My Fairphone App: Your digital sustainability tool

Strange. On my FP3+ I still have the old version (essentially for support tickets), no update is offered through Play and I don’t see the app in the Play catalogue.

As I don’t see it either, if I look in the catalogue from a PC, I suppose there’s some filter.

Running stock Android 3.A.0134.

Just a note: Fairphone has confirmed they currently have no plans to make this app Open Source:

It personally disappointed me, given during the Fairphone 2 days they open sourced a fair bit, but the app doesn’t sound like much more than marketing fluff anyway (all the info I am finding on it is quite… light on detail) so maybe it’s not that big of a loss. If it ever changes I’ll make sure to help package it for F-Droid.

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Got my Fairphone at 12th of december bit sonce yeszerday ot stopped working and I also get an connection error though I have internet via wifi or mobile commection becaise everything else works fine…

Deleting the app data fixes it.

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I have the FP App already on my phone. When I start it, it now requires a login. (This wasn’t required before, right?) I tried the credentials of this forum but they a rejected.

  1. Why do I need an account?
  2. Why is it not the same one as used for this forum?

The forum is hosted by Fairphone, but not part of their business; see, e.g., this thread, on separate credentials for FP shop, FP support, and the forum.

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Will the “troubleshooter” part of the app replace the data collection from fairphone so users can decide if they want to share it?
The app could ask for consent, make it legal in Europe and more useful for troubleshooting.

If you have an account with Fairphone, by buy from the online shop then try those login details. As indicated the app has nothing to do with this forum.

All the best

Ah, I understand. Thanks for the clarification.

But why does the app need an account? I’m interested in the CO2 tracking feature in the first place. Why does this require an account?

Actually, I’m a bit surprised since I thought that FP is quite concerned about privacy, so this doesn’t really fit in this picture. Especially because the login screen doesn’t say anything about why and what happens with collected data and alike:

and also the form to create an account doesn’t even show any of the information I thought would be essential to match the GDPR requirements (to be clear, I doesn’t expect many pages with legal stuff, but just a few sentences why I need to register to use the app, which data is collected and what happens with this data):

As long as I don’t know if this app could be helpful for me, I would prefer to delay the account creation until I decided I want to keep using it.

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Good point, you should open a support ticket for the missing link to the privacy policy.

I dont think that such Form must give any GDPR details, however you should be able to read the data privacy guidance before you enter the data. Still which data are used is quite obvious from the Form itself.
I think I still have the old App but can access the data protection guidelines
https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/fairphone-app.appspot.com/o/documents%2F20200408_MYFAIRPHONE_APP_PRIVACY_STATEMENT.html?alt=media&token=b7f83dda-f375-408b-a559-4cbc7a7b171d

I thought so too but then they started to include a hidden data collecting in the stock operating system without notice or opt in/out.
I understand that its useful for debugging, statistics but it would legally require consent in the form of opt-in. It makes me sad that they take such shortcuts

Why not?
And, deducting what data a closed source app collects solely from the form is ambitious. :yum:

Because the only that needs to be assured is that you can access and read the data protection policy, but there is no need to provide summaries of that on specific pages/forms.

Overall issues with that would need to addressed to FPs data protection office, Info’s in the data protection policy linked above or available on their home page.

Edit: I’m quite surprised that many feel that FPs mission/vision is data protection, because I have never seen specific statements on that. So can anyone share such?

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Just to add, although I’m running FPOS on the FP3 I don’t see it on the Aurora Store, so would assume you need to have a Google account entered on the device to get an update or see it in the store and probably its really only available in Google Play Store.

Its not only about summaries, its about consent and transparency.
Looking at article 4 it is clear that the GDPR is needed for the app.
At least article 5 and 6 are violated in my opinion.
Edit: that is only for the app. the hidden data collection is way off the charts.

We’ve seen first hand, in real-time, the cost of intensive data extraction on our society. … it is up to each one of us to be vigilant about our own data.

There have been older blogposts about the need for fair software,
some of the goals they had have been scraped later as being to hard to archive.
This was from the FP2 time and FP has changed since then and that’s ok.
Its always a changing market.
They have made some great work, FPOOS, the work with F-droid, Jolla, Privacy Impact and more.
The recent developments that are criticized are maybe just rushed and not coordinated, that is why I think its fair and good to point it out to make it better.

Our ambitions for fair software

Fairphone’s high-level ambition for our phones’ software is to bring more fairness to software. To us, that means focusing on the following key principles: transparency, longevity and ownership. Transparency is about building trust with our community. Longevity means keeping the software up-to-date and secure long after the product was sold, and ownership is about putting the user in control over what happens on their phone.

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Really like the idea behind the app. With everything fairphone related in one place.
Hope they will make a section for their podcast series in a future release.
For the last couple of days I haven’t been able to use the app on my Fairphone 3.
Every time I get a ‘Connection problem, Retry’. Hope they will fix this bug!

On FP4 it helps to delete app data and cache

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Thank you for the info :blush:. Will try what.
So you had the same problem on a Fairphone 4?

Yes, I’ve had the issue already multiple times.

Okay, let’s hope for a quick fix!!.
Followed your advice and now my app is working again :pray::crossed_fingers:.

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