Default disclaimer: The community moderators don’t work for Fairphone, so please don’t confuse anything I (or other mods) say with a statement from Fairphone. Also, this should not be taken as qualified (or even not) legal advice
I’m guessing this is about these parts of the warranty statement:
- Limitations to this Warranty
This Warranty is not applicable for: […]
(g) damage caused by breaking or circumventing access limitation protection or by the improper usage of a root access;
(h) damage caused by installing third-party software and/or any malware.
Bear in mind that the aforementioned is not a comprehensive list to the limitation.
It’s a combined hard- & software warranty statement, so this will likely point towards, for example:
- them not solving any software problems that you get directly related to installing other apps.
- you being out of luck if that software destroys the phone (remember Ubuntu destroying UEFI bioses on certain Samsung devices, anyone?)
It doesn’t mean that any defects not caused by that software will not be fixed. Though I see how this could easily lead to some burden of proof issues (technically, for problems arising in the first 6 months of the warranty Fairphone needs to prove that it isn’t a warranty case if they feel it isn’t, for problems arising after that the customer needs to prove it isn’t caused by them doing something wrong). This could get tricky in cases where you can’t restore one of the original Fairphone OSes, which is stated a requirement for repair (but note that they mention they will provide instructions to install a supported OS).
The software provision in the warranty is indeed limited to the two OSes Fairphone provide. This means that they won’t fix problems in Software that they don’t provide. This shouldn’t impact the hardware warranty though.