FP2 delivery and information policy is a huuuge disappointment

Discuss The Industry
21

Because he’s tired of your stupid questions. So I will give the answers.

As @Sonne says, this is an Android issue! So write a letter to Google or throw it directly away, doesn’t care. There are a lots of alternatives, e.g. syncing them with DAVDroid or with Google… so this question is now ANSWERED.

Fairphone doesn’t have the rights to share them with you. They are from Qualcomm, the manufacturer of the Chipset inside the FP2. So they must design their own chip in order to release those things. So it’s an LICENSE issue.

Anyway, you can download them and you don’t have to extract them from your phone. I think is a huge accomodation and should be ok for everybody.

Do you know ANY other smarphone where you can compile the source code yourself? Well I don’t and I think you neither. So just be happy to have that!

There are in fact two solutions by the community:

  1. Adding some stuff to the boot.img and flash that (what is pretty easy and works very fast, I’ve done that myself), this works with the stock version!, see here
  2. Adding SuperSU directly to the open source version of FP OS, see here

Fairphone istn’t allowed to give you an easy way to root your device, as there would be no Google Apps:

So next question:

Yes, indeed. I had problems on my laptop as well (but due to a too new gcc version).
I have bad news about this for you. It’s an Andoid problem, so you’ll have to contact Google about this… Since FP OS is based on the AOSP with very little changes, it’s not Fairphone’s fault.
(Actually I think 8 GB should be enough, but you likely did more things wrong… e.g. using an 32 Bit machine? :smiley: )

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22

You can disable the App “Google Contacts Synch” and then you’ll be able to store contacts locally.

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So I’m stupid ??? Is there nobody here to put that person (retsifp) in his place ?

Once more, I’ve said what I feel and think. You can think differently. Neither you nor me is stupid. And no question is stupid when it is about freedom and privacy.

“This is an Android issue” is not acceptable when speaking of a basic function of a phone : storing local contacts. Fortunately, paulakreuzer says it’s possible (even if the opposite was said elsewhere on the forum). Thanks to him.

But I’m not sure this is the solution as he says “disable Google Contacts Sync”. I will not start the phone without removing Googles Apps. I don’t want sincing. I don’t want Google apps. I want to control my privacy and I want this to be garanteed by the phone provider, not by third party or community apps (as already said above).

No, I don’t know any other phone for which I can compile the code and precisely, I hoped it was that one. Before ordering, I requested information to Fairphone (via Facebook) and it was told to me about the opening of the source and also about the Jolla project. Would I have notice and understood these two small words “binary blobs”, maybe would I have not decided to buy the phone. I thought they were tools to program the phone, nobody is requested to be a specialist of such concepts !

Fairphone can’t disclose some binaries ? Well, so I ask to Fairphone to garantee that no information, even one bit, is never transmited by theses binaries outside the phone. If they do so, we will have done a GREAT step toward freedom, at last !

And finally yes, my desktop is a 32 bit machine, 5 years old and good working. So no, it’s not FAIR to buy another one (more than 1000 euros), only to be able to compile the code for a 500 euros phone. This word is mad !

24

There are some aspects I am a little sympathetic with @Openit4us.
During the waiting period of the phone, when I became impatient, I also was thinking that the crowdfunded project or not - if I put up a project and promise to deliver (and sell the phones already) - then it should be produced on time.
However, this was a very emotional approach, as I was waiting for a phone (my old FP1 was already gone) and was quite disappointed in not receiving it. While I still think that the communication could have been better, with colling down I was able to rationalize for myself the delay.
When i earlier bought phones from other vendors, then these products just came onto the market when they were finished. As a customer you couldn’t see what happened before the launch, and I wouldn’t be surprised if most of these phones from big vendors were also behind their internal schedules; just, as a customer you don’t see that (well, beside the fact that I never bought a phone that just came to the market, but usually just took old phones from people who renewed theirs). I have been involved in a lot of project work, and I think all of them were struggling to stay in time. I guess this will also happen in the electronics sector, just that when you don’t support a crowdfunding campaign, you don’t see that. But then there is an even more important aspect that came to mind.
Of course if a company promises a certain delivery date and gets behind the schedule, it usually means a lot of additional pressure on the employees and furthermore on the whole supply chain. This, eventually, also puts a lot of pressure on the workers in the manufacturing process, which are exactly those people, than belong to the group with the already worst working conditions and smallest pay in the whole production cycle. But it is not their default if one engineer made made mistake, or because the customers cannot or don’t want to wait for their products. And this is, what I think, is also part of Fairphone is about. That even if a problem occurs, that you don’t start to increase pressure on the workers to produce a couple of more phones a day. So with these thoughts in my head, I also started thinking that we as customers shouldn’t always insist on keeping every time schedule. Of course I understand how it feels as a customer to wait for a product you have already paid for. You expect the company to deliver. But in the end it usually means that a lot of this pressure will be transfered to people who are not responsible the delay.
So, yes, I can understand when someone gets upset if the product that was bought gets delayed, and I also felt that way. But when I tried to rationalize my impatience I came to the conclusion that I should be a bit more relaxed and flexible, and to not just think about my own comfort, but also about all the other people in the production cycle.

