February Update 🎊

Discuss The Industry
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Dear community,

February has been a busy month behind the scenes at Fairphone. From design awards to a new video series and strengthening our teams, here is a look at what we’ve been up to lately.

:mobile_phone: The Fairphone (Gen. 6 ) Updates

Journey to The Fairphone (Gen. 6)

We recently kicked off a new video series: Journey to The Fairphone (Gen. 6). In the first episode, we take you behind the scenes to show how The Fairphone (Gen. 6) came to life. It is now live on YouTube and you can watch it here: Why Most Smartphones Are Designed to Fail (And How We Built One That Lasts)

Android 16 for the Fairphone 6

Speaking of The Fairphone (Gen. 6), some of you may have spotted our recent Instagram Story: We’re hard at work on Android 16, and while we can’t give you an exact date just yet, it is coming very soon. Stay tuned and follow our official social media pages for the latest info.

iF Design Gold Award :trophy:

We are incredibly honored to announce that the Fairphone 6 has won the iF DESIGN AWARD 2026 Gold. Here is how the jury recognized our commitment to modularity and sustainable design:

“The Fairphone 6 proves that sustainable design can be every bit as confident and exciting as the latest from Palo Alto. The detailing, color schemes, and modular accessories open up a fresh catalogue of opportunities for users and clearly differentiate this phone from its competitors. We quickly saw the Gold in this design. Built to last - and to stand out.”

Supporting KLABU around the world :soccer_ball:

Beyond the hardware, we’re also focusing on our social mission. We’ve recently partnered with KLABU, an organization that builds sports clubhouses in refugee communities. By providing them with Fairphones, we’re helping these communities stay connected through the power of sport. You can read the full story on our blog: This is how Fairphone is supporting KLABU Sports Clubhouses in refugee communities around the world.

Update on Customer Support & Hiring :hammer_and_wrench:

As many of you saw, we recently shared several vacancies for our Customer Support team and have now moved into the next stage of the hiring process to bring these new colleagues on board.

Strengthening our team with dedicated, well-resourced people is our top priority to ensure we get back to the responsive and reliable service you deserve from us.

We know the best people to help us build a fairer future are often right here in this forum. If you are passionate about our mission and want to help us improve across any part of the company, you are very welcome to check out our open roles here: https://shop.fairphone.com/team.

Community Meetups & Fairbuds XL :love_letter:

Want to meet fellow Fairphone enthusiasts or try out the new Fairbuds XL in person?

Join one of the Community Meetups in March:

Thanks to @urs_lesse you can find all upcoming meet ups at events.fairphone.community.

If you are a meet up organizer and want to test the new Fairbuds XL, you are welcome to reach out to me via DM. :envelope_with_arrow::headphone:

Thanks for being part of the journey!

The Fairphone Team :green_heart:

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Fairphone wants to collect my phone data and shove it into an LLM?

Are you kidding?

This is unbelieable!

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Could you explain what you mean? I don’t see any of this in the post itself, was it in one of the linked videos/articles?

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The only thing remotely linked to LLM that I managed to spot was the job opening for an AI Engineer but the job description is wide.
And now when double checking, the one for Jira Implementation

@bjoern23 please explain as your reaction is difficult to understand without further context

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The AI position states:

Key Responsibilities & Objectives

Designing and developing new features for predictive maintenance for the Android platform to anticipate hardware failures (e.g., battery degradation, storage corruption, overheating), software glitches, or performance bottlenecks.

Architect, implement, and maintain the end-to-end stack—from the device kernel (data acquisition) to the cloud (model training/serving) and the Android application (user feedback/alerts).

Utilise real-time device data, advanced analytics, and machine learning models to accurately anticipate potential failures, degradation, or performance bottlenecks before they impact the user experience.

This sounds like collecting data from users phones and feeding it into an AI model at Fairphone. Even though I know how to get rid of an app doing this, many people won’t. And I really do not appreciate this.

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As a PM from a big Dutch organization I am not so concerned.

Using tools like ai to improve your business operations or reduce failure in your product is the right way. Why not leverage tools to be better?

Fairphone is not forced feeding you with useless AI tools. It’s for you (customer/user) to have a better product and service.

don’t forget this is Europe. Has high standards regarding customer data. Not a free for all data mining land.

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They collect that data anyway (or at least I would expect them to), nothing is changing on your side. They’re just changing the tool used to analyze the collected data.

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Personal data that are collected must be defined within the data protection policy.

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