I really don’t understand the buzz about this Fairphone post. Any tech company today has to consider how they go about AI in their products and to tell the customers about it. That is what they have done.
And it’s ok. As a customer I have a choice. Obviously, if I stick with the default Android, I can (but need not) use Gemini. Or I can opt for a different OS.
The paragraphs about Gemini are in some promotional tone, true. Maybe they copied it from somewhere? Anyway, that does not change the basics, that Fairphone obviously tries to be transparent and give customers choices.
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The reason I have Fairphone is because it was the only one on offer coming close to pure Android. Like with my last phones Xperia10iii and Xperia A2) , first thing o did was uninstall or deactivated all rooted apps and replaced them with open source apks. Google Chrome, Gmail, YouTube, and so on. Same with meta apps.
I use Brave and Firefox nightly thunderbird , Calendar, SMS, dialer, MP3 player and Foto are replaced by their Fossify version. I did all that to Ungooole and I Zuckerberg my life.
Gemini works very good with all the services offered by Google. Sometimes, I still using my Google accounts where needed, but nothing more. I can’t backup pictures with One because my gallery app is not from Google . Why do I need all of a sudden l Need Location switched on when sharing Files between devices that are already on the same WiFi network in the same room? Why is digital Wellbeing turn itself without permission on to use data in the background.? It’s things like this and Googles walk of silence I stay away. I don’t care that Google using my data at all. What makes me angry is that they claim not to.
The point is easy.
One substantial part of fairphone is sustainability. Use your phone longer and minimize impact.
While we cnnot see it when we open up ChatGPT in our browsers, the impact we create is ridiculous. Gigantic datacenters have to be built with fresh hardware, which will then eat the electricity of small nations. You just cannot feed this hunger with green energy.
If we all use AI, the impact of buying a new phone every year will become negligible.
So a post not warning us about the use of AI is like dropping the sustainability from the fairphone brand.
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No, Fairphone doesn’t need to tell their customers about AI, they chose to do it.
Those companies they mention in the beginning are the ones who have spent large amounts of money on LLMs and now need to recoup their investment by pushing it into everything.
I wouldn’t expect Fairphone to tell me about new Gmail features, so why exactly would I need them to explain Gemini to me.
This is Google’s product to sell!
Instead of helping them with their greenwashing Fairphone could maybe, just maybe, consider not doing that 
Fairphone likes to paint itself as an ethical company but there’s nothing ethical about the current AI bubble, hyping it up for no reason is just absolutely not a great look 
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Absolutely fair concerns — many users are more focused on long-term usability and support than AI features.
Security updates really should remain a priority, especially for those of us who choose Fairphone for ethical and sustainability reasons. A consistent monthly or bi-monthly update cycle for the FP4/FP5 would go a long way in maintaining trust.
Better customer support is definitely something a lot of people have been asking for — response times and clearer communication could really improve the experience.
As for Android 14 on the FP4, the silence is getting frustrating. Even a rough timeline or beta roadmap would help set expectations.
And yes, the removal of the always-on display on the FP5 felt like a step back. Would be great to know if there’s at least a plan to reintroduce it.
Transparency has always been one of Fairphone’s core values, so hopefully they’ll share more concrete info soon.
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Interested in buiying a FP, but I don’t want my data to be seen by any AI. Is it there a way to totally turnoff Gemini? Or is it tightened bind to FP OS?
I don’t use a google account, except for the play store.
You don’t have to use Gemini, it is completely optional.
I never downloaded the app, and never got it through an update. I have never seen any option to use Gemini on my FP5.
Worst case you could disable that app, if preinstalled on FP6
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I have a FP6 and can confirm that the Gemini-App can be disabled in the settings.
It also can be removed completely with ADB commands.
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We’re going to see a lot of money and effort chasing “AI” wasted figuring out what it’s (not) useful for the hard way.
Personally, if I wanted to use an LLM, it wouldn’t be Gemini.
I’m really excited about the potential of Al, but I’m also worried about how much energy it uses. It would be great if we could do more Al processing directly on our devices instead of relying on big data centers. This could save a lot of energy and make Al more sustainable.
I’m no expert, but I think focusing on “on-device” Al could be a game-changer. It would reduce the need for constant data transmission and make our devices more efficient. Plus, it could help with privacy since data wouldn’t have to leave our phones.
I hope companies like Fairphone look into this. It would be amazing to have powerful Al features on our phones without the huge environmental cost. Let’s push for more sustainable tech!
Sorry to rain on your hopes and dreams but :
- local models are way, way, way worse than online ones. The reason being that it needs ungodly amounts of compute and RAM. In the sense of dozens of GB of VRAM and a dedicated cluster of GPUs.
You can experiment on local models on your computer but might only be able to use 3-4B parameters on a consumer-grade (16Gb RAM, a small GPU). The order of magnitude for state of the art chatGPT is more like 400B-1000B parameters.
The current LLM paradigm is : more compute, more better. it’s antithetical to a lower-grade, local run.
- It still consumes energy for inference since your phone will be working a lot for this, that means reduced battery life and autonomy.
There may not be a dedicated GPU for this so everything might have to be done on RAM, which phones have not a lot of (8-16 GB). The model will be max a 3B parameters on top of that.
Its may save energy because its only 3B and not not a boiling-lakes high compute thing. But it will have its costs in terms of quality of answers and bqttery life.
If you’re interested in a local run, try https://jan.ai for instance, and select an on-device model (because they also have API). An on-device model is necessarily an open-weight one so you can’t have OpenAI nor Anthropic products, but you can have qwen, gemma, llama, and others
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I hope there will always be an option to turn off the AI stuff on your phones. It was one of the reasons why I returned S25 to Samsung, even though I thought hardware was absolutely amazing. Samsung implemented the AI so far into the system, that it’s effectively impossible to get rid of. I would hate that to happen to Fairphone.
If I want to get confused because of random small errors in the response from a predictive text model, I just use Mistral’s Le Chat (it’s European at least, and doesn’t have an insane antisocial CEO). So, if you will ever plan to implement AI (sustainably and with an option to purge it completely from the system), I hope you consider smaller models from Europe as well.
And thank you for letting us disable Gemini and other stock android AI features on Fairphone! Good job!
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LLMs are just a small part of AI. AI are also used in enhancing photography, audio processing and other things. I wouldn’t lose sleep over Fairphone not diving more into AI assistants and LLMs, however to not dive into the audio and visual enhancements that can be achieved with AI would be FP willingly losing the race.
Yes and no. The technology might differ a little, but the problems remain exactly the same:
- huge environmental impact
- stealing from creators for training
- biases
- …
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Computational photography? It’s done on device.
I am unsure what you really mean, but most ‘AI enhancements’ are not done on the phone. And even if, the RAM/CPU usage is ugly.
It’s called computational photography, that’s what the AI cores on the phones are for. It includes rudimentary things like HDR or panaroma. Those are computational photography as well.
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For HDR and panorama you don’t need AI cores or AI at all.
How do you think the phone is applying HDR effects automatically? That’s AI. Automatic contrast and brightness, that’s AI. Not participating in LLM assistants that’s one thing, but to think Fairphone should just quit the race completely that’s bordering on insanity.
Sorry, but this is just plain wrong. Those are ‘just’ sophisticated algorithms made by ‘intelligent’ developers.