Of course I did not know! When it first occured, I contacted Fairphone. Answer: not our problem, go to the shop where you bought it. (!!!) I went to the seller, they did not know eather, changed the screen protector for another 30 Swiss Franks. As the issue did not go, I started to search and found this forum and the answer. Fairphone and the retailer lied to me on purpose, thatâs why I hate this brick and NEVER AGAIN will even think of bying a Fph.
2 Likes
It can be frustrating to deal with these issues, especially if you paid a lot of money for something that does not work properly.
However, being angry will not help at all. Worse, it will affect you more than the phone. I know about computer rage from personal experience, and itâs not healthy. Some advice based on my experience:
Claiming (fairphone) support lied is just a way to create a narrative in your mind that can help you be angry. Try to understand they are just people (usually not developers or engineers) trying to find what you describe in their database. You can instead say they were not helpful at all resolving your issue.
In general, directing anger like this can lead to even more speculation and you can then direct anger at anyone saying something good about fairphone, or hating on moderators, etc.
Calling the device a brick is usually done in the hope that this will make others understand just how bad it is, and justify the amount of anger. But this definition used to be used when e.g. the device doesnât turn on at all. Your device has an issue that makes the phone a pain to use in your daily life, we get that. This is definitely a good reason to get a refund, no need to call everything completely worthless or a brick to get your point across.
What are productive ways of dealing with this:
- as you apparently already did, try to return the device. If you bought it from a retailer they should indeed offer you a refund or replacement if the device does not work properly. Some retailers will try to ignore that. If they donât listen I would not go there again. I donât think Fairphone will give you a refund if you got it from a retailer.
- if the device is not useable in your daily life, and you cannot wait until october to try the fix, look for another phone and try to sell the fairphone, which is apparently also what someone here did. You can also try to get a cheap second-hand device as a backup to use while waiting for a fix if you want to give the phone another change.
I think it was wrong from the retailer to deny you a refund, or to suggest a screen protector (if that is what they did). I never use a screen protector since it typically messes with the sensitivity of the display, and I found that they are not needed. A case that sits a mm or so above the screen is enough to protect it from a fall, and the glass is good enough to sit in pockets for years. For the fairphone 4 I would just go with the official case.
No-one will think less of you for deciding you donât want to buy a fairphone ever again, based on your experience. But then I would also recommend finding a better retailer.
Good luck, and please try to hate less or be less angry. The phone doesnât care, itâs just a machine. And the people you interact with will receive that anger and frustration and be less willing to deal with you.
To deal with anger myself, I try to think of things I take for granted and be grateful for that instead. Phones are technological miracles that allow us to send information wirelessly from almost anywhere, and thatâs wonderful.
18 Likes
As i still saw ghost touches after i just got my FP4 back from a repair because i experienced bootloop screen after the android 13 update and also could not relock the boot loader as is was terrifing due to the get_unlock_ability was 0 , the dam thing is locked agian and i am gona sell it a.s.a.p and never look back. pfffffff⌠forget this ever happed, a few hundred euroâs down the drain.
If only the billions of angry people all over the world knew that!.. 
Seriously now (to all, not you specifically), anger is the natural attitude to a situation you consider needing to fight against, much like fear is the attitude to something you consider not being able to fight. Unless youâre a Zen Master, you canât do anything about it.
So itâs IMHO pointless telling somebody who is âviolently unhappyâ to just chill down, swallow the pill and be grateful the situation isnât worse. Anger needs to pass, venting off steam needs to be done, and it so happens that this forum is the only place it can possibly be done (What would the alternative be? Taking a train/plane ticket and visiting the Fairphone HQ?..). 
My point is, unhappy people will always come here to express their disappointment and frustration, itâs inevitable. 
3 Likes
Well, they should explain the problem to us regardless of how âtechnicalâ it is. I guarantee there are at least some people on this forum who will understand it anyway and can interpret it for the rest of us. Android is not secret dark magic that only one manufacturerâs outsourced development team can understand.
Coming from the free software community, the degree of lack of communication from Fairphone remains astonishing. Iâm used to seeing every step of development done in the open, but not only do we not get anything like that, or descriptions of identified problems less vague than âwe identified the problemâ, but I these people literally disabled their bug tracker and years later gave us an intermittently edited wiki page instead. Among many other faults this means we lose any ability to comment on bugs, track their ongoing progress, etc; the developers also lose the ability to communicate such things to us.
I know this is how a lot of outsourcers work (because the less info they provide anyone, the more job protection they get and the more they can charge) but this too is not an excuse, itâs a problem â and is one of many reasons why it is usually a mistake to use outsourcers for anything (I have never yet encountered one that wasnât simply dreadful). That massive Australian Optus disaster? One week before the disaster, Optus fired their entire networking team and turned to⌠outsourcers! For a telco this was unbelievably stupid. I think even Optus probably realises this now (one friend of mine made redundant at the time got a panicked re-hiring call a day after the disaster, and laughed in their faces).
Not doing at least some of your software development in-house when you sell a notably expensive phone to end-users is similarly foolish, and this whole ongoing mess is showing us exactly why. Itâs now been, what, three months since the Fairphone 4 Android 13 upgrade â an upgrade which is not reversible so cannot try it out to see if it works first â but despite the fact that it had serious problems reported from the start, the outsourcers apparently cannot even be convinced to get the fixes out in a non-dilatory fashion (I mean, numerous users reporting multiple reboots a day, many of them sending their actual phones in for analysis, and the fix is held off for a month after identification?!). It would be interesting to know the relative team sizes working on Fairphone 4 versus 5⌠but of course we canât know that, because we donât even know who the outsourcers are. Itâs all secret, because keeping everything secret from your customers is, oh wait Fairphone wasnât supposed to be like that was it.
