It is the only soc vendor that still has at least some sort of open source approach with codeauroraforum. Mediatek is the wrong approach.

Chris

 

[mexmorris]

I totally agree with you. I am rather disappointed in this os thing too and in fairphone also: only thing they do is let people discuss over at fairphone forum how bad situation is. There are several discussions and polls running you were asking for ( https://forum.fairphone.com/categories). But nothing is done and will be done for FF1. So people can complain, but in the end are left alone. FF's solution: FF2. That's not sustainable.

Sent from my FP1 using XDA Free mobile app

 

[JYPDWhite]

I totally agree with you too. In the past fairphone said "if you can't open it you don't own it" OK in hardware point of view the fairphone is open (as any other smartphone too...) but in software it's closed like Fort Knox... And that the fairphone 1 owner now will stay at android 4.2.2 is bad...
One year back in time I moved from Samsung s1 to fairphone and I thought "ok this is also a step back in Android version, but that's only temporary" but now I have to state that I have to live with an outdated and buggy android version...
Not nice.

Sent from my FP1 using XDA Free mobile app

 

[Unrelashade]

Maybe someone or even fairphone can get a crowdfunding up for developing updates and regarding the issues you mentioned above?

edit: i found on the forum though that they are still working on an update
https://forum.fairphone.com/t/software-update-v1-8-temporarily-postponed/3474/12

 

[ShotRu]

Just for the record, as of March 1st 2015 the Google Apps installer from the FP1U (w/ Kola Nut 1.8) grabs a new 123191025-bytes file (dated 27-06-2014) named gapps_1.5.zip from amazonaws.com.
As per fairphonegapps.cfg it has a md5 sum of 9444e40ed5afc9d61530681542f97b97.

Can't post links obviously, but check by yourselves

HTH...

 

[haffenloher]

Fairphone should use Qualcomm. It is the only soc vendor that still has at least some sort of open source approach with codeauroraforum.

According to this article, the second Fairphone will indeed come with a Qualcomm SoC.

 

[superdragonpt]

According to this article, the second Fairphone will indeed come with a Qualcomm SoC.

Good News

 

[Unrelashade]

Would anyone of you like to inform/ make noise at Fairphone about this critical issue that all smartphones have:
http://www.replicant.us/freedom-privacy-security-issues.php

 

[benkxda]

The new Fairphone 2

The upcoming device from Fairphone: The Fairphone 2​

Read the article: The architecture of the Fairphone 2: Designing a competitive device that embodies our values

Article at heise: Fairphone 2: Android-Smartphone in Modulbauweise
...including technical data:
OS Android 5.1
Display 5", 1920 x 1080
SoC / RAM Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 / 2 GB
Flash Storage 32 GB + microSD slot
Camera 8 Megapixel
Data Connections LTE/HSPA, Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g/n/ac), Bluetooth 4.0, GPS, Dual-SIM
Battery 2420 mAh (replaceable)
Price 525 €
...yes, that's the price.


Check out this nice animated website.

Official Fairphone 2 video

...and I already asked about a place for the Fairphone 2 here on XDA. Maybe a forum merge (FP 1+2 in one forum) or maybe a second forum... we'll see

 

[Tentos]

Thank you for the overview of the next Fairphone. There has even been an article on XDA News about it. (It was very critical, and while I think that the Fairphone team is always interested in feedback, the article was too negative IMHO).

I just wanted to add that the current Fairphone OS version 1.8.5 has been released. I was one of the lucky few where the original OS version 1.8 worked withouth any problems, and I got accustomed to the KitKat-style launcher. Version 1.8.5 comes with the old launcher, but the KitKat launcher can be downloaded at
ht tp://storage.googleapis.com/fairphone-updates/FairphoneKitKatLauncher_10.apk
The link has been provided by Rick on the Fairphone forum.

I would of course be interested what the current situation is for an update to KitKat, but if I have understood correctly, there are not any real news (unfortunately).
@_keesj posted an article about the software situation back in December: ht tps://ww w.fairphone.com/2014/12/09/our-approach-to-software-and-ongoing-support-for-the-first-fairphones/

 

[Hyst]

FYI
https://www.fairphone.com/2015/09/16/long-term-software-support-fairphone-1/

Wonder if they could provide the sources so that the community can also start porting other roms. But probably the license prohibits that.

 

[Vinnl]

Perhaps, but this is already fantastic news! I'd be so happy if I could run Ubuntu or Firefox OS @keesj, thank you very much for all your hard work up til now

 

[_keesj]

Hello,

Perhaps, but this is already fantastic news! I'd be so happy if I could run Ubuntu or Firefox OS @keesj, thank you very much for all your hard work up til now

If you guys want to interact and talk about the future of FP1 (but also talk about Fairphone 2!! ) please join me at
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/opening-up-the-fairphone-2-software-supply-chain-tickets-18756253459

Have you also read this article?
https://www.fairphone.com/2015/09/23/opening-up-fairphone-to-the-community-open-source-fairphone-2/

Greetings