Hello and farewell - I think I'm giving up on the Fairphone 5

Excellent! :grin: Someone else already beat me to this point here, but it’s so tricky with phones isn’t it because they’re such personal things? I hope you have many happy years use!

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Oh gosh that sounds frustrating!

Yes I agree, as it stands sadly I’d struggle to recommend them

A good point, very true!

Fellow FP5 owner here, it’s really unfortunate how your phone has accumulated so many issues - I don’t think it’s very common. My phone works well after 14 months and going and I would never think about replacing it. Alas there have been periods when turning to support would be almost useless, but right now it should be slightly better and improving?

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Hello,

I’m very surprised by your bad experience with customer service. My own FP4 froze after that infamous update. It was from 2024, so still under warranty. I had a brief email exchange with them, and they immediately sent me a replacement. I’m very satisfied with their responsiveness.

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Death by a thousand cuts. As I’ve always summed up this phone.

I can relate to nearly all the complaints you bring up. In my mind, they’re still not enough to outright throw my phone out the window, but at this point I’m positively confident I wouldn’t recommend a Fairphone to friends and family, nor will my next phone be from Fairphone.

I’m proud to own it. I’m happy to be doing my part. But my day to day life is already problematic enough. I don’t need my phone to turn into a laggy mess when battery falls below 10%, or the touch consistency to become erratic or get ghost touches when I am plugged into a charger.

Minor annoyance after minor annoyance. Along with a community that tells me to just dOnT LeT iT Go dOWn tO TeN pErCenT thEn. Real helpful. At least these people are still more engaged with my problem than Fairphone themselves are.

I’m still sticking around. But with the mindset of a tired mother, who has no emotion on their face, and reacts to everything with a tired sigh. I’ll continue throwing in my two cents into the forum about issues and observations. With the assumption that not a single soul will read it at the company.

Go buy a Nothing, or a Pixel.

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I have my FP5 for 1,5 years now and no problems so far. My wife is using her FP4 for 3,5 years. We are both yery happy with FP. Luckily we did not need Fairpones support.

I would like to say that modern smartphones are quite complex products and therefor it is natural that technical problems happen. And as you can see even Google sometimes stuggles with their own phones:

Probleme mit dem Pixel-Update: Bluetooth und WLAN streiken laut Nutzern | heise online
https://www.heise.de/news/Januar-Update-fuer-Pixel-Geraete-Nutzer-klagen-ueber-Bluetooth-und-WLAN-Probleme-11155315.html?wt_mc=rss.red.ho.ho.atom.beitrag.beitrag

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That’s good to hear!

Ah I’m glad, that’s good,! :smiling_face:

I can definitely empathise with all of that! I commend you for your strength :raised_fist:

I agree, they certainly are complex!

What a nightmare you are having! Are you running stock Android, and which Android version is that? Were you using Android or iPhones before?

I have a e/OS official on my FP5 and while I don’t do phone calls, I am not having those kind of issues, and frankly they would also drive me nuts too. I am not suggesting /e/OS as a fix but after backing everything up perhaps a reset is worth trying? I don’t know how old the handset is but it may be under warranty if it is a hardware issue.

For the authentication issues, I use Last Pass autheticator and find it straight forward to switch between them although generally I use the browser for payments rather than apps. I often get the authentication code copied immediately before hitting the purchase button. I think there might be some apps that show notifications or have widgets that may help with that.

With apps, the Fossify Camera, Phone, Calander, and Gallery are all good - you can find them using Aurora Store or F-Droid (I found the App Lounge unreliable). Some apps rely on trackers so I needed to use Advanced Privacy to allow some for specific games that reward you for watching ads.

The latest Android version I tried /e/OS murena 3.3 was a lot more buggy than previous ones, but an update is out now.

The only other handset I had considered was the Nothing range. Google have added their own specific extra hardware “features” to the Pixels (lije a Pixel only authentication method which they can lock your Google accounts if you don’t have it working). I can’t see how anyone can trust such a shady exploitative company. Nothing seemed really simple and to have good compatibility, but I don’t know how easy it is to flash a stock Android or degoogle Android.

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@got-a-FP5, I’ve tried /e/OS on my FP4, and I’ve stock FPOS on my FP5. I am able to corroborate every problem on the FP5 with AOSP 15, and also know that many of these problems don’t exist on /e/OS. Some are upstream, some are downstream. Most could be resolved by FP, but haven’t been; most don’t exist on other vendors’ distributions.

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I had no idea on that… interesting. I did the /e/OS install myself because at the time the additional cost was pretty daft. Is the community e/OS build the same or better than the official one? I wondered if I should have gone for the official build.

At the moment both Fairphone and Murena have awesome discounts on /e/OS fairphones, so the difference in cost between them isn’t much.

@got-a-FP5, you may want to observe ≤ community.e.foundation/t/69901/24. Slight differences exist in the pre-installed version, some of which might be negative attributes for someone who cares about FOSS, but positives for someone who wants the best-supported OS.

Hi! Do you have “Developer options” enabled? If you do, maybe the option “Don’t keep activities” is checked (you can find it at the bottom of the options).
If you never enabled Developer Options, ignore this message :face_with_hand_over_mouth:

For the rest, I don’t encounter much of the issues you describe on my FP5… Although, I do think that the FP5 was a draft for the FP6. They release FP6 really quickly after the 5 and my wife got it. Comparing the two devices makes it clear: they made mistakes on the 5 and fixed most of it on the 6 (CPU, battery, plastic/aluminium sides, etc…).
I kept my FP3 for a bit more than 5 years but I don’t know if my FP5 will last that long.

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That’s interesting! I’ve heard good things about e/OS. I’m keeping my FP5 around on the side to see how fairphone as a company progresses so we’ll see!

That’s an interesting observation about the FP6, it definitely seems more of a consumer-friendly phone, and of course the price is more appealing.

I’ll be keeping my eye on fairphone for the future!