Dear all,
as my current FP3 is quite slow nowadays, I was planning to buy the FP6 immediately.
Due to the equipped RAM of only 8GB I am hesitating now - ist there any information available if a version with more RAM will be available in near future? I believe this would make the phone much more future-proof!
Thanks for your feedback, Arno
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No information at the moment. Perhaps 2026?
I think 8GB may be just good enough. Remember, for desktop PCs, 8 GB has been sufficient for quite some time. 16 GB is often nice for heavy I/O or graphical tasks.
The Fairphone is designed to be a good enough phone. Many people were complaining about the price of the FP5. So I guess they wanted to keep the price lower this time. Which means lower specs.
12 GB might have been best, considering local AI workloads might increase in the next few years.
Also bear in mind that Android upgrades tent to include more resource friendly enhancements.
And also don’t take the first screenshot in a bad way. Unused RAM is wasted RAM. RAM is faster than local storage. So keeping apps in memory keeps the phone fast. The second screenshot is a better benchmark. So half of my 8 GB is dedicated to actual use. The rest is just RAM for performance gains (keeping apps in memory and keeping data cached in memory).
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@UPPERCASE I have to disagree, “good enough” today certainly isn’t good enough 6 or 8 years from now. We already had an 8GB option with FP4 (!) in 2021, so I’m definitely not buying a smartphone with only 8 in 2025. RAM will become the bottleneck for most of us long before Android or spare parts support runs out, which is a significant problem for sustainability.
I played a bit with the filters on geizhals.de (price 349-650€, launched 2024/5, black, 5-7"), and found that 64% of comparable smartphones already have 12GB or more. And most of those have rather low goals on sustainability. That means for me that for FP6, 12GB is the absolute minimum to remain useable during an extended lifetime.
A “midrange” smartphone will probably have at least 16GB by 2031, which is what app developers will then be expecting, so how will life be then with an FP6? My FP3 is really testing my patience already since last year, in terms of slow reaction times.
See also the in depth discussion here.
As you can see in my comment, I don’t fully disagree with you 
I guess it’s a lesson for the community; be careful what you wish/complain about. People made a lot of noise about the size/weight and price of the FP5. It is now addressed in the FP6 by a different battery, that has to be screwed tight. And the specs are less of a bump compared to the FP5, to keep the price low. Fairphone is listening, so be mindful of what you complain about 
You might not like their solutions based on your complains 
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@Thoense: I very much agree with your statement, thank you for backing me up with some data.
@UPPERCASE: Even though this descision might be based on community feedback, we should not start to put the blame on them / us. The technical responsibility is with Fairphone, and from my point of view, delivering a device with only 8GB RAM in 2025 does not hold up to their sustainability standards.
Let’s hope they will deliver a 12 or 16GB version soon.
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Possible. The FP5 got a downgrade option to 6GB RAM and 128GB storage, to offer a cheaper version. Maybe the FP6 will get a 12GB RAM option. But I don’t think that will be soon. I suppose one of the reasons to keep prices low is to have everything mass produced. Creating deviations in the production adds cost. But who am I of course 
I could be totally wrong.
@UPPERCASE: As Fairphone angel, do you have any way to forward this issue to Fairphone’s technical department? It would be good to know, if the option to increase RAM was already taken into account in the current design. I am a hardware development engineer myself, so I know that it would make it much easier to offer such an option, otherwise I fear we have to wait for FP7.
Which will be no option for me personally, because my FP3 is already too slow nowadays.
Another question: You wrote about people making much noise about the price in the past. What about making some noise concerning the memory issue now to get the attention of Fairphone management? Where and how could this be done, are there some channels to feed?
I’m still using a 7 year old phone with 4 GB ram. I’ve installed an unofficial, up-to-date Android 15.
The 4 GB is not a problem for any single app. Only when I switch between apps, they often need to reload. As such, it’s a minor inconvenience, but not a show stopper.
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@Lembramol Good for you, my daily experience is different, and I don’t seem to be the only one.
Multitasking, background services, improving functionality and user experience, and using the phone in more and more situations is the broad and long-term trend, and the major value proposition of a “smart” phone.
