Wow that is such a bad idea... I... I'm honestly speechless. Who thought if that? I mean...

I don't believe that is legal. That's just absolutely ridiculous.

I guess that's also one positive aspect of Fairphone: They do officially cooperate with certain custom ROMs such as /e/os and IodeOS, and also make it significantly easier for not-officially-supported custom ROMs to exist.

Yeah, I largely agree with that. With regards to the schematics it unfortunatrly appears they are unable to release everything due to legal reasons though.

To add to that, Fairphone is also regularly criticized that they're struggling to keep up full support for devices that are just a few years old. But unfortunately most of their issues are not their but their suppliers fault. Once the manufacturer of a specific component stops Firmware support for that component, it gets really hard to provide fixes and support once firmware-related issues arise. So that's more of a general smartphone-industry-problem, in that the life cycles of the 'big players' are much to short, giving hardware-manufacturers an incentive to stop firmware support for older components quite quickly.

I guess we have to differentiate between issues that Fairphone has control over, and issues that Fairphone is simply not big enough to solve on it's own.

Where?

For the most recent example check out this Forum thread regarding the Fingerpringt sensor issues of the Fairphone 3(+) with Android 13, due to the sensor's manufacturer having ceased support for the sensor and Google having updated its security policy.