Remarks by the software update FP4 20230318

It seems a regular argument that you use this forum to tell Fairphone how to behave.

  • It seems Fairphone set up the forum to be used for and by the users to chat and offer casual help.

  • Any help that could be supported by the warranty has to go via support, not the fourm.

  • Any complaints, requests or idea that you want Fairphone to acknowledge, again contact Fairphone

  • The site is especially desgined for user interaction, Fairphone do not read of interfere with it’s running or content

  • The only exceptions are

    • The update the discourse engine
    • The add a topic when a new OS update is available and do monitor that topic
    • Behind the general public use there is a Beta team that has user helper to find bugs, not to fix anything

So again you are using a topic to complain about Fairphone and try to be an authority on how they should run their business.

It would make more sense you contact them. I’m pretty aware that you want other users to know you are unhappy, got it . . .

But could you please think about what you say, maybe I don’t read as you intent as English is not your base languge

  • If Fairphone is of the opinion that you don’t need any transparency towards your customers,

What is that, transparency about what? If you know what you are talking about then it is transparent.

If you don’t know what you are talking about then how can you ask someone to be transparent about something you do not know exits.

Fairphone are not going

  • to tell you their every move.
  • to test a phone with every conceivable app, let alone combinations
  • to test all peripherals like headphones, car interfaces
  • to check the adapters will work with all earbuds on the market

You keep trying to lay all the responsibility for your disappointments etc. on Fairphone’s doorstep but you have been told many times, you have the wrong address.

As a user I, not Fairphone read your comments and all that is happening is that some users will get a bit upset maybe as they try to feel for your, Fairphone won’t and it’s not their job. It’s not mine really as I have no contract to support you.

I just feel for you and can see you could do with attention, but that’s it. You don’t seem to change your outlook or actions regarding complaining about Fairphone on this forum, so I hope you are getting at least some satisfaction that you are not being totally ignored.

All the best, take care

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Your answer is kinda cute :). I don’t need attention. Everything’s ok. Thanks for your speculation on my personal references.

Your opinion is accepted, it’s ok if you see it differently.
I can see that a communication channel has been introduced and this can be used. I understood you too, don’t worry.

This is an OFFICIAL Fairphone forum and not a third party. So I’ll give my feedback here as well.

You could also deal more with the problem instead of setting yourself up as a communications policeman who says what and how.

Thanks for your understanding.

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Setting up a customer-to-customer forum is a common move meant to prune all the ID-10T (also known as PEBMAC/PEBCAK) type issues before they swamp support. It ensures support only gets the serious problems.
As such it obviously doesn’t need to be monitored, it is independent, just some kind of sedimentation tank filtering the heavier nonsense before it clogs your pipes.

So it isn’t really surprising they don’t bother with it, but they seem to forget they are not just a basely commercial, profit-driven company, they pretend to have a message, a mission. And a forum is a great (and cheap!) place for marketing to keep the flame burning and the fans motivated. Missed opportunities… -shrug-

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Its quite interesting for me that when someone is not as annoyed/angry/disappointed (or How you want to call it) as others or phrasing that annoyance the same way as others is considered to defend something or someone.

With the difference you talk to those that can fix it and not to someone on the street🤷

We all get your point and might also understand or agree, still venting it here will not help.

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Interesting that you interpret it that way instead of reflecting on your own communication. Nobody gave you a task to judge me. And still do it, very interesting, don’t you think :wink: ?

Don’t the people who fix it use roads? What kind of comparison is that supposed to be? Are those demigods in white?
Currently they are doing very little to solve the problem. They once said they would and only fixed a small part of it. And now? Did I do something wrong to address this here?

We have a Samsung A52s and a Samsung A53 in the family, so we’ve never had these problems. I mean they’ve come to Android 13 by now, but you were totally unfamiliar with these types of problems. The FP4 and A52s have a Qualcomm platform, the A53 and S20 have their own Exynos platform

It’s also not a problem if there are problems. Anyone who deals with custom roms also knows the xda forum. Everything is written about there and traded transparently.

If a group of free developers can do it, why can’t Fairphone write, we know the problem, but are e.g. depends on third party suppliers, or we will try to roll it out with update XY. I don’t understand this mentality. There is a forum where you can talk directly to users. This is not an isolated problem, but with all devices.

