I really hope that was not the reason to buy it in the first place. You are an early adopter, i personally think hiccups like this are to be expected. It’s ok to let some steam of by complaining in the forums, and i think they got the message. But please do not forget the Fair in Fairphone is not first and foremost about you but the people involved in building the phone and mining the minerals.
You also financed the production of the product. And think that was really great of you! But you knew, when buying, that the product was not lying around in a storage center ready to be delivered, but that they are still designing, testing, figuring things out. Now they made a mistake with the backcovers – which could have communicated earlier, possibly, but still only leads to a slight delay compared to the months the phone was in the making. I think this is a bit overreacting. I can understand this, especially as your phone might be a christmas present, but keep in mind why you bought a Fairphone, that you are supporting a pretty unique project.
Very good example, things like this what happen everyday. At the restaurant, when your order is not yet ready, they do not let the other tables wait just because of that. If you are at the bakery, order a type of bread currently in the oven, they ask you to step aside and wait until it’s ready, because else, everybody else would need to wait to. Thinks like this happen.
Until they gathered real data in the running process, which can obviously only happen now, all they could share would be assumptions. I am pretty sure they have these assumptions, but i think it is easy to see why they are not sharing them. And that is a good thing! They should only share them when they gathered enough data to support their hypothesises – else we are all here again in a few days or weeks, angry and frustrated, because smartphone production is a complex thing and assumptions can easily be wrong.
In fact, Fairphone is a professional company. If they were not, they were unable to produce a single phone. Planning is planning. It’s, like somebody else said, only on paper, until you get real data. And that can only happen in the process of production, which means now. And even then, unexpected delays can happen, always and everywhere!
Why do you not notice them with Samsung or Apple? Because when they start selling a product, they already of millions of products out there in storehouses and stores around the world. Only then, they start public selling. Such delays are normally simple invisible to you.
And then you throw all these backcovers away? Hardly sustainable. And the additional shipping is not really environmental friendly. Sorry, that just does not seem as a good solution! Also: Fairphone is not Apple: How should they pay for all of this?
In fact, that is true! They are only a limited amount of people.