[Fairphone 1] 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 [MENTION=394278]nihil0[/MENTION]) 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 [MENTION=3331073]LuLeBe[/MENTION] and is now available for many other devices. Peace of Mind was developed even further by [MENTION=3833079]mudar1488[/MENTION], 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?