Of course we can hope that developers somehow get a major incentive for making slim & efficient apps, but as long as the HW manufacturers are happy to keep living Moore’s law and selling new phones every year, we have a kind of feedback loop or upward spiral going on. Realistically, only governments could change that on a national or European scale, but restricting policies are definitely not en vogue these days…
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If things spiral out of control, Fairphone could opt for Android Go. Not my favorite version, but there are options to keep a device alive with “just” 8 GB of RAM.
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RAM is a funny thing.
Along with other things like CPU speed, its increase has slowed down in recent years as the development of computing advances slows down.
But it’s not super expensive, so one thing that cheap phones are able to do to “seem” better is to place more of their construction budget into unnecessary amounts of ram. People can say that their $200 Chinese phone has 12GB of RAM, but how necessary is it?
Since RAM is very cheap in terms of electricity to use, operating systems are generally programmed to gobble it up by using spare ram as cache for frequently used programs. When Windows is eating your ram, it is just trying to load in advance what it things you will want, and will willingly release that ram to be used by a hungry program if necessary. 
So the question of how much ram is necessary is a tricky question, because you need to detangle what is needed to keep the stuff you’re using loaded, from what is needed to load other things into cache in the background.
I propose we look at Samsung Galaxy phones to determine what is needed for the consumers of a very expensive and powerful android phone to be happy for 2-4 years.
If we investigate that, we find that from 2020 to 2024, the minimum amount of RAM you could get (without going for the “budget” FE versions) was 8GB. So for 4 whole years, it was acceptable for an android flagship to have 8GB as a minimum option. 
This ties back to what I said about development slowing down, there have not been 8 consecutive years before that when the minimum amount of RAM stayed the same.
It is only with this year’s Samsung Galaxy that they have gotten rid of the 8GB option.
And in my opinion, increases in RAM for the rest of the decade will be driven by locally run “AI” models, because those are very hungry for RAM.
I believe that if we stay away from using AI models, we will find 8GB sufficient for at least 4 years of moderately powerful use, and longer for average use.
Increase those figures if you use e/OS/ or CalyxOS, because it is Google bloatware that is the heaviest factor in sucking away performance from older phones…
I note that Google’s minimum ram requirements to run android have recently jumped from 2GB for android 13, to 6GB for android 16. That does seem to be spiraling out of control… And I imagine it’s driven by “smart” features involving AI.
But maybe with such huge jumps recently it will settle down for a while.
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To furter develop this point, I have checked in more detail how Android RAM requirements have developed over the last years (please correct me if I am wrong):
Android 13 (15.08.2022): 2GB
Android 14 (04.10.2023): 3GB
Android 15 (03.09.2024): 4GB
Android 16 (20.01.2025): 6GB
FP6 claims 8 years of software support, so we have to interpolate until 2033. Is there any chance at all that 8GB will suffice?
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Of course there is, as long as there’s Android Go, if all else fails.
And then you are saying chance. Is there a chance? Yes, absolutely. Is there certainty? No, there can’t be.
they clearly pondered about it very much since there was a blog post about this back in september (that thoense linked in #3).
I agree completely with Paperpilot here.
Smartphones hardware do not evolve as fast as before. Past trends cannot be extrapolated blindly.
It’s also badly optimized programs that gobble up RAM by lazy coding. The fact that phones have more RAM encourages bad program writing too.
Google is getting ready to offload some of the inference costs of AI on local devices, but who knows how it’s going to go. The AI “boom” will force upon us some offline generative AI bullsh!t. How much we can escape is up to Android or Fairphone if they can manage a “clean” OS.
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It was a rethorical question…
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I will give the same example I gave the previous time this topic appeared since the discussion is going the same way : Google released recently the Pixel 9a with a RAM of 8 GB and 7 years of updates. I think Google knows what it does.
Moreover I find weird to compare the FP6 to a flagship whereas it is not.
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Just a note on Android Go - I have no experience with it, but reading some articles it seems that there are restrictions regarding to the compatibility of apps. See here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AndroidQuestions/comments/1bec27t/question_about_android_go_edition/
This would be a showstopper for me, I guess,
So still, I believe 8GB RAM is a bad choice for a new phone today.
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Fairphone is a Google partner. They inform Fairphone about roadmaps and requirements. If 8GB was okay according to them, and since Google also releases phones with 8GB, it’s probably fine. But some more RAM would’ve indeed be nice. But I dont expect issues.
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Maybe it is the english language I don’t understand well, but your link concerns some limitations about Android Go and you conclude on something different (8 GB is not enough according to you).
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