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.
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.
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.
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
Is it???
I put quotation marks around it to specifically signify I meant the general function, not the actual person. Evidently it more than failed…
All right, I stand corrected. I had completely missed the fairphone-4-software-issues thread, which is quite informative, thanks for pointing it out! (Those threads should be stickied, IMHO.)
Anyway, what I was saying is that I expected more status reports from Fairphone, more posts like “fairphone-4-software-issues”.
A saying goes along the lines that in times of crisis managers should communicate…
Sorry that you feel this way. This forum is mostly self-run because we are lucky to have such an amazing community. My role here is to be the face of Fairphone for big topics, to help Angels with their requests and whatnot. I do read the forum quite often, and so do other members of the company to make sure we are all aware of what’s going on here, even if we don’t talk too often.
I’m also the Social Media Manager, meaning that I can not dedicate hours to this forum because I also have other tasks. This has been the same for previous Community Managers - some were able to be more active, some others weren’t - but that doesn’t mean we don’t care about this forum and the community here. We are also aware of all the issues going on with Fairphone 3 and 4, that’s why we are working on updating the bugs tracking list after listening to you all. And we also have an amazing Customer Support team to whom people can reach with their issues (and they process and answer all tickets the same way, whether the request is polite, aggressive, neutral, or whatsoever)
Hope this clarifies a little the role of the Community Manager here. Again, I want to highlight that we do read you and hear you and care about the forum, even if my (or our) presence here is only for the big topics.
I can only speak for myself of course, but as somebody who has bought a FP4 and has been experiencing rather annoying issues for many months, what I would like is more frequent updates on potential fixes. Even updates like “sorry, still haven’t found why it does that” are fine with me. That is what would show Fairphone is caring about their customers: Keeping them informed.
(IMHO, YMMV, etc.)
Sorry, but this comment is absolutely unneccessary.
As suggested, a public bug tracker similar to the one which existed for the FP 2 would be nice, so one can always check there before submitting an issue. This would also make the process more transparent. One coould see what is already being worked on or what may take more time or even what will be treated as “won’t fix” including an explanation why certain things have to be as they are (for example why the supplied camera app of Fairphone 4 is hardcoded to use Google Photos and won’t work with any other gallery app - maybe this is a requirement by Google if the camera is based on code provided by Google, but I don’t know and the support can’t tell me either).
Yes, I am aware that maintaining such a thing needs time - but just using a public repository on Gitlab or Github to collect user reports about bugs and feature requests would change a lot.
And yes, I am also aware that this topic was already discussued many times. But telling people they are “spoilt children” because they like to know what is going on, does not really help either.
I was going to edit after your critique but wanted to understand better before I do.
Is it
a) I should not criticise the frequent and general demand that users want Fairphone to communicate more
b) That I shouldn’t emphasise it by comparing to ‘children’ or
c) You think that is an unfair observation of children
I understand how you can see it is not helpful but this is a topic about communicating with users, not a [Help] topic. Also this topic is not not directed to Fairphone but but a peer to peer opinion.
I’m sure also that I fall into that category of people that expect a lot of or to some, too much attention, so I speak for and about myself too.
and the referred to comment I made in that topic
This forum deals mostly with functions of the Fairphone, but a lot is just complaining about Fairphone and some is for for emotional support to users. The later is difficult to judge as to whether indulge or cut off.
Either way I’m happy to cut out. I’ll wait to see if there’s a response that seems to warrant a reply and then I’ll mute this topic.
It is, that you are insulting people by calling them ‘spoiled children’.
For a native english speaker it might possibly sound different, but for me, that is nasty. It implies, that the request for a more explicit communication about bugs that are addressed or not addressed is an inappropriate wish.
When I ran a support team, we supported big customers with different support level contracts. Some had premium contracts that required us to respond within 1 hour and come up with a fix in 6 hours. We literally updated them every 30 minutes, even just to say “we’re on it”.
The lowest level contract required a reply within 3 hours and a fix within 3 days. We updated them every day.
It’s human psychology: people like to know their stuff is being worked on. It’s supremely important for customer satisfaction. The one thing that’s guaranteed to hurt customer satisfaction is lack of communication: people hate companies that don’t talk to them, or talk to them only when asked. Even if the talking is done by a cron job sending an automated email at a fixed time, that’s enough for people to think “Nice! These guys aren’t forgetting me,”
In this case, Fairphone is dealing with issues that affect everybody (bugs) not individual cases. What I would do is simply maintain a list of open bugs and have someone update the status every week. You know, a simple text file with entries like “This-or-that bug: under investigation, likely cause Acme driver - Jul 10, 2023”.
Every week, I’d go around in the Monday meeting and update the text file (with an actual update, not just changing the dates, else people will notice and get mad ). It really shouldn’t take more than a minute per line, and probably less than that.
Lol why are you constantly defending their inability?
It’s really a shame how Fairphone treats their customers, but there are still people who defend them for whatever reason.
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