Your experience sounds rubbish and I’m sorry you had to deal with all that.
I’ve never worked in tech, but have worked many different industries and dealt with a heap of complex customer service issues.
My two cents/pennies/rubles is that I’ve noticed some customers just end up getting caught in a perfect storm of disasters. Faulty products, poor service, unintentional bottom of the pile treatment, faulty replacements, delivery disasters etc etc. Sometimes the algorithms of life just throw everything at the one person.
I think FP make relatively decent products overall. They’re not the top tier tech, but most users don’t need that but get talked into thinking they do by the big boys with big marketing budgets. It is not possible to hit a balance between product satisfaction, customer expectation, and the occasional perfect storm. Like when some guy buys a new car, then every part fails one by one.
You seem to have got a dud, then another, plus some shonky CS experiences. A lot of people haven’t had that. A bit like equality, fairness is a human goal we’ll sadly never reach. It exists as a positive carrot on an impossibly long stick.
Even-though I didn’t have as bad experience as you, I understand you. Sadly, fairphone is not recommendable brand. I have had fairphone 5 for some time now. Since the beginning there were bugs that I was ready to put up with, because I care about fair and I care about my privacy. But “normal” user just want that damn thing to just work. There was a bug from almost the very beginnig, the multitasking was getting stuck and then you had to restart Quickstep. It was annoying as hell, there was no communication from fairphone and it was not fixed long after I made a switch to CalyxOS (which was my target to begin with). Since than I have a pretty stable experience (pity Calyx is taking a break). But I already had an option to recommend a phone to someone, but I never said to buy Fairphone, because if they get a bug like that, they will have very shaity experience and I will be to blame. And there is a lots of bugs like that here on the forum and there is not much attention on that from the FP staff. I mean they are reported to support, but nothing happening, even when people troubleshoot and send valuable data. Fairphone has to step up their software game or they will achieve nothing, sadly…
I agree here. Yet I’m pretty sceptical that will happen with the current way Fairphone operates.
When checking LinkedIn, they seem to only have 1 or 2 dedicated Android specialists (like for OS/Kernel development, not app development for Android) and the main development work is being done by T2Mobile in China. That may be the reason they only push one update per month as they don’t want to pay additional fees for more regular updates or any hotfix releases.
Seeing the current state of the stock Android, I wonder if it’s a lack of skill on T2Mobile’s side or if Fairphone just don’t pay enough for them to really care about the result.
Only way I see to improve the situation is more Android knowledge and development in-house instead of relying on external partners like T2Mobile for the core experience of the flagship product.
I’m sorry to hear that. I’m on my 3 Fairphone now. Started with FP 2, then FP 3, I bought FP 6 e/io, by Murena, this summer and I’m very happy with this operating system. FP 3 lasted 6 years with no major hick ups. Still have it as my back up phone.
Interesting study you have made there. Nevertheless let me counter some of your conclusions:
Not everyone is on LinkedIn, so the number may be right or completely wrong. But why should they have a huge group of Android specialists if they have a company doing that for them?
How well that works is a different question. But how many updates would you like to see per month? Weekly? Daily? I’d be looking forward to people complaining about their phones only being busy with updates.
By bringing more updates and hotfixes it’ll get more and more complicated to figure out where potential new issues were introduced (and that may always happen). You’ve done all daily updates of the last two weeks and suddenly one of your rarely used apps won’t work anymore? Good luck in figuring out where that issue came from.
I don’t know how much time this Google certification takes for each release, but there’s definitely a difference between a daily build of a custom ROM and the release of an official firmware.
Having said that I don’t want to say things couldn’t be better. Fortunately, for what I do with my FP5 I’m not impacted by any bigger issues, but I understand that also features that not everyone uses should work for those who need them.
I know, I was the one who created the topic. And notice how long it took to troubleshoot it, and there was no input from FP (and I sent the link to support), and no fix. The support never contacted me after the initial message.
Thanks for the info. I am surprised they have Chinese developer that itself might be a security risk. A: if its one out of two, how much control is there over the commited code. B: china is known to interfere with bigger companies than that. Now I hope the firmware was not developed in China as well. I know not everyone cares about this, but to me this is a huge red flag.
I was always recommending fairphone products since a few years, but the constant software degradation and poor choices regarding android 15 and lack of what the users wants and experience is dragging me away from it.
I know that my next phone won’t be a fairphone.
And worse, I don’t think I’ll wait that the support for my fp5 will drop or even that a part break to change the whole phone.
All of this because of a few small bugs, like the volte notification, or pin code to change USB mode.
It sounds like no big deal, but this notification that pops 3 to 4 times per hour reminds me every day that I’m not in control of the phone that I own.
And that’s the main issue here.
There’s nothing “fair” in fairphone if I’m not the administrator of the hardware…
My experiences with Fairphone are:
FP1 – promises regarding repairability were not kept. The hardware was poor. Multiple reboots every day. Not really usable as a smartphone.
FP2 – after 1.5 years, the core module was broken. The replacement device broke after 7 months. Unfortunately, it was outside the warranty period.
FP3 – After 26 months, sudden death.
FP4 – Ghost inputs, call volume too loud for my ears and my environment, high battery consumption. Now the FP4 is only my navigation device on my bike/motorcycle.
I bought a used Gigaset GX4. Everything works as it should. It doesn’t have 5G, but 4G is enough for me.
I will never buy a Fairphone again and will not recommend it to anyone else.
