Thoughts?
Fairphone proves the usual excuses for ending Android support aren’t valid.
That alone is worth a lot. Their endeavour for longevity is also great. I hope they get the attention they need.
By supporting the very manufacture to blame for short support times? Qualcomm is the root of the problem.
They don’t provide the bloody drivers for newer Android versions.
Manufacturers can only provide security updates after 2 major updates.
Are other Chipmakers better? It’s not like they could just have no chip at all…
Ok, than they are alright and green, very fair much phone
I’m not really conviced by fairphone. They claim they have an ethical and ecological supply chain / manufacturing but there is very little on their website to support that claim. The phone is made in China like any other smartphone. The “Fairtrade Gold” label doesn’t mean Gold-rank fairtrade materials, it means that only the actual gold that’s inside the phone has the fairtrade label. The amount of gold in a phone is ridiculously small and doesn’t represent the major part of the phone’s emissions footprint. They have another label which name I can’t remember but I looked it up and the terms are very vague. After all the electronic components are still electronic components : copper wires made from copper, qualcomm CPU made in the same qualcomm factory, etc. I don’t think a label changes that.
All in all I don’t think that buying a brand new, 580 € smartphone with subpar performance is a good move if you care about the environment. Buying a used phone sounds like a much better option to me : cheaper, better performance, probably not as serviceable BUT it’s already living a second life anyways.
I tried to be enthusiatic but FP looks way too much like a cash grab aimed at people that care about the environment
They are a European company. If they lied about any of this, an NGO would have already bisected them since then.
I bought my Fairphone 3 at the start of 2020. I love it. I love the fact I can dissamble it with the provided screwdriver in two minutes.
I love that I can buy replacement parts for it if anything breaks without having to get some kind of expensive repair from Apple or Samsung. Ive replaced the charging port on this phone and I’ll be replacing the battery soon too. Giving people the ability to fix and maintain their own devices is fantastic.
I am hoping to get a decade out of this device and I’m nearing 4 years with no complaints so far. I’m a little bit dissapointed they got rid of the headphone jack on the Fairphone 4. While you can get adapters etc, it shouldn’t be necessary imo. That alone is my biggest gripe with that device. Aside from that though, they make great devices and I highly reccomend them
The removal of the headphone jack is what made me call complete bullshit on their whole “repairability and sustainability” schtick. At the same time of the removal, they began selling their own wireless earbuds. So now you can’t use wired headphones with their phones, and instead have to buy a pair of wireless ones (which they conveniently sell to you) which will eventually have their internal batteries die and need to go to a landfill because none of it is repairable. I initially thought they were a pretty good company with decent values, but ever since they did that I no longer care about them.
Yeah that was a disappointing moment. Though I think you can still use wired headphones with an adapter that connects them to USB-C.
Well, when I ordered my FP4 last year the wireless earbuds were included for free. Still bought an adapter for aux that i keep in my car. I think this is fairly acceptable. Now my only problem is that they didn’t offer an adapter with both aux and USB for charging.
It’s still more waste. An adapter is a bigger use of materials, extra cost, and another point of failure. Hardly a sound decision for a self-proclaimed “sustainable” manufacturer.
I disagree with this choice, but I don’t think they are bullshiting, I think they are walking a difficult line of trying to be sustainable, up to date with the technology (adding 5G this early is also very questionable IMO), attractive for consumers and not completely unaffordable, which leads to difficult compromises.
None of those points demand the removal of the headphone jack as a compromise.
Here are some: making the design easier, making reaching IP rating easier. Again, I’m not saying it would not be possible to make those with a jack, but maybe considering the aforementioned compromise, it was easier to ditch it.
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From what I heard many Fairphone 3s didn’t even survive that long. Quality, audio quality and performance all seem to be pretty bad. That combined with its very high price point kinda defeats the point of it. The idea is great, but the execution isn’t.
I’m using a FP4, and here the signs are reversed. The hardware is working so far, but the software is incredibly buggy and instable.
