In December 2014, Fairphone admitted that it had failed to convince chipset vendor
MediaTek to open up the source code for first-generation Fairphones. In September 2015, Fairphone released an update indicating that they had indeed gained access to MediaTek's source code. An update to Android 4.4 “KitKat” was announced for 2016 but was delayed because of major issues. In July 2017, Fairphone announced in an e-mail to their buyers that they were sorry not to be able to pursue the release of Android 4.4 “KitKat” for the Fairphone 1.
Alternative software In November 2013, one of the developers of
Replicant wrote a blog post in which they said that Replicant could work on the Fairphone and the bootloaders (that are not part of the operating system) may even be free software. The Fairphone team seemed "definitely interested" in helping get Replicant running on the device. In August 2014, an unofficial build of
CyanogenMod 11 (
Android 4.4 “KitKat”) for the Fairphone 1 engineered by Christian Hoffmann was published at the
XDA Developers Forum. == References ==