Thats in my eyes not correct, and not what I said. Its just that the word Fair in Faiphone does not stand for “a user must be able to always at all times control every tiny little bit of UI on their phone”…
However I see you want to be infuriated by this notification, thats for sure your decision and thats the point: you let a notification control your feelings. I like to take over responsibility for my feelings and to control my feelings is much more important to me than controlling a notification.
It’s not a question of that notification in particular.
The notification is the symptom.
The real deal here is that devs somewhere are not taking in account that users wants control of their hardware. That they had the opportunity to correct some things. And they deliberately chose not to do so.
What other things lays hidden in the system like this ?
What piece of given control are we hitting without knowing every day as we uses our phones ?
We shouldn’t have to install any other system just to control our hardware…
And yes, it infuriates me that some people somewhere are deciding what I do with my notifications. Because today it’s only one notification, 3 to 4 times an hour.
What if in the next update it’s 2 or 3 notifications for other stuff that we can’t suppress ?
Nobody seems to care that what we let go here is very very much bigger than a simple notification.
what a long thread! I’m a tech guy and happy user of my first FP, the FP5. A small company can not deliver a close to perfect product, this is my take on how I see FP and why I accept certain problems. Don’t expect FP to deliver like the big brands. Having said that, I feel that FP is more transparent through forums like this than any other brands.
I bought my FP3+ because it had begun to feel grim to buy other brands. At the time, I was exiting the events and hospitality industry in order to study, and because I’d started noticing how much waste that industry creates.
Once you see that on a personal level, you see it everywhere, and so when I found myself needing a new phone, I thought “Surely there must be something like a fair trade smartphone”.
Searched the web for that and here I am, over five years on and no real issues.
I fully accept that my phone doesn’t have the razzmatazz of the multi billion dollar rivals, but I expected that. In terms of business model, Fairphone is very much an underdog surrounded by wolves.
As has been said, this forum really makes a difference when it comes to making things more personable, which is a huge plus compared to the Apple/Google brick wall approach to customer relations.
In spite of not being very techy, I rooted to e/OS at the start of the year, and had to accept more quirks as a result, the worst being the current banking app outage suffered by a lot of users.
I try to remind myself that it’s all primarily the fault of Big Tech monopolies, and so am still happy to limp along with the underdogs. Understandably, that isn’t for everyone, but each to their own.
To your first point: Yeah, that’s true. But considering we’re in the tech industry, even the most social-media-shy people I know have an account there. Sure, that’s only my little bubble and other people might be different. So, why not put the assumptions aside and check the source code to see if I’m right?
First, let’s see what Fairphone tells us on their page about who is the creator of the software for the Fairphone 6:
This is the source tree from our hardware and software supplier T2Mobile.
Okay, it looks like no one at Fairphone is actively developing according to them. Let’s fact-check that by running the following script to see how much Fairphone employees have to do with this code here.
The output (see first comment under the code) confirms my point: The only commits (contributions) from Fairphone employees are several commits from Luca Weiss in 2021-2024. Since this information is publicly available, it’s okay to use the full name. But these commits happened directly to the Linux Kernel for better compatibility in the future. Aside from that? Nothing. Fairphone didn’t lie: T2Mobile is handling the whole development process. Which is even worse than my assumption.
From my experience working in IT, my guess is that Luca’s main work is to control what the guys over at T2Mobile are doing. Which is always necessary when you hire some external company for anything. They need to be managed. But seeing that only one guy has to manage the whole of T2Mobile’s software development for 3 different devices + 1 probably in the making, I’m pretty sure he’s overwhelmed and needs more support there (you’re doing great work, Luca! Don’t get me wrong please). Just for information, here is the job posting Luca potentially applied on.
I didn’t articulate myself very well here. Monthly updates are totally fine most of the time. My problem here is the following: when you launch a brand-new flagship product, I expect bugs to be fixed as fast as possible. Not only because that’s what I would expect as a customer, but also because you have a higher rate of media attention during that time. Waiting 4-6 weeks (or even longer) isn’t really acceptable when you’re affected by a really annoying bug. Especially when you read in the community forum that they have already deployed a potential bug fix to the beta testers and there is no way to join the beta program even as tech-savvy user. And I don’t want to talk about the fact that the fix didn’t cover all scenarios and the update was pretty disappointing for most people (me included). Yes, Fairphone is a pretty small brand. But I expect more from them on the software side because the current way they develop is a total deal-breaker for me. I can’t recommend Fairphone to my relatives and colleagues because the speed they fix any bugs is just unacceptable to most.
I don’t want daily updates. But I want bug-fixes for problems you can read about in the community forum for hours to be developed and deployed as fast as possible. Not only as a byproduct of the regular security fixes every 4-6 weeks. Yes, that costs more money if the whole OS development is being outsourced. That’s why they don’t do it in my opinion. And that’s what I criticize. They need to be more independent of T2Mobile to be able to act faster and improve software quality. To revert some crude “improvements” that T2Mobile seem to implement that break so many things that are not there when you use LineageOS, for example. I’m pretty sure @ArianK16a could tell us more here.
That’s the only thing I can agree with you. I don’t know that either, and I’m not even sure if it’s publicly available. But I don’t see that as the most contributing factor here.
that itself might be a security risk. A: if its one out of two, how much control is there over the commited code. B: china is known to interfere with bigger companies than that. Now I hope the firmware was not developed in China as well. I know not everyone cares about this, but to me this is a huge red flag.