Fairphone 4, 5, and 6 Re-added to Graphical Installer

Apps & Core Settings
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Vincent completed the work to re-add the Fairphone 4, 5, and 6 (FP4, FP5, FP6) to the Graphical Installer! No more “scary terminal commands :tm:” needed to install iodéOS for these devices!

As a short background, the reason these devices were removed earlier this year was due to erasing the FRP (“Factory Reset Protection”) when installing. Removing the FRP was implemented to prevent any accidental bricking of the devices in the case the user did not remove a Google account from their prior system before installing iodéOS. So resetting the FRP was an essential addition, but the side effect was that when the FRP is cleared, the phone reboots. So during the install, an additional reboot was needed to be accounted for by the graphical installer.

In the last few months the lack of graphical installer support for the FP4 in particular has been a major pain point for many, as, if the bootloader is locked, to upgrade from iodéOS 6.x to 7.x requires a factory reset of the userdata partition (all your personal data needs backed up and restored). There was no way to do this reset (until now) without a computer terminal and a few terminal commands. But with the Graphical Installer now working again, any remaining FP4 users that have not upgraded to 7.x can go ahead and use the Installer to clean install iodéOS 7.x without using a computer terminal.

FP4 users with a locked bootloader: Please backup your userdata using Seedvault and then restore after re-installling your system! There is still no way to upgrade a locked-bootloader FP4 from 6.x to 7.x without reformatting the device!!!

  • In addition, make sure really important things are backed up outside of Seedvault too just in case any issues exist restoring it.
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IodéOS installer support for Fairphone 6
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Hi rik,

how can I know/check if the bootloader is locked?

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The easiest way is to simply note if the splash screen indicates it is unlocked at boot or not. I don’t have a Fairphone to confirm their wording, but there should be some indication.

The more technical way would be to put it in bootloader mode and it should show there. From there you can also run fastboot flashing get_unlock_ability to double check (this is on a Pixel, not certain if that exact command works, if not you can look at all bootloader variables to see if one is related to unlocking with fastboot getvar all).