Pls help me to decide weather I had a good idea or not.
I am thinking of getting a fp 2 for my daughter as her first phone. She should be able to listen to music on Deezer, use the camera, use a messenger app (preferably signal) and use Duolingo and Sofatutor (learning apps also used at school).
No free Internet browsing.
I guess it would be useful to restrict the rest and it should be possible.
I know fp2 is not supported anymore but cannot do that?
I can’t and do not want to spend much money but I like the idea of her already experiencing more sustainable smart phones.
The Android version of the FP2 could be to old for an app like Duolingo etc.
And as you say the FP2 is no longer supported and therefore is in risk of being attacked by a virus etc.
So in my humble opinion it isn’t a good idea to get a FP2.
Seconded.
It might be a good educational project because it’s so absolutely easy to take the Fairphone 2 apart, but actually using it on the internet now? Please, absolutely not.
Just try it and tell, how it works. I don’t know how to restrict the internet connection. Since it runs Android 10 or lower the updates from F-Droid have to be done manually. With custom ROMs like lineageos you get Android 11 but I am not sure if you can run apps from Google Playstore.
The FP3 runs on Android 13 with the stock ROM. There the security support ends early next year. I’d only use this with a custom ROM that has longer support (but I can’t recommend any as I don’t really follow what’s going on in the custom ROM world).
…slow, gets hot if an app requires more power, and the camera is more for the purpose of documentation, not so much for actually enjoying the results. She’ll learn that it isn’t much fun to work with that phone (anymore). If you can accept that I’m relatively sure that all apps would run on the latest available software (Fairphone OS, /e/OS, Lineage). However I learnt that restricting the phone running on /e/OS is much harder than if you run a Google Android.
If you don’t want to spend much money it becomes hard to get a phone that still has software support. If you accept that you can go with refurbished non-Fairphones which is some kind of sustainability, too.
I consider the risk to be more associated with what the end user does.
What they download and run, what websites they visit etc.
If you lock all that down / avoid sketchy stuff then much lower risk!
Even if you have the latest Android version and look for trouble, it might not save you!
I had an Android 10 device until recently and the only app that I’ve come across so far that will not run / tells me I need a later OS version, is Amazon Alexa!
That was when trying to link the voice control to from Sonos to Alexa.
