A significant part of my decision to buy FP2 (6 month ago !!!) was that it is rooted.
Now, I have it one week and I already found 4 reasons to have it rooted:
- To make a backup (you don’t provide a backup app and titanium backup needs it)
- To install SnoopStich, which helps to find out about my privacy
- To read log data to help to debug a problem I have with OpenKeychain
- To hopefully solve the problem that user-defined ringtones are removed with a reboot
I bet there will be a lot more reasons.
And I still want to use the phone as a phone.
Try to install standard apps such as Deutsche Bahn app without the Play Store
(I initially started without a Google account, but there was simply too much only there available).
So keesj, after your announcement, tell me please what shall I do?
It seems, you require me to root the phone using one of these “grey market approaches”.
Well, if your goal is to protect your customers, then it is an interesting approach to force them to use dubious software to root the phone (e.g. in the KingRoot thread rumour says that KingRoot might “install “Chinese Stuff” on your phone and it uploads your IMEI”).
In addition, IMO it is very very unfair to decide, not to give a rooting option without clearly announcing that in ahead. I bought the phone, because all I read was that it will be rooted (see e.g. here). You might have said otherwise somewhere in the forum, but there were no clear statements with the official specs of FP2, so why should people assume that it is different than with FP1?
All these sites will now write articles: FP2 turned out not to be rooted and therefore is not as usable as it seemed to be. That will be a publicity nightmare.
While almost everybody here understands, that the FP2 is not rooted by default,
the decision not to support an option to root the phone at all is poor, strange, offending, and a nightmare for Fairphone and me.
Please please please, change this decision before too much damage is there!