Fairphone Keep Club: Sustainable consumerism?
As you may well know, Fairphone is a company that originally arose from a kickstarter campaign and makes phones that are as easily repairable, as sustainable and as fairly sourced as possible. They do have their issues, but compared to other big phone companies they've done a great job with this.
Now it appears that Fairphone is due to announce the so called 'Fairphone Keep Club' on the 14th of September - a bonus program as we all know it. You buy stuff, you get points for what you buy, and when you've got enough points you can redeem them to buy more stuff.
The keep club website claims that it's the only rewards program that gives back to those who keep their Fairphones as long as possible, but judging by the listed 'challenges' it appears that the most efficient way to gain points is to simply buy new stuff.
Personally I'm a bit torn on this, due to the idealistic viewpoints I tend to judge Fairphone under in accordance with their stated sustainability goals. I do realize that is a much higher standard than the big-players in the phone industry achieve. I also get that Fairphone wants to build its brand identity and create incentives to keep customers and sell their products. But at the same time I can't help but think that in the end that program is an incentive to be less sustainable, as it ultimately provides you with those fancy points as a psychological incentive to buy the newest and latest Fairphone product.
So I wanted to bring this topic into a wider community that may not currently be as deep in the Fairphone bubble: Do you think such bonus programs will rather help spread the idea of a more repairable, sustainable approach to phones, or will it rather serve as an incentive to artificially shorten a phone's lifecycle by prematurely buying a new one? And more generally speking: Do you think advertising strategies rooted in consumerism and classic capitalistic company goals are compatible with sustainable product lifecycles somehow, despite not exactly having aligned interests?
Note that I also posted this on Lemmy. I'm interested to see how those discussions will compare.
IMO there are the idealistic wishes of forward thinking consumers and there is the capitalist reality. Fairphone is doing the best they can to live up to their ideals while not being out of business. I for one would like them to stay in business. That requires a little bit of advertising and I like this approach. If I was able to get a fairphone (I am not, the USA can't have nice things), I would be happy to be a member of this club. Being rewarded for buying my own parts and maintaining my phone would be a dream.
I like to push the life expectancy of devices. This system would not draw enough incentive for me to buy one every time new models became available. But I would feel good every time I bought a new part for my existing device. It gives a little bit of something back to those who maintain. Sure its not as much of one as buying each new model iteration. But those whose consumerist habits are formed from the concept "I got it because it was on sale" or "I got it because its new" should not be the target audience for this device.
I would hope Fairphone is trying to give those who already have the right mindset a little something back for living with a sustainable devices. Hopefully they are banking on the correct mindset being the majority of their customer base.
If anything this club might be a nice reminder for me NOT to replace my phone when something goes wrong. I already keep track of my phones birthdays and death days to try to better control my replacement habits. Current phone was born on November 10th 2021. Unfortunately it might not last as long as others as I struggle with the privacy concerns of direct google products. I might be flipping to iPhone in the near future after more than a decade on Android. I am not happy with my choices all around.
As I attempt to make myself into a informed consumer I find that I get deflated by the idea that everyone who is trying to survive as a business and do better by our planet is "not doing good enough" because of small imperfections in the business model. The reality is as much as we don't like it, this system IS still capitalist. If we ignore those who take the small steps in the right direction because its not enough, they will not survive. If they do not survive their ideas and the good they did might be lost. We have to support everyone we can that's trying to make a small difference. The more important part is consumer understanding. Understanding the difference between actually helping and green-washing will help us make better informed choices.
As a lower middle class person stuck in the USA I often joke I only have two votes. My actual vote in elections and my wallet. I see Fairphone as someone trying harder then most and deserving of that little support even when they have to play the capitalist game.
I am curious as to why you consider iPhone more privacy centric than Android. IIRC, there was an article that turning on the data privacy toggles on Apple only meant that the data was not being sent to Google and Meta; Apple continues to collect almost the same data for their telemetry.
I personally feel Android and iPhone are both equally culpable in the privacy aspect of things, and at this point in time it's about picking your choice of poison.
I couldn't agree more. Apple's marketing is a masterclass. Convincing everyone that they are privacy focused when in reality they are just keeping your data for themselves to make more money off you is a genius move.
If you actually care about your privacy, you probably shouldn't be using a cell phone at all.
