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.
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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.
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I totally agree with
And per
Yes, that’s what a proper bugtracker is for. Unfortunately, we’re unable to use gitlab.fairphone.org whatsoever, nor issuetracker.fairphone.org for recent devices.
demonstrates this too.
However, @Ingo, in this regard, what does
mean?
Do you know of any of the methods of joining such programmes?
Yeah, calyxos is brilliant (if Google support is unimportant).
Indeed, pitfalls they are. I tried /e/OS, but it was almost as buggy for me, just in different ways.
Fairphone advertise here on the forum for beta testers etc. so you may want to visit frequently not to miss an opportunity.
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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.
Watch for announcements like Fairphone 2 beta program signup instructions or Fairphone 3 beta program signup instructions - Signup closed! 🛑 in the “Participate” category, e.g. with a search like this: Search results for 'beta #participate in:title' - Fairphone Community Forum
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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 
.
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That’s a questen of your expectations!
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…
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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.
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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.
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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
It’s not only the Google eco system - I have no problem that Google Play Services are used at all. But the Google Photos app nags me to get paid services for simple tasks like certain image editing procedures - and of course these tasks are “suggested” just when opening an image. So the official gallery app asks to get a subscription for about 2 EUR per month to be able just to use all the features of it, and this is not only only storage but als basic image editing features.
Yes, I am aware that most people don’t care that the apps do this as long as they work overall. But for me this leaves a taste of “we want to make money and that is all that counts” and this leaves a not so nice impression.
I think I’ll switch to a custom ROM - but not to get completely rid of any Google services but to be able to decide what apps I use. Open Camera is ok, but “Aperture” which is included with LineageOS 20 seems to be the better choice in terms of user experience. Banking apps should be possible as well, maybe with the help of Magisk, I’ll see…
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I use Gallery and have no problem on the default FP3 A11 OS
https://f-droid.org/packages/com.simplemobiletools.gallery.pro/
The FP3 is not the FP4…and the FP4 stock camera app photo preview does not work when the Google Pictures App is deactivated… however else it also works fine on the FP4 and with Open Camera or some GCam Ports the preview works just fine…
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I talk about FP4, not FP3.
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Just did the switch to LineageOS 20.
- Backing up everything as far as possible using Google backup feature and app specific ones (Signal, Nova Launcher etc.)
- Unlock the bootloader
- Install LineageOS recovery
- Installing LineageOS 20 as sideload
- Reboot recovery
- Install “MindTheGapps-13.0.0-arm64” package as sideload
- Install OS
- Restore backups including Google account backups
Result:
A much better experience 
All apps work so far, even the banking apps which are usually picky about custom ROMs. But no more strange visual bugs. Also 3-button-navigation works without any issues at all.
For the time being I think I’ll stick with LineageOS.
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In addition - with LineageOS 20 also AptX works fine
If Fairphone reads this thread - which imho is very likely - the one thing that sure won’t encourage them to come up with a solution fast is a string of passive-aggressive comments demanding a solution fast.
I used to run an escalation support team, and I know the guys always processed the aggressive tickets last and at the last moment. All the tickets were always processed on time because we had contractual obligations to reply within a certain delay. But the loudest, most obnoxious and most demanding customers were those who were served the worst.
Just sayin’…
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They are reading this, as linked to . . .