Defacto wrong
FP4 with suggested ROMs
Is New, Google free and sustainable
(For me also pixel devices with this ROMs are sustainable)
FP2 was introduced in December 2015 and will get its last software update is in March 2023 (also see https://support.fairphone.com/hc/en-us/articles/360018643677-FP2-Update-to-the-latest-software). This makes about 7 years of support which much more than nearly all other manufacturers give you. And in all these years you could easily replace damaged parts like the display or the battery if needed.
In addition LineageOS also supports the FP2: LineageOS Downloads - and with that you even get Android 11.
So why do call this not sustainable? What would be sustainable for you? 10 years? 20 years?
At some point all computer based devices come to a point where it becomes impossible to adapt current software versions to it - mostly because the chip manufacturers don’t provide open source drivers which can be adapted for newer operating system versions and in parts because newer software may need more RAM or a newer CPU.
Yes, in an ideal world a company like Fairphone would be able to produce all the chips themself and also write all the needed software themself - but Fairphone is not a huge company like Apple or Samsung and designing and producing chips and creating all the software to get Android support for it including all the required certifications is very expensive.
1 Like
You can also get a Librem phone - this is without Android at all since they use PureOS and at least the battery is easily replacable and they also have a guide how to disassemble the device:
1 Like
Or from Germany a Volla Phone, thats focused on privacy no idea if anything is self-repairable…
A sensible step if you can wean yourself from smart phones, absolutely 
Sustainability is relative. All physical forms degenerate and though humans have developed skills to make tools, machines and tech each item can only be sustained at the expense of other resources the greatest being human exploitation.
It soon becomes clear that people don’t like many forms of exploitation and so we have a business of increasingly smart phones and gadgets, so old ones will not be supported for very long as it is not Financially sustainable
1 Like
I meant for example: If I need a new bottom module I cannot get it through Fairphone anymore.
I did not say it correctly: I realise there is software support – and appreciate it. But the hardware which I need to replace is not available anymore.
Yeap! that’s the way of the ‘new’ tech business
Regarding the release date, the FP2 does well, but of course this doesn’t help you if you bought it just before the release of the FP3 in 2019. Sadly, I even read from time to time about people buying a bunch of the same spare parts “just in case” before they aren’t available anymore and some of these will surely go to waste unused, leaving another FP2 unrepaired.
For me, it’s like reducing plastic waste. Easy to start with and you will get more passionate over time until you reach your personal balance between comfort and the goal. Going zero waste is close to impossible, just because you don’t see it anymore doesn’t mean that there is no waste produced for you.
At this point, I wrote a lot. Then I realised that it’s way easier to ask first at which point you currently are and how much you depend still/at all on Google services. I will still leave my wall of text there in case it’s helpful, it is just not finished.
Most important thing first: Always keep “No backup, no mercy!” in mind. A phone with Google services will backup a lot of data in the cloud, photos, app data, settings, contacts, calendar entries… Don’t keep important data just on your phone!
My personal journey:
-
Get aware of the data Google has about you and decide what you don’t trust them with:
https://takeout.google.com
Set the permissions to use your data as strict as possible.
Replacing an app is relatively easy in most cases (Camera, Gallery, …), replacing a service will most likely cost you money, time or both (data backup). -
Not just apps provided by Google share data with it, many other companies do so. εxodus is a good starting point to check your other apps for trackers of all kind.
-
Start replacing the easiest apps first, this will get you motivated. The best approach is to use FLOSS apps (from F-Droid, the PlayStore or whatever safe(!) source you found), otherwise you will most likely just distribute your data even more.
The list in the first post of this thread is a good start, you may find more up-to-date apps with more specific requests. -
Disable the replaced Google apps or just don’t use them anymore for some time until you are sure you can live without them.
-
Use a tool like Universal Android Debloater to get rid of the unwanted apps you can’t disable. It’s relatively safe to use with the presets, but I had to do some factory resets on my old phone after playing around and removing too many apps. Check this after every system update.
-
Now it’s getting tricky, since you pay for Google’s services with your data. Replacing the dialer will prevent Google from knowing about your calls, but they still have all your contacts. If you have a trustworthy mail provider and it offers this service, you could sync your contacts and calendar entries there. If you have some webspace for example, you could connect it via a file manager and synch your photos with it.
