Ex Apple User seeking advice on FP6 and eOS

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Hi all, glad to be on the forum. UK Apple user here who is committed to leaving Apple, big tech and cloud services. Last week I pre-ordered a Jolla Phone 2. In my research I came across Ubuntu Touch - not realising it was still being maintained and viable… when looking for good hardware to run it on, I came across the Fair Phone 5 and 6. Then, I discovered this ‘e/OS/’ and I seen I can buy the FP6 with it pre-installed and ever since this has been my most of-interest device to replace my iPhone 16 Pro Max.

I feel like eOS might be the best option, running on hardware actually designed, marketed and sold and supported with it pre-installed from a vendor that has been around for a while. Like Jolla, the hardware and software is all within Europe too, which is something I am growing incredibly strong toward wanting to support.

I am ditching the cloud due to the UKs new war on encryption, online privacy and freedom. Sadly all cloud providers are subject to the same anonymous, handover of data for any or no reason and as a result I’m moving to an Ubuntu PC and will sync everything locally, over my LAN automatically between phone and PC which most of the time should give me close to that ‘iCloud magic’, without someone elses computer(s) being in the middle. It should also be fun to dabble in all of this.

With all that said… should I go ahead and order a FP 6 with eOS - the 14 day try it policy makes this really… really tempting and safe to give a go.

I am aware that going with eOS will mean likely no banking apps, no MS Authenticator, no NFC / card payments or apps for everything under the sun (Starbucks, McDonald’s all those handy little loyalty point programmes etc). I am prepared to give this up. My plan for contact, calendars, a Keepass DB and file sync will be as I said above, a little local server running off my Ubuntu PC that will sync when at home on the wifi network. Email will be the only thing on someone elses cloud, I’m told running your own mail server is a bit of a risky one as if it goes off even for a while, lost data forever etc. Though I will move all email on to this PC locally to ‘store’ it. I currently have iCloud email and Outlook, a third option would be nice that is just that… mail and nothing else. Proton is only good when paid and doesn’t play well with Ubuntu mail clients etc without a special plugin and subscription so I’m not sure about that. Any other recommendations?

Tl;dr - should I go for the FairPhone and eOS, any tips?

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Welcome to the Community Forum :waving_hand:

Frankly I think you have already done your research well. One thing to bear in mind (although you already seem to gravitate towards buying from Fairphone and not from Murena): Fairphone’s warranty terms leave you much more freedom when it comes to the operating system on your Fairphone – so in theory you could still change your mind after buying the FP6 from Fairphone and install another operating system yourself. In contrast, if you bought the FP6 from Murena (Fairphone’s partners who develop and maintain /e/OS), their terms would not allow you to do so.

When it comes to banking apps, you might actually get surprised and be able to use it in /e/OS – but that is hard to predict and never guaranteed indefinitely (banking app developers might come to adopt new Google security technology that /e/OS needs to mimic to keep the app working in /e/OS).

Just one more suggestion should you go for /e/OS – also have a look at Murena’s forum at https://community.e.foundation

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well guys… I went ahead on Christmas Eve and ordered a Fair Phone 6 with eOS, direct from the makers site. @urs_lesse thanks for that advice, I did go for it directly in the end. Extra glad I did now.

At least I could change other OSs, seen a thread on here about Lineage OS having an official build… this seems to be one of the most widely supported mainstream phones with a reputable / track record manufacturer behind it in terms of OS choice.

I know e/OS/ has all these alternative mechanisms to run Android apps, but is it bad I’m contemplating just not bothering at all? I suppose it remains to be seen how much difficulty that will lead to. However, my pain has been with iOS currently. Set up a Radicale server on my Ubuntu laptop and Syncthing to take care of contacts and calendar sync, plus the KeePass DB. iOS is refusing to see the CalDAV server, though it’s all configured….. can’t wait for e/OS/ as I think that fully supports these standards and non maliciously I’d imagine…

As for e/OS/ are there any decent smart watches (mainly for health tracking and heart rate tracking / alerts) that I can use without a proprietary app or cloud service. Some people online saying Garmin devices use .fit files that can be synced via USB directly to the PC, but anything else that works?

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Oh, so far, Amazfit device with ‘Gadgetthing’ as an OS - is that what a lot of you guys are doing?

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Gadgetbridge is a great choice. The only (?) practical choice for privacy-froendly smart watch usage.

I know that Amazfit are in generally well supported, just make sure all the features you want are supported. Activity trackers, trails are generally not supported if I recall correctly.

You’re going to have to dig around online to find exact models. It’s a fun research project for both this, and your other data ownership project. Interesting journey to read so please share your experience along the way for others that might want to try the same thing.

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Interesting topic. I like the look of the Jolla - very reminiscent body shape of my BlackBerry Priv.

@fair1500 are you still ordering the Jolla??

