this post was submitted on 24 May 2024
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What's your suggestion for hardware patches after the manufacturer ends support?
There is no option. There is too much variation in the various phone chips for the hardware hacking community to reverse engineer more than a bare handful. And as soon as the hardware has been reverse engineered, it will never be used again by a manufacturer making the exercise largely pointless.
Add to that, the fact that Qualcomm actively discourages long term support of their chips….
That's why Fairphone choose a QCM6490 for the fairphone 5. It's far from being the best, but it has longer term support than mainstream oriented SOC.
Since the SOC will probably be enough for most of users, it's not a bad option I guess.
Well then I really hope the Fairphone 5 is gonna get really long term support and start a new trend in that regard.
Just buying a new phone every 5 years isn’t sustainable!
They advert for a support between 8 and 10 years (at least 5 major version of Android, and security patches after that). I don't know their politic about the availability of the repair parts, but if it's for the same amount of time, I'll be happy.
I changed the battery and the usb port of my OP7 last year... the oneplus site didn't sell them anymore, I had to go on aliexpress to have both ... That's quite frustrating for a device that is 5 years old...
8 to 10 years is good, but it should be just a start.
I’m still using my PlayStation 3 and a computer from 15 years ago (as a backup) and I think it should be the same with smartphones
Exactly my point. Thank you.
Get a new phone the vendor does support.
Firmware patching is applying low-level firmware to the modem or baseband, similar to a BIOS update on a desktop or server. These binary libraries are (a) proprietary, and (b) opaque to the user (meaning they're not documented like normal software)
Once a vendor drops support for a platform, that's it, that's the end of the line. The device will still work, but any, glitches, firmware vulnerabilities, or updates for network-side changes will no longer be addressed.
This is just not realistic though, as the support is so short. You cannot buy phones ever few years. Only thing you can realistically do is apply at least Lineage and exercise caution.
Denying reality isn't realistic either.
Knowing your threat model and being aware of your tradeoffs and decisions is useful. Maybe security isn't more important than longevity, but the phone owner should be making a deli rate choice.
With the new pixels having 7 years of support things are improving. It would be nice for them to open source the hardware specs at the end of the support window...
https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/4457705
Who's going to be digging into the depths of a 5+ year old phone on the off chance they can find a baseband vulnerability though?
Even if they do find something, the number of people for them to exploit is probably going to be vanishingly small.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/18/22440813/android-devices-active-number-smartphones-google-2021
There are 3 billion Android devices. So basically everyone is incentivized to break in. Especially if the firmware is not updating, that means once you find an exploit it's good forever
Plus, and most people don't realize this, the same chips are used in multiple different phones. So you just have to break the baseband once, and you get into multiple different phone models