Questions about the Fairphone 5

Discuss The Products
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Hi

I’ve Arch Linux KDE on PC, I’m interested to an open source good smartphone List of open-source mobile phones - Wikipedia .

Good because my PinePhone Pro isn’t: camera with green image tint, can’t film, bad microphone sound, Wi-Fi & telephone stop working, archlinux-pinephone-pro-barebone-20241223 not boots · dreemurrs-embedded/Pine64-Arch · Discussion #706 · GitHub
PinePhone Pro full documentation - PINE64

So maybe the Fairphone 5, since the 6 has strangely USB 2.0 FP6 Discussion about USB-2 and missing Desktop Mode …

Can the Fairphone 5:
USB reverse tethering?
UVC, the smartphone as webcam by USB to a PC? Use a device as a webcam  |  Android Open Source Project
USB mass storage, the internal storage, microSD card, USB drive?
Boot a microSD card, an USB drive?

Is it possible to install, boot it Arch Linux ARM? With Plasma Mobile? There’s postmarketOS edge/fairphone-fp5/plasma-mobile/20250725-1410 - postmarketOS // Official Images but based on Alpine Linux.

Why no FM receiver? Although the Fairphone 1 & 2 have it FM-radio on FP2, FP1, any of them? .

Why IP55 ? Why not IP68 as other smartphones?

The location of its bootloader? In the internal storage? Is it possible to erase the bootloader, brick the Fairphone?

Is the OLED display protected against burn-in?

googling “fairphone 5 oled burn” OLED burn-in check …

Will there be Fairphone 7?

Thanks.

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Hi there, welcome to the forums!

I’ll do my best to answer some of the questions I (think I) have answers to. :slight_smile:

Should be possible with third-party software, such as re-link.

Considering that this functionality was introduced to Android 14, and the Fairphone 5 utilizes Android 15, I don’t see why not. :person_shrugging:

I’m not sure what you’re asking here, could you clarify? :thinking:

The Fairphone 5 supports microSD cards and can be connected to external USB drives via the appropriate cables.

As far as I’m aware, this is not possible, as with most Android devices.

As far as I’m aware, there is no official statement on this – at least not that I could find. However, I seem to remember that having a headphone jack is required for FM radio, as the headphone cable acts as an antenna.

Considering that audio jacks have been absent from Fairphone phones since the Fairphone 4, that might be one reason for it.

Fairphone is committed to creating phones that are modular and relatively easy to repair. That same modularity has led to an engineering trade-off wherein additional sealing of the phones had to be sacrificed in favor of user experience.

I assume the bootloader is stored on a separate partition within internal storage. This is standard practice for Android devices, and I see no reason why Fairphone would deviate from this.

As such, I’m sure that if you tried hard enough, you could erase the bootloader and hard brick your phone. However, that’d require an active and/or careless approach, so the odds of doing so accidentally are low.

I don’t think anyone knows the answer to that question. Considering the release schedule of Fairphone models so far, it seems likely that a Fairphone (Gen. 7) might appear around 2027/2028. But that’s pure speculation on my part. :crystal_ball:

Hopefully this helped you along a bit. :waving_hand:

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Fairphones are relatively bog standard Android smartphones. The answer to many of your questions is applicable to most Android phones.

USB tethering is a built in feature of Android. You don’t need a 3rd party app. Though I never used it myself.

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As far as I know using your Android device as a webcam is also a built in feature now. But I never explored it. This is where I say, there’s apps to fulfill this function, in case Android’s own implementation isn’t satisfactory.

It’s a miracle the phone has IP55 in the first place. The FP5 has a removable back cover, and no gaskets to keep water out. Do not submerge it in water. And do not rely on it’s water resistance.

As of OLED burn in, I am the author of the post you linked. I’m greatly dissatisfied with how much burn in there is on my screen. But since other forum users claim theirs look good still, then maybe my case is a fluke. I’ll probably replace my screen soon ish.

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The question was about reverse tethering.
I’ve read that this can be done even without a 3rd-party app but with a rooted phone.

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I had to google this. So reverse tethering uses a usb connection. Yeah I never heard of that one.
But I can confirm that a basic usb to ethernet adapter does work on the phone. In case that matters.

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USB reverse tethering is internet from the PC to the smartphone by USB, it was a feature of Android: USB-PC internet share Is it possible to have reverse tethering working with Google Play ? - Android Community , googling “usb-pc internet share android removed” I even not found an answer…
I guess I’ll use the 3rd party Gnirehtet GitHub - Genymobile/gnirehtet: Gnirehtet provides reverse tethering for Android , re-Link is a payware re-link - reverse tethering made easy …

Well has anyone UVC working?

USB mass storage device class - Wikipedia , e.g. my old smartphone Logicom L-ement 403 with Android 6.0 (as in the 1st link of this post) has USB mass storage, but only for a microSD card plugged to, not its internal storage… but the PinePhone Pro yes. E.g. I can create, delete a partition on the microSD card.
Again USB mass storage was a feature of Android, googling “usb mass storage android removed” I found https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/1aqjd0/why_do_new_versions_of_android_not_support_usb/ .

Well at least the PinePhone Pro can boot a microSD card…

No jack anymore yes but why not the headphones cable as antenna plugged to the USB-C of the smartphone?

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Because FM radio is an analouge thing. The USB C port is purely digital. Usb C cables are shielded, so they literally make awful antennas. If you plug a usb to headphone jack dongle into your phone, the phone sends out a digital signal, that the dongle converts to analouge and sends it out to your headphones. Skipping the analouge step from the phone’s point of view entirely. Losing the headphone jack on smartphones meant losing fm radio capabilities as well. (There’s a caveat here, but all you need to know is that the FP5 is physically incapable of receiving fm signals)

You just have to start using internet radio services. The Foobar music player app has a built in radio station browser, if you’re interested. Or if you intend to go to places with no mobile data, you just have to pick up one of those portable battery operated fm radios.

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Well, my Samsung Galaxy S5 (from 2014…) is IP67 rated while still having a removable battery/back cover, an audio jack etc. But the display is glued in, unlike FP. So IP55 is really not that great. At least it shows that you don’t need non-removable batteries to achieve IP67. This has been pure marketing to prevent users from replacing the batteries and force them to buy a new phone instead. So kudos to FP for not following that trend…but I guess they could still have managed IP67 in some way since the S5 did it. But IP55 is fine for a phone anyway.

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I finally bought a Fairphone 5, good machine!

But the stock Android 15 OS hasn’t UVC, although I installed:

on the smartphone: DroidCam Webcam & OBS Camera https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dev47apps.obsdroidcam
on my PC Arch Linux KDE: OBS Studio Arch Linux - obs-studio 31.1.1-1 (x86_64) & DroidCam OBS Plugin AUR (en) - droidcam-obs-plugin .

It works! So why the Android OS hasn’t it originally? Maybe an other OS, /e/OS, LineageOS Info about FP5 | LineageOS Wiki , postmarketOS https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Fairphone_5\\\_(fairphone-fp5) …?

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One comment:its rather difficult to read and understand your post as they are spammed with links.

And I merged your topics together.

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