Add to it the very mediocre hardware (slow, outdated SoC, terrible camera, bad battery life) and it’s not a fun phone to use. Especially not at that price point.
I agree wholeheartedly. Do you end up checking your e-mails for FP employee responses to the Forum posts?
I did for a while, but I gave up. Both their support and their communications on the forum is almost inexistent.
Yep, on the Forum they’re nowhere to be found, usually. I’m the reporter of the screen ghosting issue. Have you tried Support though? They offered me an RMA.
I tried their support a few times. Since the bugs are software-only, an RMA probably wouldn’t have fixed anything. They took the bugs, said they stuck them into their backlog, and then didn’t do anything about them. The bugs got swapped out for other bugs when Android 12 came around.
The biggest two bugs I had before were that the notification toggles disappeared ~1/day and I could only get them back by repeatedly changing the user on my phone. The other one was that video wouldn’t work in split screen.
With Android 12, both of them are fixed, but now my screen turns completely black whenever a new notification appears. Also my mobile data connection disappears ~1/h and only appears again if I manually toggle mobile data. Sometimes when using split screen, the phone gets completely stuck for ~30-60secs. The nav bar also sometimes just disappears. ~1/day the recents button on the navbar loses it’s function and requires me to reboot for it to start working again. GPS randomly dies as well and only works again after a reboot. That’s especially fun when you are currently using your phone for Google Maps while driving.
The navigation bar disappearing and the mobile data connection needing manual re-enablement affects me too. I don’t think anyone has posted about them on the forum yet, though.
If only CalyxOS supported the Google Play Store, I would use that.
I guess having only one phone every year makes it immensely easier to support than having multiple models at every price range every year. Apple does it, why couldn’t Android phone manufacturers do it?
This is really good to hear. The worst thing about mid range android phones is the lack of future software support. Even flagship androids aren’t anything to write home about. As much as people like shitting on apple, they support their devices for quite a while compared to other manufacturers.
So? Sell it and buy the new one
Believe it or not, some people aren’t big on over consumption and want things to last. Companies should do better and not produce crap that’s going to end up in landfill in a few years.
Have fun using obsolete tech
Its not obsolete if they are providing the updates…
Most Android manufacturers are using minimal development teams to get closed source blobs from the CPU+radios OEMs to talk to the OS. Like the article says, Qualcomm stop supporting older generations of their SoCs pretty quickly, and those manufacturers don’t invest the resources in custom development, which is the LineageOS approach that Fairphone are taking. There’s nothing to promise these updates will be stable and secure though.
Apple has a huge advantage in developing their own processors from start to finish. They’re not reliant on anyone else’s code, and if they do need to buy in certain components (like Intel modems that they’ve used before), they’ve got the size and budget to get pretty much anyone to agree to their terms. It’s why Google started the Tensor project, which is rumored to be finally going full Google (ending reliance on Samsung) from 2025/Pixel 9.
Good explanation. Even if their long term support doesn’t work out it’s nice to see a trend towards long term support and reduction of e-waste.
I still think that open standards would better enable long-term support than more effective vertical integration.
We need an open source smartphone.
pinephone
I wanted to get a Fairphone 4 until I saw I saw it didn’t have a headphone jack. Made me think all their “sustainable” mottos are just marketing.
Purism with their Librem phones took people’s money and didn’t send them the product so I didn’t want to chance it or support a company that does that.
So in the end I got a Pixel 7 instead and put Graphene OS on it. Not particularly happy but didn’t seem like there was a better choice.
Recently found out from a Louis Rossman video that the lead dev of Graphene has some mental health issues that don’t make him a very trustworthy individual. Supposedly he stepped down but he’s probably still contributing code.
Tl;dr: phones = bad
Will it really get Android 13? I see no trace of it on the release notes
It’s already released. So yes.
Do you have the link for the manual package install? My Ota doesn’t have it yet.
They stopped the OTA, since there are some issues with the fingerprint reader. No manual package so far as well. Explanations: https://forum.fairphone.com/t/fairphone-3-and-3-a13-fingerprint-sensor-update/97654
Thanks for the info!
