My Fairphone 3+ has had a good life (purchased late 2020, used as my only phone since) and I’ve been very happy with it overall. Now that Fairphone have announced that they are no longer supporting FP3 from August 2026, I am reluctantly considering upgrading. I don’t feel confident enough in my tech abilities to try one of the open source operating systems.
So, just wanted to get people’s opinions on how far off the FP7 is likely to be, and whether to wait for that or get an FP6 now. What do people think?
Not sure how much you use the phone but while I was waiting for my FP6 to get repaired I installed lineage os (with Gapps) in an old phone and felt just like normal android. Limitations were Google pay and RCS messaging. I recommend trying it and if it does not work out switch, if it works keep it until FP7 comes out.
The process was not so hard to do indeed, and don’t expect it to be harder on Fairphone.
As far as I know no risk of bricking FP3, if you trigger a rollback-protection you can still use the unbricking solution available using EDL/QDL mode.
This is not the case with FP4/5/6, where one has to send it back for reset…
Hey! I recently bought a fp6 with the murena e/os operating system. I am not remotely techy and its been absolutely fine! I had been an iPhone user for 10+ years and I honestly thought I would struggle with a new operating system. Not so, I’ve been very pleasantly surprised!
(The only thing I’ve not managed to do is set up an equivalent of Apple Pay/Google Wallet but that’s probably a good thing anyway.)
I have no idea what the FP6 is like and even less concerning 7 but I do know this - I installed eos, (Murena), on my 11yr old’s first ‘phone and apart from ignoring the update notifications, he has had zero ‘tech’ problems.
