If you think that that analogy fits well, then at least they kept everyone up to date about the status. (something other people complain about they didn’t).
They also could have said nothing… Maybe it would have been better; you can’t break any promises if you never make them.
I can understand this decision concerning the more complicated spare parts. But not for the battery:
Please tell me: whats the price for producing lets say 10 000 Batterys for fairphone 1?
You could even collect orders for that battery and then let someone produce a batch. Can’t be very expensive!?
Regards, Ben
I have heard from Fairphone that you need to order at least 50.000 if you want to get them for a reasonable price, and that was not an option since there are only an estimated 20.000 Fairphone 1’s still in use.
The problem, as a Fairphone employee explained in a post, is exactly what is to be called “reasonable”.
No one ever offered some solid numbers regarding the reasonabilty of producing a batch of replacement batteries.
So, you’ve been told 50.000 is the magic number. Reasonable price (for FP to order them), just guessing, would be about €5 per piece: €250.000 total then (Anyone with more insight should correct me here).
If you could find 10.000 FP1 users willing to pay about €25 for a brand new replacement battery, this could be handled without too much damage on any side.
But no one ever asked. 
On the efct17 there has been a discussion with Fairphone employees and community members about this topic and that is where the number of 50.000 comes from. It was pretty clear at the time that there was no viable way to get these batteries.
We did ask them on the EFCT. Batteries are not that cheap. They did a calculation like yours and the total price was nearing a million (or over a million, I don’t remember) instead of your €250.000. Batteries are simply not €5 even if you order 50.000 of them. And that doesn’t even consider the environmental problems associated with ordering 30.000 or more useless batteries.
I would have guessed that as well.
What really annoys me quite a lot, is the lack of information.
Not only I have posted this question for just some basic number-crunching more than once; addressing especially @Douwe directly, who has been on the forum since then quite regularly.
So they were able to share this info on the #efct17; well, where was the problem to share this info here in the forum. Just three numbers: minimum order: 50.0000, Order price 20 € each. Maximum of 20.000 FP1 still in use. So you can see, that the battery would have to be sold at least for 50 € each to reach the break-even point. That only working if everyone purchased a battery.
And of course it would be against all sustainability to waste 30.000 or even more batteries for phones that can no longer be supported software-wise.
It even seems, that the generic battery for the Huawei phone will soon be sold out and seems not to be produced any more; although this phone must have been sold in much higher numbers.
But no! No message from FP in that direction.
You’re the first one here giving such information. Would have been better - if these numbers are correct - to just make them public. Everyone would have agreed that preordering batteries for 1M would be insane.
BTW: By saying “No one ever asked” I meant that FP didn’t ask the FP1 users, not the other way round - sorry, if I wasn’t clear enough.
Agreed. If there really is a 50.000 lower limit to producing batteries. This, too, could have been communicated openly, couldn’t it?
What I really don’t understand: What’s wrong with the FP1 batteries, so they couldn’t use the same kind in the FP2? And FP3, and…
I guess it’s the new design of the FP2. To that modular design the battery of the FP1 would have been an unnecessary limitation. Add to that the quality problems with the first FP1 batteries (lots of bloated ones).
Also, the battery design is licensed. They may simply not have the rights to use it in a new phone design.
The FP2 battery has a 15% higher capacity compared to the FP1 battery (2420 mAh vs. 2100 mAh), while being 24% smaller in size. It would not have been practical to use the FP1 battery in the FP2.
(Thanks to @matthijs for providing me with the dimensions of the FP2 battery over in the Riot chatroom. )
Dear people at Fairphone,
I know there are many posts in this forum and it is frustrating to hear so many people shouting around without listening to your arguments. Nevertheless I’m still waiting for your answers about my questions about software development in an earlier post (Fairphone 1 maintenance comes to an end). I hope I’m getting an answer at some point.
This is really important to me. I was number 2000 and something to preorder a FP1, and I did this because you promised an open source OS. Please help me to understand why the OS development was not puclicly available and accepting help from community members like me.
Sorry to say you fall into this category yourself. The answer has been given (multiple times) in this topic.
or example by @paulakreuzer in post 58 of this thread:
Hm ok, sorry, I missed this post. But it doesn’t explain why it’s not possible. @paulakreuzer So the people behind Fairphone just messed up with the first manufacturer… That’s a pity (because I primarily bought my FP because I expected it to be open; I enjoyed that it was rooted 
). I’m quite sure that FP did promise they use an open source OS. I can’t find that, now, of course, but for the FP2 they explicitly advert this as a feature.
Nevertheless I’m glad that they seem to have learned from their mistake: FP2 really IS open source. It’d be much easier to let the community contribute if the development took place on Github or Gitlab. Is there a reason not to do that? I have a bit the expression that FP doesn’t really want the community to participate in the software development 
.
I’m 99.9% sure Fairphone never promised anything.
Well for the FP2 there are options to run partially open source OSes, but the FP2 “is” not open source.
FP Open OS is just FP OS stripped from the proprietary G%§$e stuff. Removing that is not hard work and doesn’t require much community input. Sure if there was more to developing Open OS then community input would help, but to make that a reality would also require many-times more effort from FP devs and it doesn’t seem like the team is big enough for that yet.
But for people who really want an open source OS with community development there is #software:alt-lineageos, sailfish and all the other #software:alternative-oses.
You can contribute via gerrit. @z3ntu can probably explain it to you.
This is going off-topic…
Thank you very much for your replies.
I think now that I’ve misunderstood Fairphone’s plans.
I see that you focus on social (and partly economical) sustainability, but not on ecological: To guarantee longevity of an electronic device, one must guarantee support for software, especially if it’s a device containing private personal data.
But in my opinion, every company relying on proprietary software will sooner or later have to stop software support. That’s why it’s so important to make software open source: The community itself can then maintain the software.
I for my part heavily consider buying an iPhone when my FP1 dies: This guarantees me 5 years of security updates. Another possibility would be Purism if their crowd funding succeeds. Or a second hand device supporting Lineage OS. I don’t know whether the FP2 will keep its promise to be a long lasting phone (“the phone to last”, yes, this is a promise). If it does, I will buy a FP3 when it’ll be available.
This is a community forum. You are not talking to Fairphone Employees here.
Sure, one day G%§$e will decide (out of the blue) that new Software is no longer supported on the FP2 - then everybody will have to switch to Lineage OS & Co.
So because FP doesn’t come with an Open Source OS by default you switch to one of the biggest enemies of the whole FLOSS movement? Ironclad logic!
You can get a second hand FP2 with Lineage OS.
You can’t promise something you can’t keep - so no it’s not a promise. I can promise you though that unless you are a time-traveller you’ll never be able to buy a mobile device that was proven to last at least 5 years and can expect it to still last that long from the time you buy it.