Live AMA with Franz-Xaver Geiger 13th Oct, 17:00 to 19:00 CEST (UTC+02:00)

Hi Franz-Xaver, we know that Fairhphone tries to be fair to the Chinese workers, reading payment, working hours etc. How fair is Fairphone to it’s own workers in the headoffice?

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The group of testers is closed, so we cannot join :wink:

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Whether you need to install XPosed depends on how much you want to customize the software on your Fairphone. You already mention different reasons to install it; XPosed is a great framework that offers - next to XPrivacy and GPS improvements - many ways to customize Android.

The Android we release will definitely be good enough for daily use, but we won’t be able to integrate all the features that XPosed offers. To the contrary: We rather want to stick to the standard features that come with Android, because those are most useful for all our users. For people that do want to extend functionality or alter the user interface, we enable root by default. I think this brings the best experience to all our users: A solid and stable base for everyone and the possibility to build on top of that for those who want more.

As already mentioned, the phone will be rooted by default. That also enables Titanium Backup. I don’t see a reason why you would need to reinstall all your apps manually :slight_smile:

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Hey @Lidwien!

Whenever someone asks ‘How Fair is the Fairphone?’, we normally reply with ‘What do you think is Fair?’. So, my initial response here would to do almost the same… What do you think is fair?

But I won’t be so boring, and just say that Fairphone employees are rewarded for their work according to Dutch law; which means proper payment, enough holidays, normal working hours etc. etc. Next to that we offer Dutch classes, Bootcamp and Yoga sessions and have fairtrade and organic food and drinks at the office. There is a team of three people constantly looking out for the welfare of the workers (the People Team) and they have regular interviews and talks with everyone to know how they are doing. They also organise outings, borrels and sometimes parties (like for Christmas.).

Overall I am very happy to work here and feel well looked after. But maybe you have more in mind when you asked this question?

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Hi @jftr
do you plan to forward port 4.4 to the FP2? :smiley:
This is because there are many functions of 4.4 that I really miss on my FP2 :stuck_out_tongue:

Thank you in advance, bye! :slight_smile:

I do not know about the bluetooth issues with Cyanogenmod. But I can tell you about the issues our testers and we encountered with the current alpha releases.

Connecting to all kind of devices (headphones, fitness trackers, etc) works. Unfortunately, the connection is not stable though. Sometimes it is dropped and FP1 does not reliably reconnect to the bluetooth device.

We do not have tested Android Wear specifically. Do you own an Android watch and would like to help us testing it? If so, please register for testing and mention Android Wear.

My personal goal was July :scream:
Since we failed to deliver during September, my personal goal is to fix stuff as fast as possible and release as soon as possible. But believe me, I don’t want to work on it until I retire but rather finish this project before :wink:

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Really? I don’t see that here (anymore) :stuck_out_tongue:

What good to hear. When I visit Fairphone I felt very welcome and found the office inspiring.

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the first two lines, i quote: "No more testers needed
Due to overwhelming response we now have enough testers and it is no longer possible to apply."

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ahum I just removed the (closed) tags and that sentence . Thank you for notifying me :slight_smile:

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I actually bought a moto 360 (1) few weeks back. I’d love to help you guys out!

Hello Franz,

about the Bluetooth problems I want to ask if you are working on the problem with the GPS Tom Tom GO. To give the real time traffic situation the Tom Tom connect via Tethering Bluethoot to the phone and download the data’s. At the beginning my tom tom GO 500 (2 years old) cannont connect with the Fariphone’s bluetooth, with Kola Nut the connection is stable but is still impossible for the Tom Tom Go to download the data’s. When I try to do that the fariphone is still asking everytime to allow Tom Tom to access to the Access Points.

For work I drive a lot and I use very often the Tom Tom real time traffic to avoid the traffic jam and road problems, please evaluate to work also on this problem.

Marco

Haha, awesome idea :joy:

Now seriously: Directly porting KitKat to FP2 is not possible. Adapting some of the interface to include features from FP1 is another story.

Actually, I’ve had had a very long conversation with one of the people who applied as testers about this very topic. She likes the interface of Fairphone 1 much more than of Fairphone 2. I had to tell her, and I also have to tell you, that porting the old Android interface to a newer version of Android does not make much sense. In general the interface of Android improves with each release and some of the features that we have had in FP1 have been made obsolete by these improvements.

When coming up with a new design for Fairphone 2, my colleagues (that was before I started working here) and Kwamecorp put a lot of thought in how to take the user experience of Fairphone 1 and gradually improve it. What you currently see on Fairphone 2 is the result of that process.

But, of course, I understand that the question of design and features is always subjective. What are your favorite features of Fairphone 1 that you miss in Fairphone 2?

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No, we do not currently conduct tests with Tom Tom GO.

To get some understanding of the problem: You enable bluetooth tethering on your Fairphone and connect the Tom Tom with it. I assume data works on your phone in general. Did you test whether tethering to other devices (for instance your laptop) works?

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This is Franz in between answering your questions:

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I’m guessing you can’t really say much about this (legal/contract issues), but I’ve heard rumours that the MTK sources aren’t the most joyful thing to work with as a developer. Are you coping? Does the people team provide counselling?

Yes I mean features not the entire interface, at least I can recall the ones I really used a lot and I miss:

  1. phone call recording: during a call if you push the menu button you’ll be able to record the call, I used it a lot for work in order to take voice notes during meetings;
  2. SIM colors! I use 2 SIMs one for work and one for private calls and the possibility to have color feedback of the calling/receiving SIM was very useful;
  3. contacts sharing: I was able to select a contact and send its data via sms;

I have many more and honestly I was tempted to put up a build machine in order to port the functions from 4.4 to 5.1 and rebuild the FP2 image, but I had very less free time in these months :frowning:

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I’m pretty sure I’m not allowed to share the sources with you … however talking about my feelings when working with them should be fine :wink:

I have never asked for counselling. Maybe I should? I’m pretty sure our people team has several open ears for my complaints.

Let’s phrase it like this: The rumors you have heard are not entirely baseless. The entire source tree and build systems seems to be organically grown and has several levels of indirections. This does not always make it easy for outsiders (non-Mediatek people) to quickly understand how stuff works. I believe the system is well adapted for the needs of Mediatek: There are many abstractions in place that help them manage several devices with completely different hardware configurations. On the other hand these abstractions make it cumbersome to work with if you only have exactly one phone :smiley:

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Hello, I test the laptop and the phone work mobile but even if you allow the Network Access Points of the mobile/laptop/Tom Tom Go the device connect canno’t download the internet data’s or surf the web.

The crazy think is that if FP1 is connect at a wireless internet point (like at home) and don’t use the mobile data’s the tethering function very well! With the connected device I can surf on the web and download Tom Tom Go data’s.

Please consider to make a test on this problem with TomTom because I search on the forum and I discover that I’m not the only FP user that has this problem. TomTom and Fairphone are both dutch companies and is strange that the two device cannot talk each other :slight_smile:

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Whoa, I didn’t even know FP1 was able to do that.

This is something we cannot change much about: Android 5 introduced the option for apps to set the notification bar transparent or to a different color. Since then all icons in the notification bar need to be monochromatic.

When receiving calls, the interface does have different colors based on SIM. I don’t know of a way to change configure that color, though.

Yes, this only seems to work as MMS. Not much we can do about it. The share menu can only offer options that are declared by apps. If no app declares the intent to share the contact as SMS, then this is not possible. We cannot change the default SMS app. What you could try to do: Install other SMS apps. Maybe one of them offers that option.

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