Questions before I buy a Fairphone 4 in the USA

[AnotherElk]

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".

@PowerPuff

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?

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

@PowerPuff

I know some features don’t work as well on a Fairphone as they do on the less ethical phones.

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

@PowerPuff

Do the map programs work fine, with the phone speaking the directions to me while I drive?

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

@PowerPuff

Can I get a degoogled Fairphone?

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

@PowerPuff

If I get a degoogled Fairphone, is there any map program where the speaking function in the navigation works?

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) …

@AnotherElk

OsmAnd supports pre-recorded speech packages as a fallback solution if TTS fails. You will have to download the pre-recorded package for your desired language first (you can do that in the map downloads section, just scroll down beyond the maps) to be able to select it as speech output for navigation.