This is something I expected, but honestly I didnāt expect the camera to be worse than the camera of a phone half the price of the Fairphone 4 on release.
Aside from that, I can live with most of the downsides. The screen not being OLED is a bit weird, but I get it. It needs to be user-replaceable. That racks up the cost.
98% of all issues I have with the FP4 are hardware related.
tough one. In the beginning I was satisfied with the FP4. Sure, it is too expensive for what it is, even if you factor in the āfair & repair taxā, but for me it does (or better ādidā) what itās supposed to do. I like the size, design and haptics, I like that I can change the batteries, I like that there is support for custom roms.
There are also things that bugged me from the beginning. Most prominently, the removal of the headphone jack. I hate it. Seriously. I mean, I get it, nowadays phones with headphone jacks are a rarity, but still, I hate it.
I also didnāt like the performance of the display that much. Itās ā¦ okish, but again, for the price it should be better. I could live with that. But with the bug they introduced with A13, the phone has become unusable in certain situation since it makes the not so-good-display even worse.
So overall I would say I am very unsatisfied, up to the point I am actively looking for a replacement. Although my criticism is less with the FP4 itself, than with the software support and the company Fairphone. They do not deliver on their promises and donāt live up to their own standards. If they claim to support their phone for that many years, if they promise to build products to reduce waste, than they have to deliver products that actually work. And you have to provide timely security updates and bug fixes. And if there are bugs that basically breaks the device, they have to get this sorted out fast (and not in months or years! seriously ā¦).
I like the idea, I think it is an important undertaking that we really need. But at this point I highly doubt that FP is the company that is able to actually deliver, to solve these problems, to live up to the expectations.
Slightly dissatisfied.
Poor software support. FP4 was slow to upgrade to android 12. And a bit behind upstream updates
It a little bit large.
Poor security due to using ASOP public signing keys. Partly the reason GrapheneOS doesnāt support Fairphone.
Hotspot partly not working.
I do like the repairability, not much of bloatware, SD-card. Iāll might change to a Pixel phone due to GrapheneOS or maybe maybe Fairphone 5 with CalyxOS. Depends on the reviews and support. Iāll probably keep it for another year atleast.
Better software support and meeting GrapheneOS standards. Then it would be almost perfect.
Unsatisfied. I really like the principles behind the Fairphone, and long software support is really important to me, but the deal breaker for me is the audio. Itās too tinny. No bass, making music sound poor. No treble which makes speech harder to understand. āSā sounds are particularly bad.
I was listening to a radio stream this morning where they said Meta are launching a Twitter rival called āFritzā. Stupid name for a service, I thought. After suffering a few awful sounding songs I switched to my old Nokia 6.1. The audio isnāt great on that phone either, but I can live with it. When the next news bulletin came on I realized the new service is called āThreadsā not āFritzā. Sound quality matters.
I only got the Fairphone yesterday, so Iāll be returning it. I use my phone for too many podcasts to put up with audio this poor. Itās the most expensive phone Iāve ever bought, but the worst sound from any smartphone. At these prices, it needs to be better.
I filled out a long post in a support ticket in the My Fairphone app so they at least know why Iām unsatisfied. Submitting it failed. I forget the exact words but words to the effect of āSomething went wrong. Try again laterā.
Welcome to the Fairphone community.
What audio device are you using with your FP4?
No extra device, just the speakers in the phone.
Ok, I donāt expect anything from these āloudspeakersā, for me a headphone or external speakers are mandatory for listening to music.
I totally agree. At first I was really happy with my FP4, but that changed these last months.
For these 3 cases there is a topic on this forum. So, I know I am not alone with these problems. I also reported them at Fairphone support, but they havenāt solved any of the bugs to this date.
I really like the whole idea about fairphone, and convinced my company to only buy Fairphones. But now, with all the bugs, every employee that has a fairphone is complaining about it.
So overall: at first this was a good phone, but the updates broke it.
Iām unsatisfied because using the 5ghz WiFi is not possible with this phone. It will always disconnect and I even tried to separate the 2,4 and 5ghz network. Also I expected the camera being more good for this price range of phone. If there would be another phone that makes the repairability as good as FP I would have changed already.
Satisfied, but would love to have minijack.
Did you contact Fairphone about this???
Yes:
āFor these 3 cases there is a topic on this forum. So, I know I am not alone with these problems. I also reported them at Fairphone support, but they havenāt solved any of the bugs to this date.ā
Iām also experiencing disconnects, but itās the UBNT Unifi AP rebooting for unexplicable reasons.
Imo FP4ās WiFi is just fine. Maybe itās the environment? Maybe turn off the randomized MACs?
Is that recent-ish firmware on the UniFi AP? Because if so, blame that ā UBNT has gone downhill with incredible speed in the last few years, ever since they went all cloudy and trying to force people to use controllers in the cloud (because using stuff out on the Internet to control your local networking gear makes so much sense). Keeping an eye on the controller release threads reveals absolute scads of dead obvious regressions with almost every release. I do wonder if they test them at all any more, or if they fired all their testing people and now rely on the userbase to do it.
Neutral.
The phone is good, maybe a teensy bit (but tolerably) bulky with the protective cover.
Fingerprint sensor was unusable with original OS and cover, but after a switch to DivestOS it works fine.
The adapter part of the charging cable broke; am currently waiting for support reply.
Iād have voted satisfied or very satisfied but for these points.
I am in the black part nowā¦
It getting worse and fo is SLOW in reacting to anything.
Itās almost a useless deviceā¦at least I can trust it to do what it should. Waiting on my 2nd replacement now 
itās horrible. It gets worse with every update. This Android is 12 when others have had 13 for a long time. I donāt understand how you can release model 5 with the same promises of support when you didnāt fulfill them on model 4. who will buy 5 after the problematic 4. jumping brightness. old android. poorly functioning screen. touchscreen, etc. you guys screwed up. I canāt recommend model 5 to myself or my friends. Itās not even about the money, itās about the support that hasnāt been able to solve problems for months.
Android 13 for the FP4 will come out in october btw. The FP3 skipped Android 12 to catch up again.
In comparison to other manufacturers Fairphone is a bit slow, but unfortually that is at least partly Googles fault, as they provide big manufacturers with new Android sourcecode much sooner than Fairphone. Hence Samsung and other big names in the industry have time to adapt the new version to their hardware before Google releases it to the public. Fairphone can only start working on their adaption much later. Thatās one of the downsides of being a small company in the smartphone market.
I do agree that support and communication (especially with regards to major issues such as ghost inputs) needs to be improved. That took quite a while until something was done about it.
Are you sure about this? The Android 14 beta is out for almost a year and is public. I donāt think Google discriminates companies. Maybe Qualcomm, but I guess they donāt either. Is there an official answer from Fairphone about this?
In preparation for the release of a new Android version, the question inevitably arises as to why this process takes so much time. Isnāt Android 14 practically ready already? After all, Google itself is close to release with the latest beta 5.3. āOthers get early access, we donāt,ā Ballester said. Access to a new Android is one aspect for the roadmap of new releases, another is the necessary testing with carriers, he said. In addition, Fairphone also needs to further test and optimize a āfinal Androidā for device-specific bugs, he said.
Translated with DeepL Translate: The world's most accurate translator (free version)
