Pretty much sums up my experience of use since Sept 2025..
The Fairphone 6 won the design award and I have just learned this design was a collaborative effort with the Above Agency, and they also worked together before on Fairphone 4?
A must read from the interwebs.
Mainly about the mechanics behind AppStores, Instagram, etc. and why this causes users to become consumers and the spreading of tech illiteracy. But also much more.
Moved your post here. Overall as a common sense when posting a link (and its somehow fitting to the article shared…)
Plenty of good thoughts in that one. I especially like
Kids learned by watching, by lurking in forums, by getting their stupid questions answered by people who then expected them to answer someone else’s stupid questions eventually.
and
You can now write complete programs without understanding what a single line of them does, and the programs will often work well enough in the happy path that you’ll never know how thoroughly you don’t understand what you’ve built until something goes wrong in production at two in the morning and you are completely without tools to respond.
There is one more thing regarding the “phoning home” aspect that has been on my mind for a very long time which IMHO fits the blog post quite well: people often complain that devices/programms/apps collect data and send it somewhere.
From a developers’ point of view I can see this as kind of self-defense. People get angry at bugs. And the only way to find/analyze them nowadays seems to be capturing telemetry data, because - IMHO fully in line with the article - people just are not able/willing to write proper bug reports anymore.
20 years ago, you could ask someone to run a traceroute to your server to pin down some networking issue. Of course not everyone knew what tracert actually did or how to interpret its output. But they could copy commands into a terminal and copy back the output in text form instead of a screenshot (that gets scaled down by today’s messages so that the receiver can hardly read it or would need OCR to work with the output properly).
Sometimes I think, people today only know how to take screenshots (and miraculously ALWAYS manage to miss the important parts/relevant context) and have totally forgotten how to use links. rant off 
Ask a twenty-two-year-old to connect to a remote server via SSH. Ask them to explain what DNS is at a conceptual level. Ask them to tell you the difference between their router’s public IP and the local IP of their laptop. Ask them to open a terminal and list the contents of a directory. These are not advanced topics. Twenty years ago these were things you learned in the first week of any serious engagement with computers.
In which parallel nerdiverse does the author live? (Not that he’s entirely wrong, though.)
The SSH part might seem strange, but we live in a technically advanced world and people should now about DNS, like people know about gravity. This is now basic knowledge about how the world works.
In the one users try to get help from with oftentimes astoundingly basic tech problems. Long may it last.
While the same users need a driver’s license with mandated learning about car and traffic basics to be allowed to operate a car, but don’t need a computer device operator’s license to be allowed to use a computer device … for surely logical reasons and for the obvious propelling forward of all humanity towards a most shiny and favourable future.
Well, I actually do tick all those boxes. But I’m also aware that most people - the vast majority - have never known these things — not today, not 20 years ago, and not 40 years ago. Expecting them to is like insisting that, in order to drive a car, you should also be able to repair the engine, or that to live in a house, you should understand the electrical wiring and plumbing. I’d say that it’s enough to be able to choose a safe, eco‑friendly car and an energy‑efficient house in a location that isn’t prone to earthquakes or flooding — or, for that matter, to buy a Fairphone with /e/OS. But as I said, I think the author is generally right.
I would not go this far.
It once was common to do repairs of your car. Exchange tires, light bulbs or breakers. It was even guided by manuals and there where books explaining lots more.
The manual for the Commodore C64 explained programming in BASIC.
People where able to do common things and check whether they need an expert or not.
And of course: Things were designed to be understandable and taken apart.
Lovely blog post from an Ukrainian in Belarus on his very personal “phone biography” – although I am sure I a not the only one who re-finds himself in it more than once. Marking @ElKrasso who I had to think of especially during the first third or half of the post. 
Shared by Fairphone on Instagram and Facebook:
(apparently the link is or was to the Fairphone Shop page for the FP6 on /e/OS)
Today’s Fairphone reddit AMA dealt with questions on Graphene, Ubuntu Touch, the headphone jack (don’t get your hopes up), a smaller or a high-end Fairphone and a few others. 
https://www.reddit.com/r/BuyFromEU/comments/1syy00k/fairphone_ama/
Thanks @Meaghan for pointing me towards this.
To give @urs_lesse the chance to reply 
From JULY 2027, Fairphone will be an “affiliate” sponsor of Dutch 
football club Feyenoord Rotterdam. While the Fairphone logo does not make it onto the shirt, the shorts will bear it. This will apply both to the men’s and the women’s teams.
See final paragraph here:
https://www.fairphone.com/stories/everybody-loves-fairphone-see-what-we-mean
Interesting detail: While focussing on the upcoming end of official support of the Fairphone 
, this LinkedIn post also claimed yesterday that “over 2000 Fairphone 
devices are still in active use” (out of a little under 115000 FP2 sold).
In the past, I always thought the number of devices in active use was somehow deduced from connections to the update servers – but the final official FP2 updates are several years in the past. So where does the number 2000 come from? 
Are these FP2s still “calling home” on regular intervals even though no one “picks up” anymore?
I guess they are calling home trying to find an update.
So it would be even more because those on CustomRom would not be counted…