Fairphone 3 - Build Instructions

Let’s get started on creating your very own Fairphone OS build! As Fairphone OS is largely based on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), the steps to build are quite similar to building AOSP. So you might find the resources on the AOSP website helpful.

My code is compiling

Prepare the Build Environment

Before actually getting and building your own version of Fairphone OS, you should make sure that your system is properly set up to build it. You can follow this handy guide at the AOSP project site to set up your build environment.

Also please note that you will need about 300 GB of free disk space for sources and build output. For RAM we recommend to have at least 16 GB available.

Getting the Source

Now that your system is ready to build Fairphone OS, it’s time to download the source.

Installing repo

As Fairphone OS consists of many subprojects, we will use the repo tool to download the source code. It is very handy to install repo in a user local bin directory.

To install repo, follow the instructions on the AOSP website.

Register an account

We recommend that you register an account on our Gerrit to make contributions easier. Click on the register link using OpenID and upload an SSH key into your Gerrit account.

Initializing the repo

Android 11 and 13

The following commands initialize the repo manifest for Android 13.

For Android 11, use the branch fp3-a11-sibon instead.

Note that for Fairphone 3 we don’t have an Android 12 version. We’ve been experimenting on it for a while but then quickly switched to Android 13 directly.

mkdir fairphone_os && cd fairphone_os
repo init -u ssh://gerrit-public.fairphone.software:29418/manifest -b fp3-a13-sibon
# or for http based access
# repo init -u https://gerrit-public.fairphone.software/manifest -b fp3-a13-sibon

Downloading the source tree

Now let’s download the source by issuing the following command:

repo sync --detach --current-branch --no-tags

The first time you’ll do that it will take quite some time.

Getting the Binary Components

Unfortunately, not all components of Fairphone OS can be released as open source.

When running the first build, the build system will prompt you to run the command required to download the binary components and accept the special license agreement.

Alternatively you can also run the get_blobs.py script manually. Get the relevant blobs version (“DEVICE_BLOB_VERSION”) from the device.mk file. (For Android 11, replace 13 with 11.)

vendor/fairphone/tools/bin/get_blobs.py --device FP3 --build-id <DEVICE_BLOB_VERSION> --blobs-dir /tmp/test

Build!

Finally, you have everything set to initiate the build process.

For building any Android version, run the following commands to initialize the build environment:

. build/envsetup.sh

Now configure the kind of build we want to make by running:

lunch fp3_sibon-userdebug

And go:

m

Now you can watch some cat videos on YouTube until the compilation is done.

Flash!

Did compilation succeed without errors? That’s awesome, because now it’s time to flash your Fairphone 3 by running:

fastboot flashall

fastboot is most probably waiting for your Fairphone 3 to be connected to your computer. For fastboot to actually find your device it has to be brought into a special mode called fastboot mode. You can achieve that by powering on the phone while holding the volume down button. Once your phone is in fastboot mode and connected to your PC via USB fastboot will start flashing your device and reboot it into your own-built Fairphone OS.