Fairphone provide support for the default setup, and warranty where that applies.
Any user software changes are not down to Fairphone, they have enough issues with the default setup. Here the user has a choice, 1/ Contact Fairphone 2/ Check the forum to see if a) others report the same issue and b) to see if there is a workaround.
Although Fairphone provide the Discourse engine they are not committed into using the forum as a support interface. They do however post version updates and therein can be placed responses. However a concerned user would really have to contact support if they want an official response.
There’s no ‘Fairphone should’ aspect in all decency, though some people want Fairphone to be responsible for more than they set out to be.
Still it is a little entertaining watching thoughts unravel.
Talk to Fairphone if you really want them to listen.
That’s why suggest that Fairphone(!) should provide a kind of bugtracker where this can be collected and commented by Fairphone(!) and not by users.
So why not go ahead and make them provide a bugtacker?
With these recurring discussions I’m always pretty baffled what people expect. I mean, hypothetically, even if we users all would agree on “how to run things”, who is supposed to do what to make that happen? Writing “Fairphone should …” or “project XYZ does things differently” to other users again and again obviously doesn’t get things done.
But then, maybe as Urs has pointed out, this might just be an unfortunate moment in time where there is no community manager which makes things worse than usual.
One thing I need to think about was the hint that Fairphone Angels might look semi-official or could be confused with actual employees. Getting rid of that icon in the avatar should be doable in case its cons outweigh its pros.
Sorry for this rather short reply, I don’t have the time or energy right now to elaborate more on each of the different aspects.
Edit: included a quote because I didn’t type fast enough to have my post directly below the one I was responding to
Yes - and of course one would expect, that other camera apps also work. Indeed Fairphone already provided a fix to make Camera2 API work correctly to give access to all camera modules, so you can also use Open Camera for example.
“Recent apps” is a feature provided by Android itself. When this function breaks using a 3rd party launcher and the 3-button-navigation nobody can fix this except Fairphone by providing an updated version of Android which does not have this problem. For the users it would be exteremly helpful if Fairphone would at least confirm that they know about this issue. Even if it can not be fixed because Google introduced a bug in Android which can not be fixed by Fairphone this would be a valuable information.
If Fairphone needs assistance in getting a bugtracker up and running - I can provide whatever they need and I have servers available to do this. But if I just do that on my own without talking to any staff of Fairphone first, then it is still not a bugtracker of Fairphone and Fairphone will of course care what bugs are recorded there. Why should Fairphone pay any attention to any bugtracker a user has set up on his own?
At Join our team - Fairphone Current vacancies there is no open position for this and all the positions offered are only for people living in or near Amsterdam as it is expected to be onsite for 60% of the time (except the Suppliers Sustainability Manager which is needed in China).
Let’s be real, they could use GitHub if they really wanted to. The issue is that Fairphone seems really uninterested in improving the communication with the community. My best example of that is when now-former employee Rae wrote a post after months of silence regarding Android 12 stating something along the lines of “as you know we were planning on releasing it in December” even though we didn’t know that because they never told us that. When people pointed out that the communication needs to improve she agreed.
… then she quit and it has been crickets since.
Presumably they don’t see the point in improving the communication with us, a minority of people come here at all after all. Most people “communicate” with Fairphone on Twitter or similar platforms.
My understanding is also that they’ve outsourced the development of Android, so presumably that company would have to be the one doing the communication and I don’t see that happening. It’s not like the FP4 is their first phone, it’s attempt number 4.
I’m happy with the fairness aspect of my FP4 but when it comes to core software issues like the camera and the security updates I feel they are an indie company through and through.
Same for me. It’s ok that I can get contacted by local users in Berlin who need help with their devices but since I don’t represent Fairphone I don’t want to leave the wrong impression.
Yes, the fairness aspect is also one of the main reasons why I got my Fairphone 4 and I do not regret that decision. At least one can also change the whole OS if the stock ROM does not fit the users needs - eventough e/OS/ has its own pitfalls.
