Hey all,
Thank you for starting this discussion. I understand fully that things can look opaque from time to time as to what is happening at Fairphone.
First of all, we would like to apologize for not replying to tickets in a timely manner at the moment. In the few past months since the delivery of the Fairphone 2, our small support team has been overwhelmed by the amount of email we’ve received. Despite trying a variety of ways to improve response times and reduce the number of open requests, it’s still proving to be a very difficult task.We are currently hiring new people to help the support team and members from other teams are using any spare time they have to help the support team.
We expect that we need some more weeks to get the response time back to acceptable lengths and are very thankful for your patience.
Also we do indeed prioritize tickets depending on the problem. Someone who is asking for help on how to configure their Wifi will sadly be answered later then someone with a broken FP2 or FP1. For the FP1 it also matters if the device is still in warrenty as we feel a bigger obligation to help these people faster.
It may sound unfair, but these days we have to resort to these kind of measures to make sure that the people with the biggest problems get support the fastest.
As for your other question about the open position for a software team manager: I’ll ask internally what the status is.
EDIT: to add status of software team manager.
The software team is on a steady path releasing timely updates and fixing bugs at a good pace at the moment. It seems they work better then expected without a manager and are really good at managing themselves. Therefor the need for this position has declined and we also now removed it from our website.
In order to continue developing new options and improve the OS we are now discussing to maybe hire junior Android devs.