I totally agree with you. This topic from my perspective is about how Fairphone communicates. People still see Fairphone more as a project than a company. They want to know what’s going on.
I also think that software and hardware issues kill support right now. It’s not the 1% faulty phones, replacing 1000 broken phones is manageable. It’s people that want to know if their phone has a hard- or software bug. So they try to get it fixed early.
If you get a working FP2 you’re lucky and you don’t write about that a lot, you just pull your updates. If you get a faulty one … you end up posting in the forum. So what we see here in the forum is far from reality, but right now it’s the only source we have, so we are back to communications again. What users do here is just speculation without hard facts.
I think more than 1% of software and hardware issues make the support slow. If we would knew what was going on, helping people in the forum would get much easier.
But speculation (like what I do here right now) is what you end up with if there is no more input from the other side that just tries to avoid saying something that could make things worse. There is no hard info what problems the different releases try to fix. The Changelogs are pretty vague. The also forget to mention things like a full baseband firmware replacement.
I have no idea how to fix this, but I came here to discuss the creation and use of fair electronics. Communication is a big part of this. So why don’t we discuss this as well?
Do you have an idea how quality problems (if they exist at all) could be openly addressed without making things worse? I personally like it if a company tells me:
“We know what’s wrong, we are working on a solution. We have no official fix yet, but this is the problem … we will work with our xxx and let you know once we figured out how.”
“We found a solution. All XX with the problem YY need a new ZZ. We will send you a new ZZ so you can put it in yourself” [=Like the camera module with AF issues, but this is not official yet … same for some screen issues.]
“We found a solution. All XX with the problem YY need a software update ZZ. Please install ZZ once we have it out hopefully next week.” [=Like phones that drop calls, for sensor calibration, or for phones that tend to ruin the sim card … there is no real Changelog, so it’s hard to figure out what problems are purely software related. ]
Update/Support calculations
These are some calculations, try your own.
If only 1% of the phones are really broken (DOA) they would have to deal with 1 000 customers. Lets multiple that with the factor 10 for other questions 10 000 tickets. Lets say that each ticket needs 5 replies, that would be 50 000 “support actions” for 10 people. In an hour a person can do like 20 replies. 8 times 20, so 160 per day, 800 per working week. Let’s assume the 10 work most of the time, so 8 000 a week. Not so sure, but 8 000 from 50 000 actions per week doesn’t look too bad. So to answer most tickets in 2 to 3 months sounds reasonable.
If there are fixes for all problems and customers are happy with the answer they get. If they aren’t … ticket numbers and replies will explode (software breaks the phone again) people will ask more and more. So that’s why I assume the number of faulty hardware/hard software issues is much higher. But I guess they will publish a blog post soon.
It would also help differentiating more between software (open source), bin blobs/ODM problems/fixes and hardware issues, but this is hard to do without a good Changelog.