To be fair you need a tool for that, unlike their option.

That’s true (at least for the phones I’ve seen), but there are still other ways. Six or seven years ago, phones had little slide-in slots attached to the motherboard that were accessible by removing the back cover of the phone, for example. There are tool-less ways this could’ve been implemented.

Fairphone on the other hand has to maintain a unique device which is way more work, they get early access because of that though.

This is true, which is why they bought the worse IoT SoC instead of a nornal mobile chip, but they do get access to patches and source code way ahead of volunteer projects like LineageOS and Graphene and still tend to lag behind in terms of releases. I can forgive them for major Android releases, but not for the security updates

And their noncompliance with all the GrapheneOS security demands is the reason I dont use it.

I think most of their demands are quite reasonable, really. “Provide an update for the bug that allows any app to become root/any nearby Bluetooth device to execute code as root within a month” doesn’t seem that unreasonable to me, and neither does “actually patch all the vulnerabilities known up till know”. The TEE stuff is also something a lot secure software relies on.

I guess it’s the Fairphone, not the Securephone. And then again, nobody cares about security anyway. It just adds context to the promised eight years of software support: you get support, but do you get all of the support? Do you gain anything above flashing LineageOS to a different device?

Fairphone is Google certified and thus needs to ship unmodified Android including all the Google crap

Samsung is Google certified and they don’t. They opted to use Google’s skin, with Google’s launcher and a bunch of Google extras rather than develop their own. They don’t need to do that, they just aren’t allowed to modify Google’s launcher if they choose to use Google’s launcher.

I like the idea behind /e/ but their software updates have been lacking.

Regular phones dont get 8 years of updates so they will be outdated and should not be used.

Shouldn’t they? Most people I know don’t give a shit about security updates. Apps still work, browsers still get updated. Someone like me would flash a custom ROM, others would just keep using their Android 9 phone until it no longer works some day. And to be honest, as long as you update your browser, there’s not really that big a risk of getting hacked on Android. That, and the ability to install 'your WhatsApp is outdated click here to install WhatsApp 2024.apk".

There are people thst shouldn’t use old phones (human rights activists, journalists, people in important positions within big companies) but they probably shouldn’t be using Android in the first place, especially not from a company that doesn’t have the capacity to focus on security like Google and Apple can.