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Hey, I emailed to cancel the pre-order. Money is tight enough, the StarLite tablet I pre-ordered from Starlabs to run Ubuntu comes in at just under £1,000, hoping to get that for my M4 iPad Pro 1TB model (listed on eBay). Once the FairPhone 6 comes the iPhone 16 Pro Max will be going up, hoping to get around £650-£700 to cover the cost of the FP. Then have the Apple Watch to sell, Series 10 but the values really tanked when the newer model in September dropped. Still, not going up so it’s got to go too. I’ll miss the Watch the most to be honest, Apple is truly innovating year on year there and its so accurate. Was at A&E earlier this year with some chest pain (it was all alright in the end) but I offered to show the doctor the ECG scans and remarked ‘I know it’s probably hit or miss’, he said ‘No from what I see they tend to be quite accurate the Apple Watches’, really bolstered my confidence in them. From what I can see online many of the things like PineTime (which I’d otherwise be happy to use, since it has HR tracking) are far from accurate sadly :frowning:

So far the iPhone is the barrier but I’ve got my KeePass DB set up to sync via Syncthing, this morning Obsidian for notes on Ubuntu which won’t sync with iOS in a LAN / over my router method that I want, but apparently the FP6 on eOS will allow me to do that. Plus proper CalDAV and CardDAV support for contacts and calendar etc.

It’s slow progress but I’ve been on Ubuntu for a week and a half and the answer to most queries even really specific ones the answers always tend to be ‘yes’ in terms of handling data and sync how I want to. I have had the old ‘go back to Apple, those shiny few month old devices are still here for now’ as I have before when trying to break out to Windows and Samsung etc, but this time the reasoning of having my data local and offline, none of those commercial ecosystems will work… so that’s keeping me firmly on this. Even if eOS and the FP , plus Ubuntu will have some things i can’t recreate.

I hope the Jolla project goes well. Though if the FP goes well, then I’ll have it for five years. I’d love to support both projects, but for FairPhone to be supporting a truly open OS (maybe more in the future, imagine being able to choose other OS’s) even for the £50 extra it cost, sometimes you’ve gotta put your money where your mouth is. My friends told me to go get a Dell or HP 2-in-1 or laptop from Currys here and just install Ubuntu on it, rather than ‘wasting money’ on a dedicated Linux system builder product. I see their points, but I want to support these businesses that have been around a while and are giving it a good go at making ‘buying a Linux PC’. or Linux phone, a reality. Plus, the iPad Pro as a form factor worked really well, it was my ‘main computer’, I could carry it in the inside pocket of my winter coat! I’m a nerd, but I loved that idea. Of course, a few weeks ago I had about 100 video files to convert the format of, best I could get was some £10 app which could do one video at a time.. clunky as hell. M4 chip is a beast… but it’s in prison on the iPad. So even without the UK authoritarian regime lawmaking / war on privacy, the iPad had its limits. Though this little StarLite tablet with full x86 Ubuntu… that’s pure freedom!
Sorry to go on a rambling, but the tablet plus the FairPhone are the full set up :slight_smile: I’m so excited. For now, using Ubuntu on a Pentium HP laptop with a cracked chassis and line of dead pixels. But freedom tastes good.

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I run my own email server using a virtual machine at Mythic Beasts, using some open source tooling to make week and email hosting easier called Sympl. I’ve been hosting my own email for 18 years now. With all of the things setup I haven’t had any issues as far as I’m aware. Email is resilient and will be retried if the server is temporarily down.

Main thing that stops me from hosting it in my house is needing email access whilst moving house though that is rare, the number of emails during the house move which are urgent is high, hence the need to host the email and spam assassin off site.

There are many articles only about how hard it is to host email however I’ve found it can be easy to do though there are many things to setup.

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@fair1500 I’ll be very interested to read your initial thoughts with the FP6.

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Thanks Urs. Concerning banking apps: what is important is that the boot loader is locked again after installing an alternative OS. I experienced this with the banking app of UBS. It is working well with e/OS/ but it was not not with iodéOS, as with the latter the boot loader cannot be locked again. So at the moment I stick to e/OS/.

There might be other banking apps (like the one of ZKB here) that do not need the boot loader to be locked, but most do.

So other OS like ubuntu touch can only be suggested when not using those kind of apps. (I am in the process of trying out ubuntu touch again on a sceond hand FP4, together with waydroid, but I am not very fond of it, the usability is far worse than of Android in general).

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Cf (Editable list) Apps compatible with iodéOS - Apps & Core Settings - iodé community

You can see the comment “reports jail broken device” at the “UBS Access App” - q.e.d. :wink:

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Santander’s UK app would be nice, as would the likes of PayPal, Trading 212… but if they need Google Services, then I dunno, web apps? At least on eOS I hope it won’t do what my iPhone does and constantly pull me into the app store to install ‘the app’. Is the built in browser good at forcing ‘desktop mode’ when needed? Or user agent spoofing to make it think it’s like… Edge on Windows?

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Shipped today - 8th January is the expected arrival. Quite excited!

