Should I purchase a Fairphone?

Yes I think you should.
Fairphone allows as much as possible you to be independent. You can replace hardware and soft ware. Apple wants you to be a slave in their ecosystem.

No, I would not recommend it, go for the iphone SE instead. That’s a much better choice!

Apple is working on improving their ifixit scores too.

Or try an cheap android phone for every 1 or 2 years.

If someone is in that corner, there really is little sense in considering a Fairphone that pays fair wages, uses sustainable materials (isn‘t cheap), but has a 5 year warranty.

6 Likes

hi @UPPERCASE !

I’m sorry to hear about the issues you’ve been having, and i’m sure you would have liked to have a phone with less issues :frowning:

It would be interesting to find out if other FP4 users have had these issues or different issues. I’m not sure there’s a thread for that yet.

Have you told Fairphone about the issues you’ve been having? Just to be sure they know about them. Some problems may be due to a bad quality batch of hardware components, for example.

These threads are indeed here on the forum and I confirmed with other people that these issues are reproducable. Fairphone is aware of the issues as well. They said they would fix it a few months ago.

Just to name a few:

https://forum.fairphone.com/t/microphone-quality-of-the-fp4-when-using-signal-low-volume/79021

Some other issues are just mentioned as comments in other threads (like no access to wide-lens camera by 3rd party apps, no access to full 48MP quality, crashing apps when using front camera through Camera2 API, flipped audio channels during audio/video recording, overall low volume of all recordings and calls). Everything is reported to support by lots of users. So far no change. After the last update, things only got worse.

5 Likes

A public bug tracker would be a nice move by Fairphone. Most of the reported problems aren’t probably going to be fixed in one update, so at least we would have an overview of what’s already reported, what’s being worked on.
Maybe the community could even help with reproducing bugs, providing logs, things that are normal for FOSS projects…

I already made my decision for a FP4 months ago, knowing that the (open) software side wouldn’t be up to my standards, but I’m still a bit annoyed by the lack of public communication.
I would buy a FP4 again without even thinking about it, but I wouldn’t recommend it to people outside of my circle of family and friends (for which I’m tech support anyway) at this time.
But since the shipping times are quite long at the moment, things may already have changed for the better when people receive their phones :smirk:

5 Likes

Yes, I would love that. This is one of the reasons why communication with the support team is so frustrating. You don’t know which issues are actually already reported and they prefer to discuss all your issues (even if they are completely unrelated) in a single thread. :man_facepalming:

4 Likes

We could handle this on the forum. A special tag could be assigned to it, because I don’t think we need an extra category. Similar topics about bugs can be merged to keep things tidy. So I guess we as a community could do that side, and then it would be great if someone from Fairphone can provide updates in that thread as well.

It is also possible to create an extra header menu at the top of the forum called “Bugs”, which then is a list of all topics tagged with #bug/#bugreport/#bugtracker. It kind of sucks that Fairphone allows everyone to create tags. It has become a huge mess of duplicate tags. It’s probably best to only allow people with trust level 4 to create new tags. That way we keep tags consistent and useful. It’s also possible to group tags to make things even better. An example is here. Also note the Wikis menu option at the top, that one filters for #wiki topics, we could do something similar with bugs on this forum.

Bugs that are solved can be marked as solved. And then you can also filter based on open topics (thus open bugs).

2 Likes

I don’t own a Fairphone yet but I will give my opinion. The phone I am using at the moment - Xiaomi Mi Mix 2S - is great but the battery doesn’t last as long as it used to. If I had a Fairphone that wouldn’t be a problem because I would have swapped it already. The phone hasn’t received any updates for over a year now but I can live without that. If I had a Fairphone, it would have received an update. No phone is perfect I believe iPhones have their bugs too.

For sure. And Pixels as well. I won’t buy a new Pixel anytime soon because the Pixel 6 has a major battery drain when using mobile data. It sucks that this is the norm now, releasing phones with bugs.

Don’t underestimate the importance of these updates. They are not just to fix bugs, they also solve security issues.

Even fairphone have changed their own view on fair over the last years, so what is fair anyway? (and even Tony’s wasn’t always fair…)

In what context do you consider the word ‘sustainable’ to be applied correctly? What’s greenwashing and what is not? (remember the discussion in the EU parlement about the ‘green’ certificates for investments in gas or nuclear?)

Have you considered the advances in mobile tech the last years? And how do you expect the market to develop in the years towards 2027?

What’s you view on the number of phones sold vs. environmental impact?

Have you read the small print regarding this ‘five’ years?

I agree with UPPERCASE. Of course nothing is always perfect… but that’s not what UPPERCASE is saying here, right?

When you buy a 580/630 euro phone (and the 40 euro to be able to charge it, and a 100 euro’s to use airbuds) it comes to a 720/770 euro pricetag…

For this price I expect a phone to just work. It is that simple.

And a lot of people in this thread are comparing apples to pears and/or are using a lot logical fallacies.

Perhaps the posts of UPPERCASE (and mine?..) sound a bit harsh… but honesty (sometimes) hurts…

1 Like

option 1: „cheap phone every one or two years“ versus option 2: more expensive but longer lasting (definetely 2years +), repairable (10/10) and best of class supply chain (by no means perfect, but what is), ie less resource intense choice. hmm… life is relative at all times, but these two approaches are at two opposing ends of a scale.

1 Like

I don’t underestimate security updates, I just don’t want to throw away a perfectly working phone. Aren’t we all trying to be more sustainable here?

Without (firmware) updates it’s not a perfectly working phone in my book :nerd_face:

3 Likes

No, well what are you wanting to continue to exploit? If it’s the miners and factory workers and you want a phone, then yes buy a Fairphone as the workers will be more comfortable and work better, more efficiently, and you can sleep better at night. :slight_smile:

Not only that but also the valuable resources that will be saved if fewer phones are produced.

Not really. Capitalism requires the quickest use of resources to make maximum profit, it is not a charity. If Fairphone don’t pay for a more fair extraction of gold someone else will mine and use it. It won’t stay in the ground.

Maybe you are thinking of some other valuable resource other than human, but minerals, air and water are up for grabs. It’s just who does the grabbing and who do you pay. Sitting back and not consuming just allows others to consume more, that why we have very rich people. They won’t sit idly by whilst others try and save the ‘common’ resources.

However the rich will, with guns if ‘need’ be, stop others from gathering more if they can.

It’s a profitable world for those that use money and guns rather than their bare hands.

1 Like

IMHO quite a pessimistic view.
I think a lot of people and also FP see it differently. That’s why they encourage everyone to use the devices longer, invest in long SW support and give 5yrs of extended warranty. This shall create an incentive to consume less.

2 Likes