So I guess you are not Austrian 
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Of course, I agree with the notion that it’s not always necessary to have the latest and shiniest stuff. But why should no effort be made to create a somewhat sustainable new car for people whose car is already 30 years old, outdated and broken, just because YOUR 20 year old car is good for another 10 years. Do you expect everyone needing a car at that time to buy a 20 year old car just to throw it away after another 10 years?
Buying a new car, releasing a new model and ending an old model’s support are three utterly different things that can be scheduled completely independenty of each other.
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So, what’s the point of releasing a phone every 2 years if people buy a new phone only every 1 0 years (let’s say)?
It’s commercially unsound, on many levels. It makes more sense to synchronize the cycles and release a new phone only a couple years before ending the support of your previous one, so people won’t buy the old phone just before it’s EOLed.)
For instance, if your cycle is 10 years and you release the new phone in the 5-year mark, the worst thing a buyer can get is that he gets only 5 years of support, which is still plenty.
It’s just a problem of fine-tuning, but I think that in a single-model business plan, release cycle and support duration should be of equal length.
Sure, but money doesn’t grow on trees and if they don’t have too much overhead, they can sell their devices cheaper.
Yes, and the pope is catholic too… 
Seriously, besides the shiny labels (“capitalist”, “sustainable”) there are simple, almost mathematical realities you can’t escape from.
You might want, but do you can? Business is mostly letting go of absolutes and making some compromises. The only long term viable result is a “best effort” solution.
Well, that’s something you know right from the start, and can plan ahead with: You sign a legal contract with your suppliers, which stipulates duration, origin, and all that. If a supplier breaks this contract you can sue the living daylight out of them, so they won’t.
This means that when you design your new device, you can check your options and chose those which indeed fit your requirements. Now I don’t know much about the smartphone industry so there might be some adjustments to make, but IMHO it’s doable.
No indeed, I’m German. (And I don’t get your allusion. Care to explain?)
It’s about the problems with the Austrian id app not functional with A13.
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Reductio ad absurdum… I never said people who’s ancient car is broken shouldn’t be able to buy a new one. I just said that age alone isn’t a reason to change something, be it your phone, your car, or your spouse…
Well, we have to agree to disagree on this.
(Sorry, interesting discussion, but I have to do some real work too…)
Austrians cannot use anymore an official app that helps to do many administrative tasks since the Android 13 update that decreased the level of security of the fingerprint reader.
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Around min 15 Eva explains it
And yet you insist that putting out the “latest and shiniest” every 2 years would be a problem and drives people to replace their working phone. Jeez, can the contradiction be any more obvious?
Ok, then, so 3 years is “many, many years” for you? That’s what you get by buying an FP3 in 2023 which you just confirmed you would do.
That problem doesn’t really go away, no matter how long the release cycle gets. Once a new model comes out, only few people will buy the previous one (where there might be some left in stock), I agree. But if the previous model was 5 to 6 years old (and maybe only 2 years left of support) I’m quite sure it’s much less likely to sell compared to a 2 year old phone with maybe 6 years of remaining support.
While I do agree that using a phone for 5 to 6 years is a good goal and that having to support many different models comes at a cost (that’s why I think a release cycle of 2 years is better than to release a new model yearly as the competition does), to me your arguments are ignoring the real world consequences or flat out contradict themselves.
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Are you aware that more than one billion phones are sold per year?
Releasing a new Fairphone regularly incentivises people to switch to a fair alternative. And to use a phone that will (at least should) last longer than the brand they used to have before.
As a gut feeling, once fair and sustainable phones make up the majority of existing phones, changing to a longer release cycle totally makes sense. If phones in their entirety (across all manufacturers) last 10 years on average, keeping a 2 year release cycle indeed would no longer fit. But right now the average is still 3 years. Under these circumstances a 5-6 year release cycle for Fairphone would be madness.
And some additional feedback at the end: this discussion to me feels like I’m trying to tell you about effects of national economy while you insist that all it takes is business economics (yeah, I’m aware that analogies have their own pitfalls).