Of course you can jump between the steps at will. If you got this far, enjoy it and decide how far you want to go next.
3 Likes
The way how I’ve been using Android for many years now:
- I run my own Nextcloud server for files, addressbook and calendar and have my own e-mail server - but services like mailbox.org or Posteo are also sufficient for having more privacy (both based in Germany, but there are similar providers in other countries as well).
- DAVx5 is used to synchronize addressbook and calendar with Nextcloud - so Google does not have any contact data at all.
- For e-mail I use K9 Mail or FairEmail.
- Pictures and videos taken with the camera are automatically uploaded to my Nextcloud (the Nextcloud app has an option for this) so I don’t loose anything if the phone might get damaged in a way that it can not be recovered.
3 Likes
Thanks!
So if my life requires the use a certain app from the Google Play Store (e.g. the tan generator of my bank) which is not in F-Droid store, then I can not use LineageOS? Or are there ways to find the relevant apk outside of google’s play store and install it reliably within LineageOS?
Sorry for maybe a bit hijacking this thread, but relevant question to me in regards of degoogling phones: Is there any way to use the google play store without a google account?
You can use Aurora Store to install apps from Google Play without Google Play
Not all apps may work though, Sapio is a community-ran project to keep track of which apps work well without Google Play Services
(You can, however, use LineageOS for microG to get LineageOS with the Open Source Google Play reimplementation microG or install Google Play Services on LineageOS with something like OpenGApps (which is an open source installer for the proprietary Google Play Services, so not truly open))
5 Likes
I understasnd that this is frustrating - but still, we talk about a product which is now about 7 years old and a company which is not a huge group like Samsung or Apple. So Fairphone needs to plan how many spare parts they produce in addition to the phones they sell - and getting this right is not an easy task. You can just do estimations based on the rate of how many spare parts were ordered over the time and maybe you ask the manufacturers to do another batch of modules. But every batch will cost you many thousands of EUR and this is a cost factor which can be a problem if you are a small company.
You can check EBay - they still have used Fairphone 2 models marked as “not working, for spare parts” which are about 30-50 EUR each and may work for you. Yes, this is not ideal, but still better than getting a new phone. Even without further updates the Fairphone 2 should be OK to use for another 1-2 years and paying round 50 EUR to use existing parts is not that expensive.
1 Like
Wow so technical… My phone will not bring up anything GOOGLE… I cannot add any app that depends on Google either. If as you state it is still in the phone, fair play, I do not care, as I never see anything GOOGLE… It is a custom rom, with Google allegedly removed. I am so pleased with it, that now looking to do my tablet as well. Just search through the many custom roms out there… might find what one is looking for.
That depends on what you mean be Google-free, and what you mean by sustainable.
If you mean Google-free in terms of minimizing interactions with Google’s servers and proprietary code, then somewhat paradoxically, it seems like Google’s Pixel phones are the de facto gold standard for deGoogleable phones, perhaps because Google is most at risk of accusations of anti-competitive practices on its own phones. CalyxOS seems primarily designed for Pixels, with the FP4 as a second option (they warn that security updates for propriety components are often outdated). GrapheneOS only supports Pixels. Almost every independent Android distribution supports them, and they seem to have the best support for alternative Android distributions.
If you mean Google-free in terms of no interactions with Google servers, then you start having to worry about all the details discussed in the comments above. Often there are details, and remaining interactions, that would be significant detriments to usability to remove, and so they end up staying in. Actually avoiding all interactions with Google is extremely difficult: for example, as ReCaptcha involves agreeing with Google terms and interacting with Google, there are many state services, including paying some taxes, that I can’t easily do through official websites without also interacting with Google. At this level, you really have to consider the tradeoffs involved in avoiding each of these interactions. And apart from these interactions, proprietary firmware blobs show up everywhere.
If you mean Google-free in terms of no significant Google code at all, then Android as a whole, being a Google product, isn’t suitable. As much as it is nominally open, it is controlled by Google, not community-led, and is deeply integrated with Google: alternative Android distributions must work to remove those integrations without making the system extremely impractical, with Google as an adversary putting up barriers to doing so. You’d likely need to look at non-Android OSs, like postmarketOS, Ubuntu Touch, PureOS, Plasma Mobile, and others, and non-Android phones, like the PinePhone or Purism Librem 5. These are generally significantly harder to use and less stable than Android phones; even basic functionality can sometimes be problematic. On the other hand, when they do work, they both offer far better control of interactions with Google and other companies, and can often run potentially problematic Android apps in sandboxes to help avoid unwanted behaviours.
