The Fairphone 3 (and the Fairphone 3+) comes with a stock Android. For those who are used to Android on the FP2, this means you won’t find “Maintenance” in the Settings of your FP3 (yet). For those unfamiliar with it, “Maintenance” on the FP2 includes both a tool to recalibrate your FP2’s proximity sensor as well as the “Checkup” tool, a set of simple hardware tests that allow the user to test her or his phone’s hardware components like the display, microphones, speakers and the like. This is especially helpful in cases of malfunctioning when you want to narrow down the cause of a technical problem with your phone (e.g. “can the the person I called not hear me because there’s something wrong with my microphone or is there an issue with the SIM card?”). These individual tests can be performed with a lot of other apps, but Checkup bundles them in one place and makes it convenient for everyone to perform these tests without having to look around for and newly install one or more apps.
While I do not know if or when Fairphone will bring Checkup onto the FP3 in a later system update (for a brief status quo, see @anon52719359’s post below), what you can already do right now (once the FP3 is in your hands) is to install Checkup as an app. You can
- find and install the app from the F-Droid app store: https://f-droid.org/ or
- download and install the .apk file directly from F-Droid:
https://f-droid.org/packages/community.fairphone.checkup/
Note: While you can also find Checkup in the Google Play Store, I won’t link to it here because its version of Checkup is now 32 months old and – as far as I know – still needed some issues to be ironed out. I recommend only to use the version that F-Droid provides. The version provided by F-Droid is just 12 months old, and I just tested it and all its tests I could try (I was not able to test the SIM card tests) work on the FP3 .
Another important note: The secondary microphone test in the Checkup app causes sonic feedback – in some cases even escalating and getting shrill – under several OSes (LineageOS on the FP2, Fairphone OS on the FP3). Don’t use it this test. Instead, you can install and use a simple sound recorder app to test the secondary microphone’s basic functionality.