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I see you are all fixated on the “release cycle” of x years.
Regarding this:
If Fairphone just starts offering upgrades for the FP5 instead of a FP6 (and of course delivers all new ordered FP5s with the last upgrades), then the issue with “I don’t want to pay the full price for an old smartphone.” would be solved.
I mean:
Where is the problem to reuse the cover of the phone and just put newer parts into it?
As far as I can see, the bigger parts of the FPs are all custom order for Fairphone. So Fairphone can control how “reusable” the modules and slots are.
Of course it’s not as easy as it sound but probably nobody will say it’s impossible to do.
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That’s a good point. I also wish that more modules were supported cross-generationally. But realistically this will only work for certain parts, and at some point there will be a cutoff point, since interfaces and hardware requirements regarding other modules naturally change over time.
Also at some point you will have to replace the main module containing the moderboard, be it for the lack of support for new standards and interfaces, or the end of support for the chipset’s firmware. And that’s arguably the point at which you’ve basically got a new phone and most likely have to abandon at least some of the old modules for various reasons.
So for some parts I do think its harder to make it work than it initially sounds like. But in the grand scheme of things there certainly is room for improvent here and a best effort should definitely be made.
The obvious choice for reusability is of course the battery. Fairphone is already selling their phones without a charger by default. Why not also stop including batteries and keeping upwards compatibility with old ones? Imagine being able to replace your phone and battery independently of each other. The battery is one of the hardest parts to recycle and being able to buy the phone without one in order to use one you’ve already got lying around would greatly improve sustainability! This would also make purchasing replacement batteries for jorneys or the like much more reasonable, as they could potentially be used for a much longer period of time.
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That’s correct. But still the cycle can be streched from 2 years to maybe 4 or 5 years until the core module must be changed.
Pretty much like in the earlier personal computer days, when you did buy a computer and after a year or so you could upgrade the GPU and the hard disk and two years later you did upgrade the mainboard and CPU and so on.
There was always compatibility to a range of exchangeable parts from several years, at the same time as incompatibility with parts out of a specific range (age, standards, etc.).
If we can save at least half the resources, then this approach is worth it.
And I strongly believe the hardware side of the mobile phone development will come to something like a bottleneck and slow down in a few years time (screen resolutions, battery size, bling bling…), so periodical hardware upgrades will get less necessary.
Like with the personal computers (except for gaming) in the last 10 years.
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…our FP2 is 8 years old now and is really getting old. Only thanks to e/OS/ is it still running, but it gets slow. So the FP5 is welcome, for another 8 years 
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If we take this thought a step further, we would ideally have a set of open standard interfaces and formfactors (as is the case with PCIe, USB, M.2, …) for smartphone components, so that different third-party-manufacturers could specialize and produce components (e.g. a camera module), its firmware and some sort of android-compatibility-driver. But for this to happen, we would almost certainly need some of the big hardware manufacturers and a lot more people on board. Also the standards would need to be established by some independent organization and not controlled by a single company.
Up to a point we are talking an utopia now, but one can still dream.
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Well, that’s history. This kind of behaviour stopped many decennies ago, when Swatch was introduced. So several generations have been brought up in a different kind of mood 
And the markets meet the customers…
That’s a two-way-street though.
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Of course, but somehow Fairphone has to follow it, too.
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For starters an approach like Framework/Apple would be possible.
Fairphone could make it modular and only allow it’s own parts.
Opening up could follow later when the modular project got many users and Fairphone started an open community project like Linux (open development + peer review) on it’s phones.
Of course THIS is really thinking and dreaming several years ahead.
But never say it’s impossible!
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@Ingo
I cannot answer for other people, but I have buy my FP3+ about 1.5 year ago (gen 2022), second hand with cover at the same price of a new one without cover and without shipping cost. At the moment of purchase there are still 18 mounth of warranty plus extended warranty. Also I’m expecting that my FP3 would be my phone until 2030 and over, since normally my smartphone live about 5/7 years, so tgis one will live more. Ate the moment of my purchase there is the FP4 on the market, I have evaluated it, but I prefer FP3.
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