Whut? 
Sorry, my head is spinningā¦
@paulakreuzer out!
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Sorry Paul I didnot mean to overstrain you.
You wrote:
So it will be reduced as soon as Fairphone will have enough employees to answer requests quicker.
I answered with a question mark
Your promise that it will be reduced automatically as a simple matter of time ?
- I also think that the employees at FP increase
- I am not sure that this automatically brings us the expected acceleration for responses.
I think I get the āDowntimeā point from @anon9505190 .
From my perspective it looks like that Fairphone got a stability and reliability problem with the FP2 in some cases. This is mentions in realy a lot of different threads at the forum. And yes this is not for all the users but I think there are a lot more then 1% DOA and some people here at the Forum.
I donāt know if this all comes from production issues and quality assuance in the production process or if itās software related. Perhaps there are only some charges affected. If this all would be only software related there would be more impact on all user.
So Iām not shure if someone on Fairphone side is working on this stability and reliability issues. Or if the only solution is to send the the phone back to get it replaced. The workarounds are just workarounds for a timeframe but shure no solution.
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I would like to seperate the issue downtime-of-FP2 from the buglist. (This is why I donāt agree I would be too general, too pesimistic or what else.
How is a buglist related to downtime, not only in general ? Therefor I fully understand the question āwhat is it anyway?ā and I strongly agree that the word downtime needs to be defined properly, also in many examples. After having a more or less precise definition regarding to none-availibiltiy of the FP2 then we can take a clock and stop the time, write it down and collect it here to be published. Interesting also the time from arrival where it was in uptime or not (-> DOA)
By the way: the title of this post given py paul is almost a joke because nobody wants to stop downtime like another bug issue.I saw that he didnot comprehend due to his statistics.
Well, maybe you could start to define downtime and also start a list with what you think could fall under this category.
Honestly I still donāt think I 100% got what you mean, so I think this would help also to clarify.
Certainly an interesting approach.
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The definition was already started also by some examples above.
Since you answered that I am too general about it now feel free to ask again about it. Maybe you think again I am too general about it after I propose the next examples ?
No problem with me. I only hope the moderator doesnot want again to āmake it stopā after I defined it 
I guess what you also might need are some statistic related to your list.
You could just write down (on paper!) the various ādowntimesā of your phone with a known ROM version for a day/week/month, including the time and fix (lost call, reboot, 3 mins) and the error you think caused it (if known). That would give some more āhardā info you could use to talk about it.
Like: 20 calls accepted ā¦ 5 lost due to phone crashes or something like that. Just an example and an idea, of course!
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Oft course I found a technical IT-source for definition: Techopedia.com
https://www.techopedia.com/definition/6913/downtime
And of course I am systemadministrator in a datacenter for german aerospace where strict service level agreement SLA has to be fullfilled by quarterly reports. So I hope I may relax some of my professional expertise. But the biggest issue for our datacenter is the planned downtime when we update our servers .
Thanks even lately or afterwards for your understanding.
I am still collecting cases/incidents from the tag #blackscreen or others. Also I have to ābreak downā the concept of professional planned and unplanned downtimes . The differences to incidents rather beeing complete outtages e.g. like power outtage/blackouts and beeing time out e.g. time beeing sent for repair shall shed a light on my concept of downtime. Downtime should be quite clear in opposite to the uptime of the device that should be defined as well.
That means how the time with workarounds, tidious procedures for the user and much time with searching this forum turns a temporary outtage automatically from a certain point in time into the downtime if no solution is found. The main difference to a simply broken device lies in the abstraction of the phone beeing a service to FP owners as customers rather than the bare power LED as uptime sign of live. That means also some very fundamental services like mobile network (SIM-cards problems), internet wifi-problems or SD card data-exchange may lead in summary or combination on the same device to a downtime even while the power supply, display, keyboard or other hardware is fully functional.
The main result of defining downtimes maybe is the concept of SLA=Service-level-agreement. Usually this is a limit of unavailibility agreed with the company FP e.g. about hours or days in total about downtimes of all devices for an commonly agreed time frame.
This looks to me utopic. However I am not sure if FP maybe has such internal SLAs. But think about the demands of @paulakreuzer. He demanded how many steps every user has to fullfill before contacting the support team (!) . This also truely sounds to me like a service-level-agreement for this forum.
An SLA applies to a service. The Fairphone is not sold as a service, but a as product (with outright ownership), if purchased directly from them. In this case the product needs to be fit for purpose at the time of sale, and after that no manufacturing defects should become apparent for the period stated in the warranty. If they do, it is fixed under warranty.
