But they MUST embrace LineageOS (IMO), regular updates matter
I can already hear the reviews of the upcoming Jelly Max in YouTube – “….a great phone, probably the best so far from Unihertz, but one you probably shouldn’t buy…”. It drives me crazy to know that’s coming, but it will, if Unihertz continues their track record of not supporting phones with at least security updates – if not entire major Android versions – for 2 or 3 years minimum after release. It doesn’t have to be this way!
The Max has a lot going for it. It’s a reasonable size, which gets you fans right out of the gate – first a perfect screen size at 5″. Everyone else is shipping unholdable 6.5 screens, and I mean everyone – if someone wants a 6.5″ device, they can probably find one at the Dollar Store nowadays. The Max has a respectable battery size (4000 mAh), which given the screen size (and given its 720p resolution) will probably make it a battery life monster. This is obviously not a power user’s phone, but it doesn’t need to be to serve the needs of 95% of users! If people want a power user device, they can go drop $1200 or more on a foldable phone, the Max is a $300-$400 device.
As I was very clear about in my last article, there are plenty of people who will take many tradeoffs to get a small phone. It doesn’t have to have a fancy, especially camera hardware and software (although that certainly helps), but one thing it must have is security updates! This is not something you can just forget about if you actually want reviewers (and just phone fans like myself) to recommend. Many of us really really want your devices to succeed! You are one of the few remaining vendors of reasonably-sized phones, and some designs (Luna and Star) are quite innovative. But people today use their devices for everything – banking, communicating with everyone they know (and probably sharing way too much information in the process) – but ignoring the need for these interactions to be as safe as possible is a non-starter.
And to be clear, I’m not even asking for the company to handle these OS updates all yourself – all they would need to do is head over to the LineageOS subreddit, create a post with the relevant restore zips and ask for some developers to support the device and get it in the build system. You’d probably have to send all of 5 pre-production devices out to get a decent team working to support it, and they will take it from there! Embracing the Android development community is easy! There are other Android operating systems (I personally love CalyxOS), Lineage is probably the most widely supported Android OS outside of Google, and a great place to start, as builds there will likely eventually filter out into other Android distributions.
Getting your devices onto the automatic LineageOS build system means people will be able to actually use the phone as a daily driver for years. And if anyone thinks this is a bad thing from a business perspective because those users will stop upgrading, this isn’t true! The number of people who would start recommending the device to all their friends (and Youtube followers) will vastly outnumber the folks who stop upgrading due to having updates.
Please Unihertz, don’t subject the Jelly Max to novelty status. With just a little reaching out to the Lineage community, you could have the most easily-recommended, modern, reasonably-sized phone possible.