I was briefly excited when someone wrote that we will fix the problem in the next update. Well… the disappointment is there as it wasn’t properly fixed.

The Fairphone 4 is a super cool product. I’m really happy with the hardware. I don’t need high-end CPUs or 120 Hz displays. It is a means to an end. It should be durable, simple in structure and easy to function. That’s what I loved about A11. It just worked and even smooth for me.

It’s like picking up your car from the workshop and somehow it’s running worse than before. Then what do you do there? You talk about the problems and expect to get feedback on them.

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Once again, disclaimer, I’m just making wild guesses here! But it is very common for companies to not want, under no circumstances, to admit any problem/wrongdoing/whatever.
As long as they don’t admit anything, all problems are just Internet rumors, but if somebody corporate admits publicly to them, they become real and kill shareholder value…
(That’s also why in court companies are willing to pay millions as long as they don’t have to admit to any wrongdoing.)

I don’t know if this is the case here, or if they are just indifferent, or swamped, or clueless, or undecided, or shy, or if maybe it is on top of an “Urgent To-Do” list currently used as a wedge for that wonky cafeteria table…
We did have some brief appearances of @Yasen_Tomov, and for a moment it looked like they might start communicating a little bit more, but that didn’t last, did it. I’m afraid we can speculate as to why till the cow come home.

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FP 1 was shipped late in 2013, they got FP4 TCO certified meaning they are trying to sell it to companies… A proof of concept in version 4?

And what you’d like to call ‘additional challenges’ other people call ‘having to fiddle with’:

Well, back to the definition of sustainability and peoples expectations. You got the most sustainably produced phone on the market, but the company has the same communication behaviour as all other phone companies. Would one trust a company communicating like this and maintaining its products like this to keep a phone securely usable for the next 4+ years?

Two parting lines here:
One goes between ‘willing to pay for’ and ‘willing to deal with some additional challenges’ / ‘having to fiddle with’
The other goes between ‘defining sustainability only by a more sustainable production process’ and ‘defining sustainability (in addition to production process) by product maintenance and product usability over the physical lifetime’.

For me it’s ‘willing to pay for’ but I don’t want a fiddlephone. And I lost the trust in the company Fairphone that they’re willing and capable to turn my FP4 into a phone I’m willing to use and that I’m able to use securely- without having to fiddle with it- for the next 4+ years. The replacement for the FP4 arrived yesterday (making my FP4 possibly the least sustainable mobile phone I ever owned).

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Only if you dump it and don‘t sell it to someone who is happy to have a fair manufactured and sustainable smartphone.

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After my earlier post, I felt like I should have rewritten a sentence in there; I don’t know if that was misunderstood, but next time I’ll be more thorough.
There was a early quote I saw from the company that basically said they were trying to demonstrate that aiming high on the fair trade and sustainability scales was something that could be done in a way that still produced a product people would buy. In other words, ‘you big companies can do better and still make a profit.’ The idea seemed to be that they were encouraging the big players to look at what they were doing, and ‘please feel free to take some of those ideas and use them yourselves.’
At the risk of starting a separate disagreement, I don’t see much evidence that the industry in general is doing much more than paying lip service to these ideas. My sense is that making the switch to FP is a way that I can make a tiny contribution to that. Big changes are often made up of countless tiny little pieces, each doing a little bit of work, but adding up to something significant.
This is strictly an analogy, but I hear people talk about not wanting to buy an electric vehicle until there is a better network of systems to support them. Whether they intended to or not, the people who jumped in earlier were an integral part of demonstrating the demand, and as a result, the infrastructure ends up getting built.
So, my comment about being a bit of an idealist was a disclaimer. I wouldn’t want to push anyone away from this, but ‘having to fiddle with it’ might still be unavoidable for a while.

A company the size of FP must have a real challenge trying to produce the next generation of their phone while still dealing with the support and updates for their existing ones. So yes, as far as I’m concerned, this is still very much a proof of concept. I hope it manages to go on and make a difference, and I look forward to trying to find little ways to contribute.

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Have you seen the Shift phones, not a big company but . .