I admit I was totally a sucker for that privacy marketing by Apple, and further to that I was also definitely trying to use it as justification for myself to stick with the ecosystem I’m familiar with…
That said, I still think “we block other trackers but track you ourselves” is still a bit better than open slather tracking. It’s about surface area for privacy. They might still be tracking me, but at least a) that’s only one company, not dozens/hundreds in addition to the device manufacturers, and b) their marketing toward me is limited to the products and services they offer, as opposed to literally all of everything.
Having seen how many times my email address comes up every time I go to places like haveibeenpwned (especially from companies I haven’t interacted with in years or decades), I’m definitely happy reducing the variety of ways that my info gets leaked.
I’ve even taken to adding a unique identifier to email addresses that I use to sign up to new services (thanks to gmail’s unlimited aliases), because that way if my details get leaked, I can see which service leaked it. This also makes me a tiny bit less vulnerable to automated credential stuffing for old passwords that I haven’t got around to updating, but I suppose not by much.
That's fair. I'm sure most people don't make that distinction and that distinction obviously isn't hurting their bottom line.
I replied to your question under the same question from OP. Just leaving you this note here so you know to go check it out!
Well actually there's a significant delay, but at least Murena is offering an adapted Version of the Fairphone 4 with /e/os for the US market. That being said I would expect support to be better in Europe, since any replacement parts would probably need to ship to the US from here, although I'm not exactly sure what service infrastructure Murena provides across the big lake.
indeed I am glad this got brought up for anyone doing research using this thread in the future. There is a chance we will get a Fairphone 5 through Murena eventually. /e/os or any ROMs without the ability to install google management tools are not an option for my use case. I will respond with more details on why my use case is annoying once I get around to responding to AndreasChris about the possible iPhone swap. Its probably going to be a book. Trying to figure out how to cut it down in length.
Those are some good points. Thanks for the insightfully worded reply.
I totally agree that it's better to support those players in the market that are at least making an honest effort to work sustainably, even if there is no perfect option. And yes, Fairphone has to find some middle ground that allows them to make a good effort at achieving their sustainability goals without going out of business due to the harsh capitalistic realities of the smartphone market.
I guess in the end it'll be a question of how well they manage to balance their reward system in the long term. It just initially seemed to me that the rewards listed on their website were somewhat skewed towards the purchase of new products, and I still see some conflicting interests here to some degree, but I have to admit I did not initially take the effect of the purchase of replacement parts on the system into account. I guess time will tell how that works out in the long term..
As for your privacy concern:
I totally get and support that. I do however not think that iPhones with their inherently locked down system that Apple has complete control over is much better.
I would really recommend you take a look at certain Android custom ROMs such as Lineage OS or CalyxOS. Note that you will always need to make some compromises when using custom ROMs, since a lot of apps simply assume that Google's proprietary APIs and Google Play Services will be present, but projects such as microG, that re-implement a lot of those services on an open source basis, can mitigate most of the issues that come with not using Google's services, and even if you install some Google Services via Open GApps, a custom ROM will still give you a higher degree of control over your system.
On that note it should also be said, that Fairphone's good relationship with custom ROMs is actually one of the good things about them. Not only do they make it rather easy for you to use not-officially-supported custom ROMs on their devices, but they even have some cooperations with certain third parties that sell Fairphones with alternative ROMs out of the box. (See Murena with the de-googled /e/os for example.)
Also if you're interested in the reasons why some things do or do not work without Google Play Services, what can be done about that, and what is actually open source about android, I highly recommend you read this article/transcript I stumbled upon recently on the Fairphone Community Forum. (Credit goes to paolo-caroni for posting this there.) It really is a great read!
So there really is no winning this fight for me. I am screwed in almost any direction I go beyond carrying and actively maintaining multiple phones. I have done that in the past and it is cumbersome. Lets see why my options are less cool then most peoples.
I work in small business IT. My company runs on Google Workspace. 45% of my clients also run in Google Workspace. I am upper management and the head of the on-call system. I spend roughly 55% of the year on the electric leash capable of being called, or needing to step in at any time, 24/7. Sure I probably need to get a less intensive job. But for the sake of current phone related choices we need to consider this an unchanging fact of my life. Your going to hear some things in the following paragraphs that will make you hate the "controls" my company puts on me. I am totally fine with them so lets just leave that argument aside. Security compliance is a huge deal in our industry as we are the primary targets for the hackerz.
