Communicating with the users

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 :wink: .

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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…:wink:

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.

  1. Backing up everything as far as possible using Google backup feature and app specific ones (Signal, Nova Launcher etc.)
  2. Unlock the bootloader
  3. Install LineageOS recovery
  4. Installing LineageOS 20 as sideload
  5. Reboot recovery
  6. Install “MindTheGapps-13.0.0-arm64” package as sideload
  7. Install OS
  8. Restore backups including Google account backups

Result:

A much better experience :slight_smile:

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 :slight_smile:

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 . . .

It was a rhetorical :slight_smile: Of course they read their own forum. What a silly concept for a company to set up a forum and completely ignore it…

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Actually they don’t read the forum in the usual sense: I spend hours a day reading all the new topics etc. I can’t see Fairphone doing that and taking on an official response or inactivity.

I can post my views, ignore whole categories, mute posts and users and I still have an enormous job keeping up with the topics.

Fairphone post about updates and reasonably see the responses, but they do not read the forum per ce.

But this thread has evidence of being noted:

and of course at the top of the site is


Help

Find solutions and ask community for help with your FP product. If you have a HW or SW issue this is the right place. For general questions about FPs please go to The Products. ATTENTION: This is not the official FP company support. Please contactsupport for official help and support.

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I can understand that people are pissed. This issue is causing a 600€+ device to be pretty much unusable outside. It also makes the entire phone look bad. This issue has been known for months now, and the company that made the phone seemingly has absolutely no idea how to fix it.

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It seems

  • They are aware of the issue around a heat sensor cause

  • No doubt they are also working on an A13 update, which the FP3 has

  • Each update has to certified by Google so small incremental ones take more work than the average user can imagine.

  • So how much time and resources are used is questionable, and sure the problem can be dramatic. However one of my daughters has this issue but doesn’t complain

Yes, but here’s my take: I’m fairly sure Fairphone isn’t ignoring issues on purpose. I think it’s pretty safe to presume they want to treat their customers well, and either they’re not working on the problem because they have a good reason, or they are working on the problem, but they’re not communicating. I believe lack of communication is the crux of the problem here really. But let’s not assume they’re not doing anything to solve the problem.

I will add this, at the risk of annoying the Dutch patrons of the forum: I lived in Belgium for many years, and ordered many things from many vendors in the Netherlands - be it products or services - and the one thing that struck me was how maddeningly uncommunicative Dutch businesses can be.

I often ordered custom jobs and parts from Dutch machine shops and composite part makers that cost many thousands of euros, and the Dutch businesses would simply shoot a terse email saying the final product has shipped when it had shipped. No update, no progress report, no nothing for months on end.

It’s the only country where businesses regularly and consistently behave that way. Completely maddening! In 15 years, I never got used to it.

Fairphone being a Dutch company, well… let’s say I’m not surprised in the slightest. Just be aware of this factoid of doing business in the Netherlands and the waiting time will pass easier :slight_smile:

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Well, they did hire a “community manager” a month or two ago, so they are aware there is some room for improvement there. And she wasn’t even dutch…

Except we only heard from that “community manager” once! She sure went native quickly… :astonished: :laughing:

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