I hadn’t yet, amoun. It looks like it is something to consider when it does get to be time for a replacement, thank you. The most sustainable phone is the one already in your pocket, though. I expect I’ve got at least 6-9 months to have deep thoughts about my next one.
What would be really great is to see at least one of the big brands do something meaningful in terms of letting people repair their own devices. I’ll have to make sure and sift through what’s out there again before I commit to anything new.
My one disappointment around FP, and it looks like Shift as well, is that the only way to get anything shipped to North America is through a third-party vendor. I haven’t seen any of those yet that also sell the components. Granted, I can’t remember the last time I broke a phone, but it would be nice to know that I could get replacement bits without a lot of hassle.

Clove UK, sell international and do sell the parts too :slight_smile: but not the battery

As with a lot of things in life, the truth is somewhere in the middle. Software updates and the communication around them go through the hands of dozens of people, some of whom also work on other things.

I’m sorry to hear that some members of the community are still unhappy with our involvement on the forum, but I’m also happy to hear that our efforts in previous months were appreciated. I assure you we’re working on being more active again and staying that way for the foreseeable future.

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Hi.

It seems there is a full on Social Media Manager starting today, so that may help. I hope they will be encompassing the forum and not just the ‘Social Media’ . Maybe I’m hoping for too much, they are going to have a lot of work either way ?

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@Yasen_Tomov Thanks for appearing!

I don’t think the main problem is Fairphones ‘involvement in the forum’, it’s more the lack of development and the lack of a channel for complaints that seem structural and aren’t failures of a single phone.
Contact support- this is a user forum’ is being repeated like a mantra from older users, but for someone having joined some months ago there’s no hint how Faiphone company itself would like to channel such complaints.
And there are a lot of such complaints and Fairphone company has members in this Forum. So leaving it in the dark / not expressing might even be interpreted as disinterest or carelessness. It doesn’t seem wise not giving a (maybe repeated) hint, how the company itself likes to handle such complaints…

If it’s ‘contact support’ then a confirmation by a Fairphone employee from time to time would be wise, but I share the worries mentioned here:

In case 'it really should be ‘support’ there should exist (transparent) mechanisms to filter and collect such complaints…

Thanks for that, I always thought beta programs were conducte earlier in the workflow but certainly a way to go! If I’d be an ongoing Fairphone user I’d like to know a little more about the reasons and the goals of such a program:
Were the discussions here in the forum a co factor or irrelevant? Which problems were identified and how would it be possible to affect these goals if even possible or thought of by Faiphone?

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Very few maybe one or two, so I would expect little response unless you reply to one of their posts. This forum is about the phone, and peripherals and can offer ‘free’ advice from other uses and some empathy to those struggling with issue.

And to clarify in case someone thinks otherwise Fairphone Angels are just tags adopted by users who offer personal help.

There is a beta programme for the FP3 and now one for the FP4 on upcoming OS releases, so that provides an opportunity for users to help, if they are happy to use their daily driver as a test bench, so far on my FP3 things are OK, small glitches but I happy to help.

Should this, should that . . . ? I image the employees are not sitting around drinking camomile tea all day, or whatever else they can get in Amsterdam.

More staff would want paying and no doubt Fairphone have that under consideration

Just asking them to do more work is more work for them, luckily this is just a user forum and they are unlikely to read your post and my comment etc.

But doesn’t it feel great to be able to tell other users how you feel, definitely not for Fairphones ears, they’d go deaf, or maybe that’s what happened years ago, too much drumming on their ears, ‘boom boom, sound sounds of doom, move your arse gime some room

This exists since the beginning and is not new. New is only the fact, that everyone with a forum account can apply.

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@Spongebob
For me it is totally contradictory that Fairphone has a forum, also posts information about an update and also wants to hear feedback in the forum and at the same time you claim that Fairphone is not reading along here, although there is also a forum officer? How weird is that?

Fairphone doesn’t have a ‘forum’ , the users have a forum hosted by Fairphone.

I see nowhere that Fairphone ask anyone to give feedback via the forum, support is for that.

The exception being that Fairphone do post when they have an update and any response to that topic and in that topic is likely to be read, but not this one for example.

Yvmuell clearly asked that such discussions are kept separate and that is common sense, that people still want to make general whinges on multiple topic, is user venting.

I find it tedious and demanding and Faiphone and anyone with something better to do just would not reply. But those that come here to help rather than complain try to relate to the stressed out user, it’s a human aspiration, having a phone is not

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