Questions before I buy a Fairphone 4 in the USA

My questions are:

  1. What phone companies in the USA can I use? I understand that AT&T and T-Mobile are out. Is Verizon an option? If not, what is?
  2. I know some features don’t work as well on a Fairphone as they do on the less ethical phones. Do the map programs work fine, with the phone speaking the directions to me while I drive?
  3. Can I get a degoogled Fairphone?
  4. If I get a degoogled Fairphone, is there any map program where the speaking function in the navigation works? That was a barrier the last time I bought a degoogled phone. If that barrier remains insurmountable, I could buy a Fairphone and keep Google on it. But I’d prefer not to.

Now someone on another forum says that no phone service providers in the US serve Fairphones. Is that true?

  1. Check the bands, ATT & TMO may work just fine.
  2. Why wouldn’t they? Fairphone ships the same proprietary Android OS that most other vendors do.
  3. Yes, but it is far cheaper and more effective to do it yourself.
  4. OSMAnd and Organic Maps both work just fine with any TTS engines that can be selected in the Settings app, so eSpeakNG, PicoTTS, RHVoice, and even the proprietary Google TTS which works just fine on “degoogled” systems. Also actual Google Maps works just fine on “degoogled” systems too.

no phone service providers in the US serve Fairphones

None sell it, doesn’t mean it won’t work.

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Welcome to the community forum.

First things first: Fairphone don’t sell and support anything in the North American market yet. You are free to import a Fairphone 4 on your own responsibility, Fairphone can’t support you directly there. Additionally please see https://support.fairphone.com/hc/en-us/articles/202005103, section " Shipping outside of continental Europe".

Please read and perhaps ask here … Fairphone owners in the USA (FP2 FP3 FP4 FP5).

Source? The Fairphone 4 apart from being much more ethical overall is a totally normal Android phone.

Which map Apps do you use? The major players in this field should work fine at least.

You can.
https://murena.com/ (official partner of Fairphone)
https://iode.tech/en/
oslist

I’m using /e/OS on a Fairphone 3. Text-to-Speech (TTS) is included in /e/OS, so maps Apps can use it.
Should the need arise to get by without TTS on any phone, you might be interested in the fallback solution included in the Open Source maps App OsmAnd (Play Store / F-Droid - the F-Droid version is the + Version for free, which costs money in the Play Store, supporting the project) …

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Hi and welcome to the community forum.

Fairphones are not sold officially in the USA and so there is no “official” guarantee that they will work there. However there are quite a few people using them. Did you read this (pretty lengthy and long-standing) topic?

There are also users in Canada and even two angels :slightly_smiling_face: . Have a look round!

Also check out the fairphoneangels map. They may be able to offer advice.

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Hey, I’m one of the Fairphone angels in Canada.

I was worried too that I wouldn’t have any providers that would work here, but i found a good website that shows the compatibility for most phones (including all the faiphones), here’s a link, I’ve already set it to fairphone 4 in the US

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Please tell me what I’m misinterpreting.
This website repeatedly says “No Official Network Bands” multiple times under every company. So it looks like I can’t get phone service through any company. What phone company can serve my phone?

With the notable exception (unless it has changed recently) of Verizon, phone service is not really device-specific, in the sense that the provider needs to specifically enable access for that device or model. Providers follow standards and use specific network bands. Phones follow standards and support specific network bands. To the extent that these work with each other, the phone should work on the network, unless the network has done something specifically to disable it or disable phones they haven’t specifically certified (eg… Verizon, to my knowledge).

Phone companies might provide “official” support, in which they would consider themselves responsible for making sure the phone actually does work on their network. Without that official support, they aren’t responsible if it doesn’t work, or if you need to deal with configuration or implement workarounds to make it work.

All this is especially true for data. For calls, it can be more complicated, as there can be configuration complexities, particularly with VoLTE, which is why that is discussed quite a bit in the US users thread. This seems to be a problem with Fairphone, not US providers; LineageOS generally seems to make VoLTE work in the US, whereas it doesn’t generally work in the stock OS from Fairphone.

In my experience, both with the Fairphone 4 and other unusual devices without official support, T-mobile generally works reasonably well in the US, as does Google Fi, though the latter can have some weirdnesses sometimes that are not necessarily Fairphone-specific.

What that site is stating is that no provider officially supports the Fairphone 4 in the US (ie, will make sure it is working). However, with the exception of mmWave 5G, it lacks only one 4G band and no non-mmWave 5G bands on T-mobile, for example. Checking on a FP4 in California with a connection to T-mobile, it is currently connecting with LTE/4G band 2 (if there is any 5G service in the area, my Pixel 7 Pro doesn’t connect to it either).

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I would like to avoid the duplication of the provider discussion, so would ask you to head over to the US topic to discuss further questions about this.

The rest of the questions was answered as far as I can see, so I would close here. If this a misinterpretation please send a PM to the moderators group.

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