Why I won't buy a Fairphone

[paulakreuzer]

Welcom to the forum @Alzhaid.

Regarding points 1 and 3 I completely agree with you. The higher price is explained easily with the lower quantities compared to the competition.

@Alzhaid

I understood that Fairphone was aiming to be long-lasting, so I wanted to check if I could use it for 5-7 years. Sadly I had the impression that this wasn’t possible, and that the modular design didn’t help.

Here I have to disagree. Obviously longevity only works if your expectations don’t change too much during the years you use it, but why would you need Gallileo support if you get a location via GPS within 1-3 seconds? For me it almost never takes longer on Lineage OS.
The modularity is mainly for repairability and less for upgradability. For me at lease I don’t see a reason why I would not be happy with the same hardware I’m happy with now years from now.

@Alzhaid

I had the impression that Fairphone wanted to support the device for a long time, for example with Android updates, but that they apparently abandoned FP1 hardware support was a warning for me.

The FP1 was not designed by Fairphone, so they had less influence in how long they could support it. The FP2 is a completely different case and also there will probably be no limits to upgrades for community ports any time soon.
Also there is a community port for the FP1 with almost completely up to date security patches.

@Alzhaid

For example, I found confusing comments about a possible future FP3 and no clear plan with support dates and overall strategy.

Tbh any announcement prior to the release would only hurt the marketing. Even Apple only introduces their new devices on the day they are released. When Fairphone released the FP2 as the first modular phone they made a big impact - if it had already been old news when the device was available it might have been a smaller splash.

@Alzhaid

Based on the forum and other webs, I had the impression that the mobile has a very low hardware quality with a high failure rate.

Emphasis by me

Sorry, but you can’t seriously think that a forum where people come to discuss their issues with a device is a good way to get an impression on how reliable a device is?
Also a lot of FP users are first time smartphone users, have maybe avoided tech products their whole life and often are not even familiar with the concept of 2-year hardware-warranty - not exactly good conditions to be good judges of a device’s reliability. Instead of getting their issues fixed under warranty many of them just think it’s a problem of “the fairphone” and then rant about it in the forum or elsewhere.

@Alzhaid

I read suggestions in the forum “to better call support instead of opening a ticket because those are sometimes ignored”

These are old posts. The support situation was bad in 2017, but in 2018 you got a helpful reply very fast if you mailed them.

@Alzhaid

Maybe Fairphone could offer support in different languages,

They do. See contactsupport.

@Alzhaid

how much does it take to send a part to different world regions?

Fairphone doesn’t deliver outside of Europe and even there some countries and remote locations are excluded. So delivery usually takes a few days.

@Alzhaid

what is the cost of sending the phone to be fixed?

https://support.fairphone.com/hc/en-us/articles/211437743-Fairphone-2-repair-price-list-and-FAQ

What I wonder now of course: What device will you buy instead? I can see that Fairphone is not the front runner in all the points you made, but I don’t think any other device is better in the combination of all points. Sure a used phone could be an option, but even then a used FP2 (see Market) is probably one of the best options.