Fairphone 1 maintenance comes to an end

The kind of resources that don’t cost anything which I am talking about are pretty obvious I thought - without looking into it further, how about domain knowledge, business knowledge, network & hardware & software knowledge, community forum, experience, stats, data, code bases, bug histories, etc?

The fairphone forum is now advising me to reply to other people on the forum too. I think it has a point. You do make good points and have definitely enhanced this particular topic, and I didn’t come here to formulate an executive masterplan for Fairphone, so let’s drop this. I feel we’ve said enough.

[quote=“maik, post:143, topic:30482”]
Okay - so: how many spare batteries have to be planned?
For that you’d need to know how long a battery lasts on the average. Also you need to know, how many FP1 will be used in the years to come
[/quote]When the version 2 battery was ordered by FairPhone, they should have had at least some idea about the demands. But (apparently) even this (high quality) battery was out of stock very shortly after it was stocked. It’s really a shame that phones have to be abandoned solely due to the lack of a battery (and I’m glad I have two of them :slight_smile: ).

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I totally agree. It is even more sad that when the end of support was officially anounced there were no more batteries available. Otherwise we could have got one for the - maybe near - future. In this case I do not agree with what is said elsewhere in the forum, stating that fairphone never promised a sustainable phone. They sure said that the fairphone 1 was a phone also for people who care about life cycle of a product. This does not agree with the massage we recieved in May that the life cycle is coming to an end (after some three years at best) and it does not agree with what is written on the battary: “This is your battary…And you can always replace it”. I do not think that always means forever, but definetely more than once!

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I hope, this will not repeat with the FP2. I think, a minimum of 4 years of
maintainance is a must. Otherwise the whole idea is for trash. Then a device
from the big players would last longer, especially these, where custom roms
are available.
I totally agree with the disappointed FP1 buyers. The problem will be the
dead battery.
Overall, this would be no good advertisement, when the FP2 also has such
a short life.

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Here is another article published in the German taz:

"taz.die tageszeitung vom 17.07.2017
Letzte Chance Secondhand

LANGLEBIGKEIT Für das als nachhaltig angepriesene Fairphone 1 liefert der Hersteller keine Ersatzteile mehr. Zu teuer, sagt Gründer Bas van Abel. Er sieht aber noch nicht das Ende seines Projekts

https://www.taz.de/!5426933 "

“Aber das sei nun mal eine schlichte „ökonomische Realität“.” :slight_smile:
I’m going to switch to LineageOS, first on my old Samsung S2, afterwords on Moto G4 Plus.
Both more sustainable.

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The sale of Fairphone 2 started on 16 July 2015. So it is sold for 2 years and 1 day, not 3 years.

FP1 is Fairphone company first shot AND first-shot in the whole mobile industry !!!
so I can understand that it is not so easy to fullfill all their commitments (“built to last”).

I just hope that this experience is integrated for others products.
I m just worry about FP2. I bougth it a year ago, it was already 2x more expensive as concurence (in terms of performances)…Price as not change ! Hardware as not change (camera !!!) !
I would hardly recommend a FP2 now.

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The worst part is not to have batteries, the weakest point of these appliances!!

I think that there is still an effort to facilitate the delivery of batteries to all those who made it possible to start this company. THKS!

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As far as I understood the email and how I understand all the posts from the forum managers there is no hope. I never saw any reflections about this big problem and annoyance for customers to search for a fair solution - the only one: Customers should give their old batteries to others. You see - there is really no hope and I don’t think Fairphone will change their position.

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Just a note that if anyone is interested in figuring out whether or not alternative batteries exist or can be sourced by the community, the topic below is where most of that discussion is happening. Testing of potential existing alternative batteries appears to be still ongoing, and I’m not sure how people are going to test for thermal safety - so (as with everything on public forums) there’s no guarantee that mentioned options will actually work.

A post was merged into an existing topic: :gb: :de: Generic battery to replace FP1 battery (shorter, 1,800mAh)

Thank you for the link. I read the article. It is interesting that they are talking about economic reality. When I turn on my fairphone it says: “Start a movement” I thought that fairphone would start a movement against some socalled “economic reality”. I know that they are competing with much bigger companies and no doubt they should earn money with the product to also paying the people at fairphone well. But we have also to keep in mind that they have some economic advantages. They had customers who were ready to finance them by crowdfunding. They have customers who are ready to pay a higher price for the product then they had to pay for another comparable product. They had customers who did not cancel the order when the delivery was postponed again and again. That’s just also an economic advantage. Now we learn that the support ends but they have learned a lot. But it was not communicated at the beginning: “we might only provide a short time support this time but we will learn for the future”. Instead of this everyting was either “amazing” or “we work hard in order to…” And now, once the battary is broken the phone will be useless

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Anyway, speaking for myself: although I was very enthousiastic about this ‘movement’, I was willing to pay quite a lot of money for what the FP1 offered, as well as willing to wait a long time for delivery, but ‘thanks’ to this premature abandoning this will also be my last FP.

What also struck me was the (apparently) half harted effort to upgrade the firmware: although many testers say it’s working reasonably well, there have only been produced three alpha versions; not even a beta has been released. At least a beta should have been offered, and also maintained (with security fixes).

Bah…

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There must be some major roadblocks or a very hard internal deadline on that endeavor that snapped. I find the communications in that regard quite weak to. Maybe we can pressure them and @Douwe to tell as more, but I suspect he can’t.

It’s a business decision at the end. It’s hard for everybody owning a phone, but they always said they want to change the industry from within. There is no use to a company Fairphone that is not profitable.

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Wheter it’s called an alpha or beta version is just a naming decision. You can see for yourself what issues the latest version has and whether you consider it worth upgrading anyway:

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That is not correct: there are distinct differences between alpha and beta software.
In layman’s terms: alpha is for partial testing only (for testing of some isolated functionality) while beta is for testing the software as a complete (more or less working) version.

And as I said: at this stage I would have expected (at least) a beta version that would be maintained (i.e. regurarly updated with security fixes).
But even that little bit of support for my FP isn’t there.

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2 posts were split to a new topic: Used FP1 battery

Just found an older article at “heise” about the economic situation at fairphone:

https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Wachstumsschmerzen-bei-Fairphone-Produktion-und-Support-am-Limit-3581468.html

“Ich wollte Teil des Systems werden, um es zu ändern, aber dann fing das System an, mein Leben zu diktieren.”

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I just read the article linked to by @mpcww as well as the one about van Abel’s burn out and have to say I had no idea how much work is going on behind the curtains. You guys need to work on your communication, but then again, maybe sharing bad news would be honest but counterproductive to the project as a whole, with people saying “This reads as though they are in some crisis, should I really buy their phone?”

In the end, I have no idea. All I want to say is that it was a great decision of mine to help crowdfund FP1 and watch the company grow, I am also thankful I’m not under the constant pressure to succeed like you are.

@Douwe, if you’re reading this: Great work, maybe unsatisfactory communication, but don’t let the people get you who fail to see the bigger picture and get hung up on a software release being called “alpha 3” instead of “beta 1”.

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You got me wrong:
1- Wrong naming gives wrong ideas.
2- Main point is the fact that the experimental firmware isn’t being updated with security fixes either, which was the main reason for planning the update in the first place.

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