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

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 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 :)

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

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 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?

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.

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!

Will it really get Android 13? I see no trace of it on the release notes