Should we be a bit worried about FairPhone’s policies? And the roll out of it’s unique system to be able to repair phones. I’m kind of in a big doubt. I’ve bought a Fairphone, not because it’s such amazing piece of tech, but because they seem to be the only ones trying to bring some values to the game of the smartphone industry. And honestly, I don’t want to go back to another brand. And I assume that he majority of their clientele.
YET. If you buy a new Fairphone (I bought a Fairphone 3+ in June '21), and ONLY two years later spare parts aren’t available anymore. How do you bring that together with the concept that Fairphone sais to be? If repairing and replacing isn’t possible in such a SHORT time-span, what is it’s actually use then of that option and one of the main reasons to get one?
Any thoughts on this?
I’d love to hear people from Fairphone on the topic.
You bought a used phone five years after release and are complaining now two years later that there are no spare parts?
Fairphone is trying to change the market and puts a lot of effort in it, but they are no magicians. Their market share doesn’t bring manufacturers to produce batches of spare parts in homeopathic doses. So for a FP2, there will be sadly no spare part resurrection.
But for the successors, spare parts are still available or back in stock shortly.
P.S.: Just for the records, the original post was talking about buying a FP2 in 2021.
That’s just a promise and soon can be anything from next week till january, if you think of the bottom module, which is not available since half a year now and even Fairphone can’t tell us a reliable delivery date.
I know for sure 3 users who put their back on fairphone and moved on to other cheap brands, just because they could not wait 6 months for a critical spare part like the bottom module (I mean really: who can life without a smartphone like just a week or so, think of banking apps, train tickets and so on).
We had this in times of Fairphone 2: the bottom module was out of stock and then suddenly announced, not to be produced anymore, while a lot of buyers with their like 3 years old FP2 couldn’t use it anymore. I once thought Fairphone as company has learned the right lessons about this case, but I doubt it.
Now we have the nearly same situation with Fairphone 3, a lot of users are now out of warranty and a spare part out of stock means in most of the case the purchase of a new phone.
Why should I trust in spare part availability for FP4 or FP5?
Fairphone has now around 50 different spare parts to manage (incl. FairBuds/XL)
Well. Obviously there’s a clear lesson to be learned from the current situation with the bottom module. However, you’re assuming FP don’t do anything with this lesson. My sincere hope is that they’ll learn and that this situation will not rise again for FP4 and 5 in two and four years respectively.
I think nobody mentioned it so far: while the bottom module isn’t available to buy, if you need a repair of a module that is currently “out of stock”, you could still opt for a repair via the repair center (which has its own drawbacks of course).
When the FP2 bottom module was announced to not come back to the store, the company said they still had enough to cover (estimated) repairs under warranty.