I know I for one am still on Android 12, and will probably sit there for multiple months after the next release, simply because I donât trust Fairphoneâs nameless, unidentified outsourcersâ software development practices to turn out code that works any more. Support for five years or whatever is only valuable if the support doesnât make everything worse.
4 Likes
But Fairphone has never been âopenâ â just âfairâ⌠
While I agree with the gist of your post, I think they are a standard phone manufacturer with a âfairâ label.
Where things get somewhat muddled is they build their phone hardware in easily swappable pieces, which can lead people to think they encourage tinkering. Iâm not sure they actually do. Itâs just a marketing argument (and a pretty strong one too, it made me prefer a FP4 to a Galaxy or a Pixel!).
2 Likes
Hi all,
Let me say that I love the mission of Fairphone.
But I canât wait to buy a real phone again.
And of all the fairphone owners that I have spoken to in real life, the sentiment seems to be fairly similar. I have tried the FP3 and the FP4 and I have to say they were both pretty @$%&^ phones.
How is the sentiment on this forum?
2 Likes
hello, i am using FP5 and am super happy with it (the phone is slightly too big but that is on me).
For other phones may I suggest checking these threads?
POLL: How satisfied or unsatisfied are you with your FP3 or FP3+?
POLL: How satisfied or unsatisfied are you with your FP4?
I would say the majority of users were satisfied.
5 Likes
I was quite happy with the FP3, and FP5 is close to perfect for me. I can imagine that these users who have a ghost touch problem on the FP4 are not satisfied at all, but I know (only) one FP4 user and he doesnât have any issues as far as I know.
I do however have a history of buying lower end phones so my FP5 is simply the most advanced phone Iâve ever had in my hands. So Iâm easy to please 
2 Likes
I think it very much depends on your previous experience with Android phones. If I went to FP4 directly from my old Asus Zenfone 2, I think I wouldnât complain that much. The Zenfone also had ghost touches, the UI was buggy as hell, updates were slow⌠Overall, it was not a pleasant experience.
But right before buying FP4, I was using Moto Z2 Play. It cost me approx. âŹ250 and even had an AMOLED display. If it werenât for the dying battery, cracked screen and no updates (it was a mid-range phone with only 2 major updates), I would still be using it. I had no problems with GPS. I didnât have to think about how to position my phone on the terminal to pay via NFC. I didnât experience any random reboots. Camera app/driver never crashed. I havenât had any problems in sunlight (whether it be screen dimming or proximity sensor issues). During the phone calls, everyone could hear me perfectly clearly. The phone just worked. Yeah, Iâm not entirely happy with my âŹ650 FP4âŚ
2 Likes
There will always be a dependency on individual use cases with this. And bad luck with hardware failures, of course.
Iâm using a Fairphone 3 as my daily driver, which inherited the role from my Fairphone 2 still serving as a backup now, and I wouldnât want to swap them for any other phones as long as they work and are getting Android security updates (the supposed Android 11 security update EOL early 2024 might force my hand with the Fairphone 2, sadly).
They just work, they do everything I need them to do, and they give me a level of control over the software situation on them which not every other phone out there does.
5 Likes
Using FP2 since 2018. First with LOS now eOS.
Suits my use case in daily life.
No complaints from my side.
4 Likes
Well, I used a FP2 for nearly four years, LOS as soon as possible, an FP3 with LOS more or less from the beginning for four years, and now have a FP5 for 1 month, sadly no LOS up to now (which simply is way more configurable), but no problems up to now
1 Like
Happy with my FP4, shure, absolutely, but Iâm also probably not a regular user. Iâve been running CalyxOS for most of the time so a lot of the problems with FPOS didnât concern me and the hardware does everything I need in a phone (mostly the non phone part).
(I have a family member on FPOS who is also very happy, but since Iâm tech support for them and I usually take care of issues before it reaches their phone I wouldnât count that as a regular user either)
Happy with Fairphone as a company, the lack of communication with us, the bricks, taking forever to fix (sometimes simple) issues, yeah, not so much âŚ
4 Likes
I am a new FP5 owner, and very satisfied. I had an Apple before, and once I started to lose the satisfaction of being âinâ with my friends on the same platform, the experience slowly started to grate on me more and more.
I donât lean on the phone very heavily in terms of apps or connectivity, but I havenât seen any problems with it so far. Getting it to work in Seattle took switching carriers, but I knew that was a risk going in, and FP is clear that I am outside their support area.
I have a feeling that almost any survey or poll is going to be biased in favor of the people who are disappointed. Itâs much easier to forget to look at the forum on a day when everything works just fine.
9 Likes
I have an FP4, previously had an FP3. Very happy with both of them. I found support and the community also very helpful. You have to remember that happy users donât tend to go on forums to tell the world; forums are usually filled with users who have problems. If you read forums you can come away with the idea that all the users are unhappy, when really you are just seeing all the unhappy users! Itâs the same for any product. Fairphone has a transparency and a connection to the community that Samsung and Google will never give you.
7 Likes
Itâs hard to tell. On the one hand you have polls that suggest the majority likes it. And the majority probably does.
On the other hand, many people that hate their phones end up selling it and never come back here again.
Personally Iâm genuinely considering selling mine and buying a Pixel 10 when it launches in two years. I have used my iPhone 13 work phone for almost 5 months now and while i hate iOS, at least people can hear me when I call them. Thatâs more than can be said with my Fairphone 4.
I find the biggest flaw of the FP4 to be the indie company level software support. Yeah we get updates for 5+ years, but weâre at year 2 now and the phone still feels like a beta to me.
4 Likes
Same here, using FP2 with LineageOS since 2019, Iâve also recently switched to /e/OS solved many issues I was having with the current LOS. SW-wise my FP2 feels like new
3 Likes