?? If your old phone is an Android device, too, you can simply transfer pretty much everything during the initial setup of your FP4. Neither Titanium nor root required.
Best wishes,
Thomas
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Presumably official instructions are not good enough.
Hmm! FP3 and FP2
- Citing the Fairphone 2 warranty (current version):
“This Warranty is not applicable for: […] (g) damage caused by breaking or circumventing access limitation protection or by the improper usage of a root access;”
The effect is that if you root the phone you will have to undo it and install the deafult OS for warranty to be considered. You then have to show that the rooting and any subsequent software did not damage any of the components; for example overriding the charging algorithm.
I tried that, and no unfortunately it only works for at least my important apps. Most are simply empty after such a transfer and all data / chat logs disappeared.
I tried it first because I thought that Google might be further along in terms of backup. But that is unfortunately not so. Sure Whatsapp and so standard apps that most people use, there it works.
But since I use a lot of rather unusual apps, I lose almost all data. And I’m not talking about pictures, contacts or the like. They are on the SD card or Cloud anyway.
But really databases of any apps that are stored locally on the phone and are not transferred to the cloud during backup. That is, the contents of apps that store their data locally.
As I see it, only very few apps are really saved by the Google backup function.
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yes, migrating app data in android has always been a major pain. Many apps can’t be backed up using google. I also have always relied on titanium backup which for me was the easiest and most reliable method of backing up and restoring apps+data. And the backups can be synced with my own nextcloud, no Google needed.
But it requires the phone to be rooted. I also need a new phone since my battery is dying and am interested in fairphone. I agree with what others said here, root is a requirement. Did earlier fairphones not receive root instructions?
An alternative would be custom rom like lineage, or even Fairphone Open that allows easy root access. But unfortunately, I haven’t seen news on either.
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FP2 can be rootet quite easy, and also FP3 root is possible. So it will most likely be possible but not at the moment, as so far nothing is available incl a custom recovery that might be needed.
I assume the instructions for FP4 will be quite similar
While I think it more than likely that a rooted OS will become available for the FP4 in coming months, and that FP will continue their collaboration with the /e/ foundation, you may not wish to wait for that. Getting the previous model, the FP3, is your best option right now for buying a phone made by workers who have been paid fair wages, that can be repaired and gives the user root access.
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Hi, are you selling your FP4? I am interested. Thank you.
Maybe I should have said ‘coming hours’ rather than ‘coming months’!
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i haven’t used /e/ yet. As far as i read is /e/ without Google apps as default. But is it possible to flash GMaps, GMail, Play store if i want to?
Yes, it’s possible to flash gapps and then you’ll get the Google experience to whatever extent you prefer. I think Maps and Gmail don’t require any of that stuff though.
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However i think under those conditions Lineage is the better option…
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I presume no update means no news but as I’m not yet familiar with the various sources of informations around the device I thought I had to ask: has there been any progress on a way to rooting device/flashing TWRP (I checked XDA but found nothing there) ?
I have another question: usually unlocking bootloader automatically wipes the device, therefore I tend to do this operation on the very first day of new device ownership so that I can start setting my environnement and be able to mess with my phone later without having to restart the painful security token/banking/… app setup that usually requires to proceed to a lot of validation steps.
As I’m about to receive my FP4 in a matter of hours now, is it perfectly safe to unlock bootloader or has there been feedback about eventual issues by doing it ?
And of course by safe, I don’t mean security vulnerabilities that are the logic consequences, but rather system failure or instabilities that would appear after doing so
If you stay on the original FP rom you don’t have to unlock the bootloader.
If you unlock it now right after receiving the smartphone, but later install a custom rom, all data will be deleted anyway.
depends on your use-case
you can turn and turn as you want
What I do with an unlocked bootloader is not really my question 
But I’ll answer anyway; unlocking bootloader while staying on original FP rom will allow me to root, flash kernels (I like to try different settings, play with power adjustments, set se-linux to permissive…) which will allow various apps I like to be installed (root explorer, Linux Deploy, Adaway, Flashify, Greenify, Titanium Backup…) that require root 
Unlocking is noted on the official site so a) it should be fine and b) if it not then you can ask for official support ~ I imagine
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Thanks for the answer, guess I’ll give a shot anyway
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Just received my FP4, succesfully unlocked bootloader.
Though I think I should inform the procedure described is the documentation you linked is actually mistaken.
Command “fastboot oem unlock” doesn’t work anymore (maybe only valid on older fastboot versions). It will return “unknown command”.
The correct one is : fastboot flashing unlock
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Maybe worth letting Fairphone know
Thanks for the update
From what I’ve read so far you seem to be aware, but for the sake of completeness (and maybe for others): some apps might refuse to work when the bootloader is unlocked.
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