They have their own Gitlab instance at Explore projects · GitLab but only the FP2 related projects are public. There are additional projects that are invite-only for people participating in one of the beta testing programs. They also have internal projects but of course we don’t know if it’s on that Gitlab instance or somewhere else.
And yes, software development has been outsourced from FP3 onwards.
It was an exaggerated way of making a point to actually do something that targets the company not other users here in the forum.
We - as users of the forum - have heard the same arguments all over again and again (and I don’t think that many e.g. see a public bugtracker as something to be avoided). Those topics usually get rather heated at some point in time. But it changes nothing if users talk to users.
If someone really would be dedicated to get things done, I’m convinced it’s not by writing walls of text into a forum. How somebody takes action I’d leave to them. Writing an open letter and ask here to co-sign it, start a petition on some of the well-know platforms, buying enough shares in the company to get to decide themselves, and surely more ways. I’m probably exaggerating again now, but all I ever see is complaining and not taking action. Many people seem to wait for someone else to take up the task, but all they ever achieve is pissing off a few others (in both directions). And that’s not about this topic in particular, and neither about the Fairphone forum in particular.
New community manager?
Will introduce themselves, get their positive welcome, because this forum is a nice and polite place and we like the new community manager, and then next thing will get a link to this topic as mandatory reading material .
When I bought a FP4 I was in the (mistaken) belief that I’d get a readily developed product and that the company had a working concept of maintaining the firmware and software over the anticipated duration of use (as in FP4 like 4th generation).
I don’t associate working with a bugtracker or following development on github or the proposed activity (open letters) with a commercial product. That’s more like a FOSS concept and I’d be perfectly fine with that if the FP4 firmware was announced as such.
It’s correct that those discussions won’t help much, but FP 4 is on the market for 1.5 years, one might assume that alle decisions about further development already are made and open letters or petitions might at most affect FP 5…
I did forward all this to the support as well… and most of that was answered similar to “if you have a problem, try a factory reset or send the phone to our service”. The support did not even understand some of my issues.
For example:
I asked, if it will be possible to use the Fairphone 4 camera app with alternative gallery apps in the future. The answer was, that if you have a problem seeing the photo preview after i have taken a picture, I must ensure, that the Google Photos app is not disabled. I replied then that I know that, but I would like to use another gallery app and maybe the developers would consider this for a future update - including the neccessary API calls how this may be done. After three e-mails back and forth they finally understood, what I was talking about and told me to forward my suggestions.
Is there any other way to get into touch with Fairphone except the support form? I would have no problem participating in software development or talking about technical details since I am a software developer myself and know Android quite well - but talking to first-level support often does not lead anywhere.
Yeah, I know it often is hard to get past 1st level support with companies.
Under normal circumstances I’d suggest to contact the community manager. I don’t remember exactly when the open position was listed on their jobs page. As it’s no longer online I assume they either already found someone or have enough candidates. But obviously it hasn’t reached a state yet to be able to announce the new person yet.
Not sure if (mis-)using the “open application” form on their contact page is a viable option or contact via LinkedIn (for other social media platforms I’d rather assume it to be a similar experience to contacting 1st level support, but I might be wrong).
More indirect ways might be to participate in a beta program (but there isn’t one open for registration right now) or by contributing to some of the custom ROMs (maybe ask the people who are actively working on LOS for one of the FP models).
I mean, in the end Fairphone are a regular company and I’m not sure how well it works to contact businesses in order to tell them what to do (differently), generally speaking.
It often seems to me, because the company is small and somehow feels like a “friend” (because FP actually is listening to their customer) and people are involved “at heart”, they somehow forget about this fact… Wondering if anyone would ever think of telling Samsung or Apple how to run their business…
so as I just heard in this podcast, it seems 90% or even more of Fairphone consumers want the Google eco system… so such requests from the minority of the up to 10% might not have high priority I guess… and there are workarounds with other camera apps etc., if this is really important to have.
And just in general as I often read that is so easy to develop an OS that almost everyone could do it, I would like to share again numbers, that might indicate hurdles someone, who has never worked in development of Google certified Android systems, forgets
.