The Fairphone 4 has not yet received its update to Android 16 / Iode 7, which I understand, however is there somewhere some kind of issue tracker? What are the blockers?
I am asking mainly not because I want to receive the A16 update, but rather because FP4 ist still on Vendor Patch Level from September 2025, with the newer vendor releases only being merged in the v7-staging branch.
This is further a problem, since apparently since the September Vendor update, battery drain of the FP4 is abnormally high, with this problem being fixed with the A15 Fairphone vendor update (patch level October and later) see here. Currently, I need to charge my phone about 3 times a day, despite having a completely new battery installed…
I don’t know the answers to your questions, but wanted to ask which version you are on now? I read that 6.12 is the latest stable version for FP4. Did you receive this?
Sorry for your big battery problem, hope, you will be able to fix that, soon.
I am asking for clarification in how to explain well, but as I understand all releases (including the ones from the manufacturer) have separate “Android Security Patch Levels” and “Vendor Security Patch Levels” and I am not sure if Fairphone do have a newer vendor patch level or not for the FP4 than the published September 2025 release? Another possibility is that that update will only come with Lineage 23.2, which is not yet incorporated in iodéOS.
Well, I would think that when Fairphone updates their ROM they not only pull in the security bullit ins from AOSP, but also the driver updates and therefor update the vendor level.
But even if that would not be the case, in the gitlab it is quite clear that the updates to “FP4.QREL.15.14.3” and “FP4.SREL.15.14.4” only happens on the v7-staging branch and not on the v6-staging.
Our developers reported that there are no Fairphone vendor patches for their Android 15 base since Sept 2025, so our 6.12 build has the latest available vendor security patches for the Android 15 base of iodéOS 6.x.
The bug of locked bootloaders not booting after updating to iodéOS 7.x on the FP4 have prevented us from releasing Android 16 based builds, so once that bug is resolved the upgrade to 7.x will happen (and thus the Android 16 vendor security patches will be incorporated).
No, 6.12 does not fix anything and also does not have any new vendor patches, since the fixes are only on the Iode 7, meaning Android 16 branch.
Idk what @rik is saying above there, since the patches from Fairphone are on their Android 15 branch, which, yes, is not their Android 13 branch anymore. And Iode 6 has previously built upon the Fairphone A13 vendor images. And I can imagine, that this jump from Fairphone from A13 - > A15 may introduce some work, that one has to do before incorporating those changes and that the Iode devs want to do this only once (and that for A16, Iode 7).
But this is not what rik said and honest, I also do not believe it. I just think it was forgotten, since they thought Iode 7 will be released in a few days anyway. But here we are now, with our old, buggy vendor patches, which also do not include any of Fairphone security fixes since September.
Let’s see, it will hopefully not take too long, until Iode 7 is fixed for the FP4 and our phones stop dying 3 times a day (or loose 60% battery over night)
I am bit confused, the iodé 6.x builds are A15 based, not A13.
I believe what @vince31fr was explaining to me is that there are only “Android Security Updates” (OS level) that are updated in the newer Fairphone OS builds, but that there is no Vendor Security Patch Level newer than Sept 2025 (these are more hardware based and are different than the OS security update level). Admittedly they don’t specify what type of security patch is included in their builds.
If there is someone that has Fairphone OS 15.x installed on their FP4 and can confirm from “Settings > About Phone” it should show both the “Android Security Update” date and the “Vendor Security Patch Level” date.
iodéOS 6.12 releases also have the “January 2026 Android Security Update” (via LineageOS).