Custom roms, rooted devices, and working without a google admin profile is against the terms of use for my company. I am not allowed to put a work profile or do work off a device that does not comply to company policy. Which means I need google services on something for work. And I need it with me at all times.
Google: https://fourweekmba.com/google-revenue-breakdown/
Apple: https://fourweekmba.com/apple-revenue-breakdown/
I am going to not bore you by complaining of all the myriad privacy concerns brought to bare against both tech giants. The basics of my main argument is economic. Google revenue is 79.92% earned through different advertising channels. You can see a breakdown in the above link. Apples ad revenue is part of the section called "services" in its revenue breakdown. The linked rundown does not break down service into smaller chunks but someone will probably be able to find that number for me. Services is 19.81% of Apples revenue meaning probably safe to say its >18% of total revenue.
Google: 79.92% Ads
Apple: >18% Ads
The incentive for Google to not only collect, but use that data for selling me everything under the sun, through ads, is considerably higher then Apple. Apple indicates that almost all of its ad revenue is generated through its own App Store. They do not have ad revenue streams that take ads from outside sources and inject them anywhere into other peoples lives. Its just apps on a single store.
On that Android device pretty much everything from both my personal and work profile are going to the same place. A place with much more power to use that data to try to sell me much more then just another iPhone or App. With the trackers coming back off all that ad data that means at least some data is probably going to third parties. Apple has done a lot of damage to other ad tracking business models by limiting the telemetry that's going back to them. Meta has been struggling since Apple killed a lot of the data flow out of their apps. They actually do limit the leaking of data to third parties and that is an important aspect of what I want to keep at bay.
Apple's goal is to sell actual stuff, mostly iPhones. Which does make them pretty freaking evil when it comes to environmental practice (Though imo they are doing a good job of getting on the right path for this). But Apple generally supports security updates on a device for 6+ years. They have slowly improved their repair options and anecdotally most of my iPhone friends DO keep their phones going longer then the Android ones. Apple is not a Fairphone in terms of how long I could keep it running for. but its better then my android history. it should be noted that the longest time frame promised for a Pixel phone for security updates is 5 years and that was new and groundbreaking. We're only two years into that agreement so there is no way to know how fast they will cut off security updates after 5 years yet. The longest I have kept a Android phone within security policy thus far is 4 years before forced retirement by policy non-compliance (before the device was even dead). If I don't have security updates. I uninstall work from it and it turns into a remote control or a gift to someone who needs a phone but does not need my level of compliance.
The goal of the swap is not to stop the flow of data but to silo off work data from personal data and put the data for both in competing buckets. It is not likely that Google and Apple are sharing what they could be making money off me from with each other. By siloing work into google and personal into Apple I might be doing myself some good in related exposures.
As a side note. My decision to swap is far from over. I only started considering it seriously again a few weeks ago and a change like this is like a 6 month minimum of research and doubling back on myself. I still need to contend with a lot of unknowns in the landscape that me and a few security minded industry associates on both sides of the fence are exploring. A lot of that deals with how Apple sandboxes the data coming off its own apps in comparison to third party apps. We shall see!
Fairphone isn't available in my country. I've been waiting for perhaps a decade. I've been wonder why it's not available here yet: I suspect it's due to lack of profitability on Fairphone's part, and they just don't have enough capital to expand yet. I'm not a fan of this club thing, but perhaps it will help them make a Fairphone available to me?
I think the main issue here is that different network providers in different countries use different frequency bands. So introducing a phone in another part of the world is not as easy as simply shipping it there, but sometimes adaptions need to be made to ensure support for all relevant frequency bands of local providers. I think managing those adaptions (as well as potential additional legal requirements) is what's making it difficult for Fairphone to serve all markets worldwide in a timely manner. They're only selling a few hundred thousand devices every year, which may seem a lot but is just peanuts when compared to the really big players in the smartphone industry.
I understand there may be issues, but it's been a decade. The Fairphone 2 was ~7 years ago, they're up to the Fairphone 5 now, how long does this even take?
I don't think it's technical issues, they're just not prioritizing expansion to markets outside the EU. I'm not criticizing them for this, prioritizing things means not prioritizing other things.