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25

What exactly holds you back to cancel your order? You get your full money back, no harm done. Then you can take that money and buy a product that meets your expectations.

I also would almost bet on this.

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26

…which doesn’t exist.

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27

Pssssscht that was for him to find out! :wink:

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28

@Sonne & @paulakreuzer : thanks for your advices but I was already thinking about that.

If not already done, it’s because I just wanted to let a chance to Fairphone of committing to :
1° Delivering and maintaining a Fairphone official & public rooted version without Google Apps and other similar stuff
2° Certifiing that the closed parts of this version never send any information outside the phone in any case

The fact that such a device doesn’t exist justify rightly the urgent need for it. If FP2 is that one, I will fight for it. If not, I will forget it.

29

I can relate to that wish. I was also disappointed that when the phones were shipped no option for a rooted and/or GAPPS free version was available. On the other hand I can understand that this is a challenge for small team like Fairphone. I don’t even know any phone of a big player on the market who offers two versions of the OS, and with Fairphone making the source code available for people to compile the OS themselves is a really great step! Unfortunately I don’t have the time currently to set everything up for doing that myself, and certainly it isn’t something that an “average” user could or want to do, so for me that also means, I still have to wait for the FP-osos to be released. Still I think it is great!

As I understand it, these proprietary parts of the OS, these blobs, are firmware or drivers for the hardware in the phone. If you would want to have a phone without any proprietary code, then also the hardware needs to be open source. If Fairphone - or any other brand/project - would want to offer a completely free and open OS, then they would also need to develop the hardware themselves, down the processor, RAM etc. So you certainly would need a much bigger team, much more work, and probably (due to high price) have even a smaller consumer base which would make the device quite expensive. Although, it has been made already, for example the OpenMoko. Anyhow, this would certainly be great, if also the hardware could be open source. Maybe in future, if Fairphone manages to sell enough phones to get a bigger share on the market, they would be able to do it. I’d love that! But I think for now that seems unlikely and unrealistic.

But anyhow, the point I was making is that to my understanding these closed parts of the osos are drivers etc. for the hardware. I am not sure to what extend the Fairphone developers know that code, but I guess if someone was able to reply to your question if there is any information leaving your phone from these closed parts, you could ask @keesj.

30

Well, this is far beyond what any phone vendor can guarantee you today. In fact, if you look at today’s SoC designs, you will notice that for many platforms - unfortunately including the one chosen by Fairphone - the modem can control the cpu, meaning that potentially someone could remotely access your device (and read your encryption key for example) on a level below the operating system or the firmware.

If you care about freedom AND want a smartphone I suggest you take a closer look at the devices supported (well, more or less) by Replicant. They are older models and slow, but they run without closed source binaries (although things like wifi, bluetooth or gps don’t work but at least you can use mobile data).

Just read the following article and you will understand, why e.g. Replicant will not support the Fairphone:

http://www.replicant.us/freedom-privacy-security-issues.php

And by the way: Fairphone supplies these closed source binaries to you, but they don’t supply you with the source code. Furthermore, there are many more closed source binaries on modern smartphones in some parts of the flash that typically never get flashed when installing a new operating system (e.g. the bootloader) but are still active when you operate the device. And I noticed that on many devices you cannot read/dump these binaries - even with root access.

31

@kuleszdl : I really thank you for this link and all that can be found starting there.

It is hopeless to see that so much people in the world have given up their rights to some (US) companies exchanging privacy and freedom for some games like Candy Crush :flushed:

If you’re right and if Fairphone is not able to certify that the modem has a good isolation, I will cancel the delivery (if possible) or send it back without turning it on.

So sorry :disappointed_relieved:

32

Sorry as well, I didn’t mean to make you cancel your order, but when buying a device you should know about its chipset and the implications this has on privacy etc. - so if this really matters to you I guess FP2 is not for you. The problem here is that almost all other current devices on the market have the same problem, but I hope FP will choose a different chipset for the next FP/SoC module upgrade.

33

Just to clarify, Fairphone is a social enterprise, which is not the same thing as an ordinary business.

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34

I agree, that is the case.

@Openit4us: This issue is moreover not a problem in the world of smart phones only, but this is true for almost all devices that can connect to the internet, like with any notebook or computer. Whereas it is easier to get open source drivers for computers/notebooks that do a good job, it is quite hard in the mobile world. So as I said above, if you really want to know what is happening in your devices, you need to look for open source hardware as well, which is quite rare.

