That is indeed a pity. I think this is probably a risk that I was aware of when I decided to buy a FP in 2014. I mean, this is quite a complicated project and there was a big chance that something like this would happen along the route. I still think it was a worthy investment in a good cause.
However, I already gave up on my FP earlier this year. I started having a lot of apps I couldn’t install, not because the hardware couldn’t support it, but because they required a higher version of Android. (Mostly apps like transport or messaging apps, not games or such). Then came the issue that my cover started to disintegrate and it was impossible to get the 3d files for the covers to have them printed. When I tried to get a solution to that, I didn’t get a satisfactory reply from the support. Then the phone also became very slow to navigate and use, which usually doesn’t bothers me too much, but as my wife had an old phone lying around, the temptation to switch to that one was just too big compared to the sum of inconviences that the FP has become.
Overall I expect more than that 2.5 years run our of a phone. I used my old phone (a HTC magic, if anyone is interested) for 5 years before switching to the FP, and was hoping to use that as a benchmark for my next phone. The current phone I’m using is now just over 2 years old (LG G4) and comparing this with how the FP performed at around this time last year, it is also probably going to last longer than the FP. There’s also the fact that the communication wasn’t always good (see the link for the 3d printed cover above, or also the mess-up with the order numbers when it was first delivered). Of course neither HTC nor LG would give me any kind of personal service, but just due to the fact that they are much bigger, it is easier to get a fix for problems and there’s just more information out there. (For my HTC, I could just order replacement batteries and even a replacement shell off e-bay and when the software became so old it couldn’t support any newer apps any more, it was easy to get a CyanogenMod with a newer version. For the LG, as the motherboard failed last year, I just had to head down to the local repair centre and they fixed it for free, whereas FP doesn’t even ship repairs outside Europe if you pay them for it).
So I’d say from an environmental point of view, this was definitely a bit of a fail for me. It is probably still worth it from an ethical sustainability point of view, with regard to the sourcing of materials. If I had known it would only last so long, I wouldn’t have bought it and probably won’t buy another version of it in the near future. I will probably opt for second hand phones in the future. But given that nobody could really know how it would go from the start, I don’t regret supporting this project. I still think it’s a very worthwile initiative and I hope that the company can learn from this and will be able to improve the durability of future releases.
All the best