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.
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.
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
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.
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.
I still think that open standards would better enable long-term support than more effective vertical integration.
We need an open source smartphone.
pinephone
Would be great if it would actually be usable.
From what I've read from people owning it it's unfit for any purpose at the moment and very few people actually use it as their main phone.
Pine64's model of "we build the hardware, the community builds the software" doesn't seem to be working very well unfortunately.
Its not even software issues (I mean the software is still very early, but improving), the pinephone hardware is ridiculously underpowered while simultaneously drawing too much power.
The Pro fixes the underpowered issue, but gives you a couple hours of screen-on time. At first I was hopeful software updates would fix the battery life, but the same operating system (postmarketos) gives me a full day of use on my other phone (oneplus6). That leads me to believe it's largely a hardware issue.
I hope I'm wrong. \o/
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
His code contributions have always been high quality, and they're audited by his peers. Its very unlikely malicious code would come from him, and even more unlikely it would make it through on to your phone.
While he's certainly unhinged, it's clear that he cares deeply for the project. I can't see him doing anything intentionally malicious.
I really wish him the best, and I'm glad he stepped down. Much better for optics with him out of the way.
Yup, I'm in the market for a new phone soon, and here's my assessment of my options, in rough order of preference:
I'm probably going to get an older Pixel and a PinePhone Pro, and I'll hack on the PinePhone until it does what I need. I don't think I can add reliable suspend/resume, but I can probably build a couple small apps I need (i.e. a lemmy client, I'm already working on one), get a few Android apps working, and tune the OS a bit. Worst case scenario, it's a fun hobby project.
The pixel also doesn't have a headphone jack, so the fairphone is still better in that it has an ethical supply chain, and much more user repairable
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
You're right that Fairphone's supply chain is not fully sustainable. In fact, I remember reading an interview with the founder where he admitted that poor sustainability and labour practices are so entrenched in the industry that it was impossible to actually make a "fair" Fairphone. (Incidentally, this is why the company uses the word "fair*[er]*" to describe the phones.)
Yeah, I would definitely agree that a used phone is a much more environmentally-friendly choice than a brand-new one. The amount of customers who are going to ditch their 1 or 2 year old phone for this "sustainable" phone will unfortunately not be zero...
I would like to support them, but it is lacking in several features. Kinda wish they would take their modular and user-replaceable components and let us upgrade, like a better camera module for example.
that said, it's missing the most important thing... Network compatibility.
I wish they were more similar to Framework except in the smartphone space. Because when I buy a Fairphone I'm still stuck with the specs I bought and when I want to have better specs I need to buy a new phone regardless of how repairable it is. WIth a Framework laptop I can upgrade the mainboard to one with better specs and can keep the rest.
Your example with the camera module is exactly what happened to the FP3. They released the FP3+ which featured a better camera and users of the original model could upgrade by just buying this module.
However this is definetly not the focus of Fairphone as a company as too many or regular new modules would introduce new e-waste again.
the fairphone 5 is rumored to come out this year, hopefully it will address those issues
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?
Because they want to corner every price target.
You think the masses care about how long the devices are supported? This is a topic from back in the early days of Android.
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.
You can get a pretty top of the line smartphone for that price, which I'm also not willing to pay for either.
Let's hope EU regulations can make smartphones generally a bit more sustainable.
Yeah, the high price point kinda destroys the repairability aspect for me. I could get a similar phone from Samsung or Google for €200-400 less. For that money I can get the battery/screen replaced multiple times.
I hope, the EU regulation makes repairability mainstream.
I bought my FP3 at release in September 2019, while it does overheat from time to time and I'm on my 3rd battery (kinda the point of it), I'm very happy with the purchase overall, when it dies I'll move on to the FP4 or 5 if it is released.
TBH, I was also surprised to see support for Android 13 was out
I had the Fairphone 2 and I loved it. It was like Lemmy, you never really knew if it would work the next morning but the community was great.
After replacing the battery once, without any tools whatsoever, and upgrading the camera, with a small screwdriver, it lasted for more than five years.
Since then, I've had a company phone but when it breaks, I will check out Fairphone first. Of course there is no such thing as a sustainable, or "fair" phone, but at least in 2016, this was often discussed in their trancparacy reports? The official forum was also very aware. Some raw materials where sourced to the exact mine, others thei openly said they couldn't control at the time.
Additionally, they offered the phone with root acces so trying out alternative os was never any problem. It's the closest Ive ever been to a Google free life.
for me, the biggest issue with the fairphone is that they attempted to embrace everything: modular, sustainable, fair trade, etc
their competitors do none of that, so the quality/cost ratio turns out way off and that prevents their market share to grow sustainably (pun intended). the few people I know who use it, are the profile that is used to do sacrifices like that (like buying sustainable food at large markups, etc) but that's not feasible or desirable to the vast majority
imo they should have picked a concept and perfected it - preferably the modular part which is the best thing you can do and brings tangible value to users. then move on to the other things... that's a great cautionary tale about trying to be the good guys in capitalism, the system is not in their favour
Updates on a phone is a important topic. When i choose a smartphone i look for software support period. But i think software updates sometimes make graphical improvements and that causes performance decrease. Or the company wants to slow that thing down. Nowadays you can't see the difference.
I want to love my FP3 but it loves to crap out by being slow or just crash prone. I replaced my camera because it accumulated dust behind the lense, because it is replacable.
... still wouldn't buy any other phone, it works well enough in all aspects and is a bit like the slightly crappy car you still love <3 Next one will be a FP5 :)
Reading through the comments, almost everyone missed the elephant in the room. The big problem with long term support is not on the phone or chip manufacturers.
...::: It's GOOGLE! :::... Just compare the history of Android with Windows. Windows 10 is still supported for another 2 years, yet it was released in mid 2015. Every Windows 10 capable device is still receiving updates till then.
Contrast that with Android. Android 6.0 came out in October 2015. Yet very few devices from that era are supportable today. Why? A large part of that is based on Google's never ending -> breaking changes <- and random new requirements that make older devices incompatible.
This got me personally when I bought a Sony Z3 with the intention of having a "future proof" phone. It was openly advertised as being a dev device for Android 7, so much so that a preview release was downloadable for it.
Only for Google to drop a new requirement for the GPU to have minimum OpenGL ES 3.1, while the GPU only had the instructions for 3.0. WTF?! I might add, the specification for 3.1 was only released to the public 2 years prior.
I seriously hope that some alternative to Android will establish itself again. We had Windows phone, which Microsoft utterly butchered. IOS is not an alternative as that's tied to one manufacturer.
That is amazing! I had a Fairphone 1 and used it until the 'on' button broke which was about the only thing not available from the parts store. Now I have a Fairphone 3, have had it for a few years now. I might get the camera module upgrade as I still have an old one and it's the only disappointing thing about the phone. I've been looking forward to fixing my phone because the modular design they made is amazing, but absolutely nothing has broken yet in my 3 years of use!
It's nice. For me.
I wouldn't recommend it to anyone though. People who know how to handle the issues (i.e. how to replace the stock OS - it sucks, but /e/OS is okay) don't need my recommendation.
For most people it's just a pretty expensive mid-range-specced phone.
It is a valid reason from the OEMs because they have to rely on their chip manufacturers for security updates. It's literally out of their control to do updates that long except when it comes to the OS.
Bring it to Canada!
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