Moreover, privacy/security doesn’t stop with the device you hold in your hand, because also your providers safe a lot of data about your locations, communication, contents, and contacts. There are tools though that help to limit the extent of possible data collection, e.g. end to end encryption.

Eventually I also think that blaming Google is appropriate in this case, because when we talk about blobs, then this deals a lot with the different suppliers of the electronics in your device and their drivers.

So after all I think with providing the possibility to build your own OS, Fairphone allows you much more than most other mobile phone vendors. However, if you want to avoid proprietary and closed code, then Fairphone - as almost all other mobile phones - won’t do it.

35

Well, not really. If you really want to have an open source computer/notebook, you have to start with an open source and blob-free BIOS/UEFI. There is a project (libreboot) which replaces the proprietary BIOS with a blob-free, open-source version of Coreboot, but it only supports very few and also just older devices.

There are different opinions about this. One point some people really mourn about Google is the “too open” license for Android which allows a lot of bundling of Android with non-free, closed-source components and they see it as an invitation for promoting non-free hardware.

I fully agree, except that Fairphone would have had the opportunity to consider a platform which is more free than the one they have chosen. But I hope they will adress this issue in the future with FP2.x (alternative SoC board?) or FP3.

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36

While I knew in September I still trusted promised delivery. For somebody like @Openit4us who comes to a page, see’s buy now (nothing like “back it” …) it is not clear. Especially when delivery in January is promised. This exactly the dishonest communication I am talking about. There is no banner saying "You are pre-ordering now in December, it could be later than January.

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At the moment there is “Fairphone 2 now shipping!” over the “Order now!” button and clicking on it it says “New orders shipping in february” which hopefully will be true. Probably the could say february to march, but other than that I see nothing wrong with it.
While I agree that for example the blog could give more insight, I would not know why they should put something on their main page saying “Well, we started delivering and we cannot be totally sure that you will get your phone very soon but we will definetly try!”.

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38

Since september I’m paying full monthly smart phone rates to my provider while using my old Nokia awaiting my FP2 to arrive. It still hase’t. This is why some want their long-awaited FP2 to arrive as soon as possible.

39

I might be a bit late, but so far nothing has changed in the communication of Fairphone and so I wanted to reanimate this discussion.

I relied on the counter and when it hit 10,000 phones, I was certain that my phone was shipped and that I would get my phone tomorrow at the latest. But then I had to realize that the counter does not correspond with the delivery number and now I have no indication whatsoever about when to expect my phone as I stopped to trust in their own predictions a long time ago. I know, Fairphone never explicitly claimed that the counter and the delivery number would correspond. But based on several post, it was clear that many people assumed it. So right now I am really disappointed that they still led everybody believe it.
[quote=“Sonne,
post:11, topic:12357”]

I wouldn’t choose the word “dishonest” but I also feel that the official statements often read as polished for PR and not so much intended to give open and honest informative updates about what’s going on. Also the way the delays are described feels often … I wouldn’t say dishonest, but like someont trying to weasel out of something bad they have done.

[/quote]

I completely agree with Sonne. Even though they are posting up-dates three times a week, most of the time they are not actually giving information. Instead they are throwing numbers around that only confuse people. Like how many phones they have in stock at the distributions center, a number that doesn’t say anything about how fast this phones are actually shipped to their owners.

In the mail we got 12 days ago, they claimed to ship all phones until the end of January. Everybody could see (doing simple math) that they will not be able to fulfil that prediction if they only ship 600 phones per day. Why did they make such a prediction anyway? What’s more, if one adds all the phones that they expect to be shipped from China to the distribution centre in the next days, they won’t even have enough phones at the distribution centre to serve all pre-orders. So again, why would they make such an unrealistic prediction?

And even if they actually thought they could do it. Now that they realized they wouldn’t keep promise, they don’t seem to stand up for it. On yesterdays blog it says:
We are working on a new delivery outlook to communicate to owners via email which will estimate the last day in February when all pre-ordered phones will be shipped. Thanks for your patience, we’re getting there!

This is exactly what frustrates me. Instead of just saying “we are sorry, against expectations we are not able to ship all phones by the end of this week.”, they create such a strange sentence, that only in the subclause contains the actual information and that sounds as if nothing else had been claimed before.

I don’t mind the delays; I completely understand that things can go different than expected. I just don’t understand why they aren’t more transparent about it. I understand if you use some PR phrases to sell your product. But we already bought the phone and I think we have earned a fairer treatment.

Anyway I have big hopes for the promised mail and I really hope it will be a bit more informative than the last one.

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40

I totally agree with that. I just hope that this is a matter of the most likely very tense situation at the moment and the chaos, and not their kind of politics now. In other words: I hope it get’s better when they delivered all the phones ordered so far.

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