I think a reasonable summation of Fairphone, for that sort of sustainability focused on useful longevity and long-term repairability, is that their phones are significantly better than most other phones, and significantly worse than their marketing suggests.
But in general, if you’re interested in long-term repairability, first-party support and parts availability does usually end, eventually, even if the timescales involved are usually far shorter for modern consumer electronics than other products*. Fairphone does usually provide first-party parts for longer than other manufacturers.
After that point, repairs become matters of doing more component-level repairs with available or constructed components, finding third-party-manufactured or old stock parts, or taking parts from other, usually broken, devices.
For the latter two, somewhat unfortunately, somewhat regardless of the original support offered, more popular products from bigger manufacturers often end up being more repairable eventually, because more parts were originally available, more devices being made means more are likely available to use as sources of parts, more popularity often means more independent reverse engineering and information, and more third-party manufacturers may have made parts as well. As a longer-term example, while Waltham and Elgin are just as dead as many smaller watch manufacturers, even without the wide availability of parts from broken watches for Waltham and Elgin, you can rather easily find original spare parts in original packaging, and third-party parts and reproductions, while parts for smaller manufacturers may well need to be machined. There was simply much more made—both products and parts—and after well over a half-century of depletion, the stocks of the more highly produced products end up lasting longer.
Thus, I would suspect that you would now have an easier time repairing, say, a Nexus 4, or even, quite possibly, an iPhone from the earliest years, than a Fairphone 1. Over time, the factors involved simply change, unfortunately: even if one device is designed to be more repairable, if parts eventually become unavailable, the more repair-hostile device may become the easier one to repair. I recently bought a replacement battery for a phone from 2007, and a number of parts—of course, of very variable and often dubious quality—for the Nexus 4 and iPhone 4 are on AliExpress, while third-party parts even for the Fairphone 2 simply don’t seem to exist, much less the Fairphone 1.
(* While probably an extreme case, I once dealt with a product where we had support, and usually a support contract, from the manufacturer, for 120 years (for organizational reasons, we only have documentation back to the mid-1920s, but almost certainly had a support contract before then as well). Then they suddenly decided, a few years ago, that they didn’t want to support their oldest products any longer (I don’t know what the cutoff was, maybe 1900?), and unexpectedly wouldn’t renew our support contract. To give some context on what extremely-long-term support ends up looking like, the company providing support to us now stockpiles parts they scavenge throughout the country from devices being dismantled, and even then, many repairs involve them having replacement parts individually machined. For reasons of historical significance, we have absolutely no intention of ever replacing the device, and likely couldn’t even do so legally.)
1 Like
They took two years to publish proper kernel sources for their first device.
And both their first and second device use very old SoCs:
- Volla Phone X uses an even older, likely end of life, chip from 2017: Helio P23 (MT6763V/MT6763T) - MediaTek - WikiChip
- Volla Phone 22 is only marginally better, which likely only has a year left of support if it hasn’t ended already: MediaTek Helio G85 - WikiMovel
4 Likes
For me it just shows how good FP already is seeing the entire picture of Hardware and Software, which is overall a lot more any other company is offering, also thanks to developer like you who gives everyone the opportunity to find the best ROM for their use case.
Are you serious?
…a lot more any other company…
@snowwhite I think you may be overestimating the level of difficulty and amount of time that may be required to install a different operating system on an FP4. The guides that are needed are readily available (including some of the ones shared by @askaaron) and are very well written. I had never contemplated installing a different operating system on a smartphone until about 2 months ago when I saw a thread here that discussed it. I spent a few hours on each of a couple of days to read the threads, and to learn about the different operating systems and decide on one (I chose LineageOS). Then it took me another few hours to install the necessary software (adb and fastboot) following the instructions in the guides, download all the required files for the OS, and actually perform all the steps to install the new operating system.
I would recommend that you start by trying to install adb and fastboot on your computer, which you will need to install any alternate operating system. If you can figure that out, then the remaining steps to install a new OS will be very straightforward.
2 Likes
This topic was automatically closed 180 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.