If you lease* the phone from a telecommunications provider and have set up an SLA with them, then the question of downtime may become important. This discussion should be avoided by having a clear definition of downtime in the contract. Most telecoms companies these days actually state that there is no guarantee that the service can actually be used, effectively this amounts to an SLA where 100% downtime (or 0% uptime) is deemed satisfactory performance. If you are in the situation that your Fairphone is leased as part of a service agreement, you should be having the discussion about up/downtime with your service provider, not the manufacturer of the device they chose to provide you with.
I donāt think heās forbidding people from contacting support. Thereās no obligation to even read the forum before contacting support. A lot of people on the forum just want to help people use their phones. At the moment that means pointing them to a relevant topic that may help them out. Official support should definitely be better, but just piling on requests that could have been solved faster on the forum in my view isnāt going to make things better for anyone who just wants to get on with it and use their phone, or those who have a genuine manufacturing defect.
The closest thing to an SLA that is relevant on the forum are the terms of service.
*this is usually not the case even when you pay for it on a contract, in which case you still own the device outright and are bound to a credit arrangement with the provider.
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May I ask you like a lawyer if the mandatory manual for this product is missing ?
I donāt see the relevance of availability of a product manual to whether the concept of downtime has any importance in dealing with problems that people have in using the device. If you feel something is missing, youāre welcome to help others by contributing it.
Other than that, the user guide provides information on how to use the device, as well as required health and safety documents. Further parts that can be considered part of the manual are available on-device (iFixit, tutorials, etc; Iām not aware of any legal requirement to provide all information on paper in any of the countries that Fairphone ships to). So based on my own understanding I would say that sufficient information is provided, especially when considering non-printed materials.
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Have I got you right that you donāt see any dependency between problems that people have in using the device and the availability of a product manual ? Even not with a complex product like a smartphone ?
The tiny single sheet called User Guide is sufficient for the hardware not for the delivered software. I hope we still agree how we didnot only buy hardware with a smartphone ??
If we agree most of the product deals with software then I am not sure that your well formed sentences above are sufficient to more than a piece of hardware . Most people agree that software is not a product like any other and follows more rules for a kind of service.
First Iād like to make a difference betweeen an object called product manual beeing CE marked and fullfills all legal requirement beside the task to inform the user and a valid and fine user documentation. Of course it doesnot matter if it comes as an electronic CD or printed traditionally on paper. But it makes a difference if it is dispersed on even more places than the places already listed by you.Sometimes I think this forum is the replacement for the manual.
Fact (to me) is the official answer from FP support (to me) who points to the manuals of Googles Android 5.1
But I am not sure whether it makes sense to discuss further with you when you see no sense in user documentation formerly known as handbooks or manuals in order to prevent problems of users in using their device.
(really) sorry
So, you would like a paper manual for android to be delivered with the phone? In terms of resource efficiency, transport emissions and many other impacts, this would be a disasterā¦
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No, you got me not right, sorry. The word paper appears in @Johannes post not in mine. If it appears in my post then only compared to the non-printed form due to itās legal character.
But you did think the provided information (on paper) was not sufficient, not? So, what else do you expect?
Well, I have to agree with @anon9505190 to some extent, that I do think having a good documentation helps to figure how software works.
But I nevertheless doubt that for a product like a phone it would lead to a significant improvement for the user base. What we can see here in the FP forum (as well as in other places) is that many people who have problems havenāt even read this very short manual or the support pages on the FP website. So personally I think that a detailed documentation, as much as I agree with you that it would be of added value, might only be read by a small minority, which probably will also find answers to their questions through web search.
So I am not convinced that a detailed documentation would make the situation significantly better.
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Nope, I guess Iām just too subtle.
My original post was about how SLAs are irrelevant. As SLAās are not relevant, measuring concepts that belong to them (like downtime), have no use - they do not contribute to a solution and the values youād get have no constructive use. Your response is then basically (at least by implication) ābecause there is no manualā, which is both not relevant to the discussion on whether downtime is in any way useful as a concept, nor factually accurate.
In an attempt to avoid misunderstandings: It is a problem when people cannot use their phone, but I do not see how adding up those minutes is going to help.
I just donāt see what it actually is that you want to achieve (and how you plan to get there). Are any of the following what you want?:
- Better / centralised documentation
- More support staff / shorter waiting times
- A product recall
In none of those the collection of downtime seems relevant for a solution, so Iām guessing you mean something else. Right now all I see is waste of energy that could be better spent actually helping people.
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