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Firefox mobile (or fennec fork from F-Droid) easily allow you to toggle desktop mode, and control if external apps are opened when supported (though it’s not per app but a global toggle). It also allows you to install uBlock origin which is a nice addition.

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That sounds good! So I used to participate in the MacRumors forum as an Apple nut. I made a post about the UK war on privacy (in general) and how this affects not just Apple / iCloud, but pretty much any service we use or big tech name (more so the OS of Android and iOS). Got banned didn’t I? Although I made it clear it wasn’t a political discussion, but naturally… must be mentioned. I was hoping people would start thinking about these matters or maybe even present some sort of argument to say “it’s not so bad”.

Part of me does feel bad as in August I bought a very expensive iPad Pro (1TB does not come cheap), a S10 Watch and iPhone 16 Pro Max. These are all still shiny and new, and this past month I have at times tried to rationalise and find a way to keep them - less ewaste, and maybe solutions exist.
There are some major hoops to jumps through such as manual encryption and turning all of iCloud off but still, Apple collect all sorts of usage data and if they were made to, would have to hand it over. Plus… without the ‘magic’ of iCloud, why even bother with Apple? That’s what sets it apart. But with the new found concerns… it’s no good to me. Neither is OneDrive or Google Drive etc.

I know things aren’t as bad in the EU countries yet, or the USA, but some of your governments / states are toying with the idea and embarrassingly, our government is really showing the way in 'doing things nobody asked for, many protest against, but getting away with it anyway’. It’s really sad and scary if it were to become standard everywhere. Not only that but the risk that bad actors would then hack in and see all our data.. every other week we find out some sort of system here was found to have been breached in recent years secretly and many peoples data exposed to other countries. It’s crazy.

I sort of wish i was never switched on to all of this. It’s not that I can’t get by with Apple, but if future years are like this year then we already know that all of a sudden they’ll ban the encryption apps, VPNs or make them illegal. Apple / Google will be forced to comply and do it and boom, I’m back to where I am now as is everyone else.

So this eOS and Ubuntu continues to be my best bet. Totally open operating systems that no one company controls or can be forced to modify. And hey, if they do, the PCs and FairPhone are compatible with running something else.

I wish more people cared.

I will be travelling in a few days, sad that the FP6 won’t be here to give it a good testing camera wise and all, but it’s the iPhone’s last major trip. Not just this iPhone, but my time with Apple in general. I was just thinking… 20 years ago when I got into Apple, very little was on the cloud, that iDisk or iDrive and .Mac, that was it. Computers and even phones were just devices and inherently your data was in your hands for the most part. If only they could have foreseen stuff like this, would they have developed differently from the ground up.

Sorry for the rant. This topic is what brings me here!

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I swapped to a FP5 from Apple about a year ago, with the official /e/OS build. The de-googling and the Fairphone sourcing were big factors, and the forced upgrades that Apple causes. Fairphone reparability and a minimum of 8+ years updates plus a community doing their own releases means you don’t get pushed into replacing handsets. Some people seem to be still using FP2 or FP1s!

Rather than buy the (overpriced) Murena ones I got an “open box” return via eBay and manually wiped it and installed the official /e/OS build. Saved at least £75. Updates you get automatically notified about and click the update option, just like ios. I only had a minor issue on the FP5 install but found it a bit of a chore (I put a thread here with the solution). I had no idea wtf to do but the instructions and installer were spot on (my tech skills are great so I was pretty confident I would manage). https://doc.e.foundation has the Murena documentation and the builds for self-installs. Murena has its own limited cloud storage which is optional but useful in transferring things across. In the UK, Co-op website and I think the Post Office (?) had discounts on FPs when I was shopping around.

e/OS…

Very few issues on FP5 although I now regret doing the official rather than community build - the official build updates are noticeably slower to come out. Updates work in the same way as ios.

One thing I had find is that in Android’s settings, Advanced Privacy allows you to check apps and turn on specific trackers for a particular app, this was what I needed to do to get game app rewards from watching ads - by default the ads were all blocked. :grin:

Fairphone itself…

Fairphone doesn’t have wireless charging on the FP5 (not sure about FP6) but it was so slow I rarely used it. iPhone X and below don’t allow export of saved passwords in the keychain.

FP5 & 6 support eSIMs and dual SIM use, I’ve not tried it myself… FP5 is more solid than many phones which I find a positive - not particularly heavy but a little thick. Phone case choices are more limited but there are a good range still. I think there’s probably no charger but any USB-C is fine, at home just a cable and changing the wall electrical socket cover with one with USB-C sockets is fast and cheap.

Apps…

More apps and more of them free on Android. Aurora store, and for open source apps F-Droid, are some of the google play store alternatives. You can use the free open-source (FOSS) apps for Contacts, Messages, Calendar, Phone etc if you aren’t keen on default ones.

Lots of browsers, Firefox range especially allows extensions including AdGuard, other adblockers, password managers and captcha solvers. Its easy getting bookmarks moved over.

Paid apps can be bought using Google Play voucher online as a gift rather than giving Google your card or PayPal details.