It may be achieved. Android producers can in reality toughen a telephone for a large period of time. Fairphone has announced the top of existence for the Fairphone 2, which might be March 2023. That telephone used to be launched in October 2015, in order that’s virtually seven-and-a-half years of updates.

Fairphone is an overly small Dutch corporate with nowhere close to as many assets as Google, Samsung, BBK, and the opposite Large-Tech juggernauts, but it controlled to live much longer than them with its toughen program. The entire function of the corporate is sustainability, with simply repairable telephones, to be had spare portions, and lengthy replace guarantees. The Fairphone 4 has a five-year {hardware} guaranty and 6 years of updates, and the corporate’s popularity says it may give that. Unfortunately, the telephones most effective send in the United Kingdom and Europe. The Fairphone 2 most effective promised “3 to 5 years” of updates, and it blew that out of the water.

Updating the Fairphone 2 has been an enormous endeavor for Fairphone, because it has most commonly been doing it with out Qualcomm’s lend a hand. Most often, the Android replace procedure has a series of custody, the place Google updates the Android supply code, your chip seller takes that code and provides drivers and different binary blobs to it, then the telephone producer takes the chip seller code and makes it paintings on a specific tool. For Qualcomm, a brief toughen cycle approach it sells extra chips, so it bowed out of the method beautiful temporarily, a great deal complicating updates for Fairphone.

The Fairphone 2 options the Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 SoC, a chip that Qualcomm ended toughen for with Android 6.0. In what’s almost definitely an Android ecosystem first, that loss of chipset toughen did not forestall Fairphone, which teamed up with LineageOS and nowadays ships Android 10 at the 7-year-old tool. That isn’t the latest OS on this planet, but it surely passes all of Google’s Android compatibility assessments. I am certain there are more moderen novice releases within the Android ROM group, however Fairphone’s Android 10 construct is as much as the usual of an professional unlock, versus the “inform me what does not paintings” usual of many novice ROM releases.

Fairphone does not say why toughen is finishing in March, but when it is staying on Android 10, it used to be going to must kill toughen someday this 12 months. Google most effective helps safety patches for the ultimate 4 variations of Android, so even Google might be shutting down Android 10 toughen quickly.

If you wish to stay rolling with the Fairphone 2, Fairphone says you accomplish that at your personal chance since it’s going to quickly be insecure. Fairphone says it nonetheless has a “restricted” stock of portions to be had in its internet retailer, and when you ship on your retired telephone prior to the top of March, it’s going to come up with a 50 euro credit score towards a brand new telephone.