Advice on Fairphone

I got a FP5 about 2 year ago. I got it through elementary even thought I'm in Europe because I wanted to degoogle.

It works ok, mostly, but don't expect a completely seamless experience. Mostly little stuff but occasionally more serious like ignoring the sim when on for longer than 10 min and requiring a reboot, or self reboot for no reason. Those problems have always resolved by themselves with the next update within 1 or 2 weeks.

I don't mind a little more friction for using my phone, and I'm a tinkerer, so I don't mind but my wife would never tolerate this (she is an iphone user).

The way I see it, there are 2 reason to consider FP:

• the ethical fabrication part make it worth the effort.
• the long term software support. (10 years is incredible if you can tolerate using that phone for that long)

The hardware repairability is just bling. Most phones still have repairable screen (granted, not as easily, but I don't break my screen that often) and plenty of phone offer removable battery.

From a sustainability point of view, the biggest impact you can have is from using your phone as long as possible, and FP make kind of subpar product which don't make it easy not to want to upgrade. You might be better off getting a second hand iphone and keeping it for as long as possible.

Not shitting on FP, I believe in their mission (even if I disagree on some of their decision like not having wireless charging for BS reason, but knowing my phone wasn't made by a child slave is nice), but mass production and quality control are hard, economies of scale are a thing, so getting in with FP right now is still paying $600 to get something equivalent to a $200 phone.

TLDR : phone mostly works most of the time if you don't mind tinkering a bit. Nowhere near iphone or Samsung level of reliability. Might be worth it depending on what you value.

I guess it depends on where you are and where you are getting service from. Fairphone is talking to carriers in the States, but they're primarily based out of Europe and have relationships with those carriers. T-Mobile is supposed to work well if you import one, but your mileage may vary and customer support can only help so much. On the other hand, you could get a Fairphone 5 or 6 with Elementary OS and not have Google Apps or Play Services on it at all should you choose to forgo them entirely.

My caveat here is that I had a Fairphone 4, and so my experiences are more about the company and their products as a whole. Overall, I found the Fairphone 4 to be disappointing, and a significant part of that was Fairphone's poor support and development around their phones. Many of the promises of the phone seemed somewhat empty, and often felt mildly deceptive. The community around the phone seemed dominated by a small group of active supporters willing to ardently defend every problem with the phone and the company with often circuitous arguments about sustainability, including arguing that repairability was not a goal of the phone, despite it being featured prominently in the marketing. Like my experience with Planet Computers, if not to the same extent as them, Fairphone felt like a company whose business model was built more around marketing toward people who wanted a particular type of product, rather than actually being built around making that product well. I'd contrast that with Framework, which, despite faults at times, really does seem to be a company built of people who want to build a repairable, upgradeable laptop.

I bought the phone directly from Fairphone, in Europe, but used it in both Europe and the US at different times of the year. This ran into the immediate problem of the back, which was illustrative to me of the dubiousness of Fairphone's claims. Yes, the battery was replaceable, easily, just by snapping off the back case, and that was also how the SIM card needed to be changed. Of course, the snaps on the back case were not actually designed to withstand many cycles of removing and replacing the back, so if you actually wanted to replace the battery frequently, or like me, needed to sway SIMs, the snaps would often end up breaking. Battery life, too, was atrocious; I often couldn't get through a single day without charging. Actually carrying spare batteries would have been difficult, as batteries, like many parts, were out of stock whenever I checked.

Meanwhile, software was terrible. Yes, the hardware of the camera technically fit the advertising, but the camera support was horribly implemented to the point that it was largely not usable for me, despite my rather minimal requirements. Fairphone didn't implement standard Android interfaces to the cameras, instead choosing to make many core features only available in their own camera app, which was quite buggy. In particular, despite nominally capable hardware, the focus was so enormously slow and unreliable that my primary use of the camera, quick reference photos, usually of text, in good lighting, would often end up unreadably blurry.

And yes, Fairphone promised some number of years of updates, but they didn't promise how timely those updates would be, or how well they would be implemented. Security updates were often so delayed that some corporate apps would stop working. Major updates could be enormously delayed, and might introduce a variety of new, significant breakages. At least at the time, Fairphone apparently didn't do any actual software development themselves, and instead used an outside contractor who was clearly trying to minimize effort; it seem like it was not something Fairphone actually cared about. Sometimes they would make bizarre choices in the updates: in one, for example, seemingly simply as the result of a suggestion from one aggressive and vocal fan of the phone on the forums (the phone worked perfectly for his daughter, as he pointed out when anyone had a support question or problem), they once changed the minimum brightness to be extremely bright.

I did use third-party ROMs at times, in part because they would often be significantly more up to date than the official one. But doing so was tricky and potentially hazardous. While I didn't have it happen myself, bricking the phone was easy to do, and while it would have been soft-bricking had Fairphone made some files available, they instead required that bricked phones be shipped to them for a paid unbricking process. My understanding is that this was likely because of enormous security flaws on the phone: the official images were actually signed by test keys, for which the private key was available, and the phone was set up to trust those test keys. If I understand correctly, the files that would have allowed unbricking would have also allowed secure boot on the phone, at least with the official image, to be entirely broken; but this was only security through obscurity.

I usually keep phones for a few years, and repurpose them when I buy a new one. The Fairphone was an exception; I ended up finding it so unreliable that I sold it after around a year or year and a half. For context, I previously had a Pixel 2XL; I still have that, running Lineage and acting as a modem. I now use a Pixel 7 Pro running Graphene.

I have a Fairphone 5 that I got back in April. I used CalyxOS on it from the beginning and have used iódeOS since Calyx paused releases a few months ago. I am in the United States (using T-Mobile).

I've never had any hardware or firmware issues with the phone. Definitely none of the more serious issues that @Pepetto reported, which I'm relieved about haha.

I used an iPhone 12 before this. I actually bought this phone as a development/test device, because I needed a physical device to debug issues with my open source app, Storyteller. But once I had it set up, I decided to give it a shot.

The camera is markedly worse than my iPhone, but I have a real camera for when I care about the quality of my photos. Phone camera is just for recording momrnets, anyway!

Battery life has been decent, I think. I bought a second battery that I charge up and put in my bag before long trips as a backup, which is cool.

The screen isn't quite as beautiful as my iPhone, but it's nice enough.

If you use an alternative OS, like Lineage, /e/os, or iódeOS, you will absolutely be able to side load apps indefinitely. If you use the stock Fairphone Android, it sounds like Google is walking back its strict ban on unverified apps, and will allow users to jump through some specific hoops to enable sideloading.

I have a FP5, running android. I have no complaints - it's reliable, screen is great, camera is great, battery is great, performance is great. Having a replaceable battery is awesome when traveling.

Side-loading: there maybe ways round google, but I fear there may be a chilling effect that more or less kills indie Devs...

I used a Pixel 8 with GrapheneOS for a while and while the setup was kinda ok, I just couldn't get used to the gigantic form factor of the phone. I wish small phones would become trendy again.

Will I still be able to side-load/use F-Droid? I hear that Google is putting a stop to this but if I get one that allows it now, will it continue to allow it in perpetuity?

If you get /e/ OS, then I believe yes. And more broadly, if Google tries to ban sideloading for third-party manufacturers who use both their own hardware and a modified OS, then IMO the EU antitrust law will beat them like a drum.