Fairphone 2 Developer Information

Overview

The Fairphone 2 (FP2), released in December of 2015, shipped with Android 5.1 Lollipop. The current Cyanogenmod base should be sufficient to get it stable.

This page contains the information that you'll need to develop on the Fairphone 2. This includes instructions to get the source tree, patches, and changes to make after building.

Development repositories for the Fairphone 2 are located on the ubports GitHub. You may submit pull requests against this source and they will be reviewed by UBPorts developers. You might want to give us a heads-up in the UBPorts IRC as well.

Please remember to make a complete backup of your phone before doing any flashing operations, assuming you have anything that you want to keep on it. Then, copy the backup to your computer. Your phone may be wiped during this procedure.

Development status

Current devel rc proposed builds:
GUI -> Working
Wifi -> Working
Audio -> Working
Camera -> Working
Bluetooth -> Working
GSM -> Working
Motion sensor ->Working
GPS -> WIP

Current issues

GPS is really slow
Battery life could be improved

Building

Install Prerequisites

sudo apt-get install git gnupg flex bison gperf build-essential \
zip bzr curl libc6-dev libncurses5-dev:i386 x11proto-core-dev \
libx11-dev:i386 libreadline6-dev:i386 libgl1-mesa-glx:i386 \
libgl1-mesa-dev g++-multilib tofrodos \
python-markdown libxml2-utils xsltproc zlib1g-dev:i386 schedtool \
g++-4.8-multilib phablet-tools

Set up the tree

Start by creating yourself a development directory, then move into it. Run repo init -u https://github.com/ubports/android -b ubp-5.1 --depth=1 in this directory.

Next, mkdir .repo/local_manifests, then create the file .repo/local_manifests/fp2.xml. Paste the following into the file:

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12 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<manifest>
 
  <remote name="smoose"
        fetch="http://github.com/smoose-nils"
        revision="refs/heads/ubp-5.1" />
 
  <project path="kernel/fairphone/FP2" name="ubports/android_kernel_fairphone_fp2" remote="ubp" />
  <project path="device/fairphone/FP2" name="ubports/android_device_fairphone_fp2" remote="ubp"  />
  <project path="device/qcom/common" name="android_device_qcom_common" remote="cm" />
  <project path="vendor/fairphone" name="proprietary_vendor_fairphone" remote="smoose"/>
</manifest>

Then, run repo sync -j4 (increase the job value if your computer and Internet connection can handle it). It'll download about 20GB of sources.

Build the source

. build/envsetup.sh
lunch cm_FP2-eng
make -j8

Feel free to increase or decrease the number of jobs for Make.

Flash the images

Please ensure that you have a backup of your phone before continuing.

First, flash your boot.img and recovery.img using Fastboot:

cd out/target/product/fp2/
sudo fastboot flash boot boot.img
sudo fastboot flash recovery recovery.img

Now, we can't use Rootstock to install these images since UBPorts' Ubuntu Touch is patched slightly. Do the following to finish the flashing process:

Flashing a New Android Image to an Ubuntu Touch Device

That is it.

Have fun! Look back at the Current Goals heading at the top of the article to see what you can work on. Be sure to let us know if you find any fixes over at #ubports on Freenode. If there are any fixes that involve the repositories on GitHub, please feel free to submit a pull request.