This is called crippleware. The hardware can feature X (leds blink on messages, play FM-radio). But the manufacturer of the device (fairphone) says no, you don’t get that.
Very sad… 
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Except that Fairphone does not have any incentive to make you buy a more expensive product with those features, because such a product doesn’t exist.
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They may not have any intention of doing this (I dont think so either), but they do. Other smartphones with snapdragon 632 processor have FM radio. What reason is there for withholding this feature from customers?
Maybe the manpower of the company are not enough. But if they dont talk to the community and make the software open source, nobody can help them.
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Every time they say anything here, they’ll be legally bound to that, so you want to be very careful with just spouting anything in the open.
They’ll give priority on issues, probably based on some kind of risk assessment (which includes the impact). The impact of a LED not changing colors or device not having FM, well, for you it appears to be the end of the world. For most users however, it is a minor nuisance at best.
And, yes, it is very likely they’re very busy right now as they just released a new product.
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The PF3 servicemenu application indeed contains a FM radio test. You won’t see it though because it was disabled. A comments hint to some kind of noise issue.
This is purely speculation from my part, but maybe this is just a solvable software issue.
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Not just that, we don’t know whether the headphone plug is properly wired to serve as antenna.
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Can anyone confirm if “SpiritF” works on a rooted Fairphone 3?
https://forum.xda-developers.com/apps/spirit-fm/app-spirit2-free-source-real-fm-radio-t2951455
well we have the kernel sources, is there by any chances an FM driver in there that’s just disabled.
and if not. is there a phone with the same chipset with working FM chip that we have kernel sources? could simply patch the kernel to include the FM chip (if there is one, and if its not disabled in hardware / by fuse, or simply not soldered to anything)
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Thanks. As this only leaves a working notification LED and “automatically stop charging at 80 %” as “nice to have” features, I’m not going through the trouble of rooting right now. And it remains a mystery if just the driver is missing or there is a hardware limitation.
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The Moto G7 Optimo Maxx is supposed to have a working FM receiver as well as a SDM632 CPU. If we can find Android Linux kernel sources with a working FM driver it might be possible to port it to FP3. Again this doesn’t guarantee that it would actually work.
Supposed to be this kernel:
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The Moto G7 Power has a SDM632 and a working FM receiver as well. And it seems, that the source code is already available; according to this xda-developers page:
Not, that I can make anything of it; but maybe this can help as well?
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well, looking at it, there is indeed a radio driver in it - enabled with CONFIG_RADIO_IRIS=y
CONFIG_RADIO_IRIS_TRANSPORT=y
under mmc adapters, which is labeled: “Driver for QTI FM Radio Transceiver”
The FP3 kernel has this driver and it is enabled. It is also referenced in the dtb tree, so in theory this should work, but when I looked at the device tree source, I could not find any pin/IO connection information related. dmesg does not report the driver initializing, which would indicate it might not “see” it’s hardware, which could mean
- the hardware is not there (disabled/ommitted in the chip version FP uses)
- its misconfigured in the device tree and therefore not found
definitely worth looking into some more. It’s supposed to be there and there is a driver, too.
Edit: btw, yes “transceiver” - by the quick look I had, the driver code includes functions to both receive and transmit FM radio 
maybe FP it was disabled for CE conformity issues
Edit: the comlete lack of any message in dmesg suggests the device tree might be telling the kernel that there is no radio, so the driver doesn’t even attempt to configure. if the device tree were saying there is a radio chip, but there isn’t, there should be an error message of some sort, which I couldn’t find
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About 10-15 years ago (?) small FM transmitters for personal use were common. I think this also was a feature of some early smartphones, and you could transmit audio without a cable or Bluetooth. This should be legal if the radiated power is very low (50 nanowatts?), which should limit the range to a few meters.
Somebody above already said it. The hardware/ processor can handle FM radio, Fairphone simply won’t let you have it. It’s Crippleware. There is no rational reason why a FP can’t do FM radio. In the end, it would have added one or two tracks to the PCB, saving two cents per phone.
The company Fairphone will not comment on whether there are hardware or software limitations. So we have to discuss this further.
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I moved a lot of posts to a new topic to keep this topic here on-topic about whether the FP3 actually has an FM radio.
If you are interested in discussing whether the FP3 actually needs an FM radio, please see the new topic:
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oh i posted in the wrong topic then, sorry about that
then i will write it here again, because more fitting:
local tech store has that in the specs of the FP3
but they could be wrong? idk (ja=yes, for non-german speakers)
Maybe the store has a FP3.1.
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Yes and no.
Yes … it’s not in the current official specs.
No … it obviously was in specs circulated to resellers before the release of the phone, possibly because the SoC used in the phone supports it in general, but it would still have to be implemented with antenna wiring and software support. Software support seems not to be there at the moment but perhaps possible, wiring seems unclear (if I didn’t miss something).
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