As Fairphone owner I have become somewhat sceptical of their repairability claim.
Mine fell on its side on some pebble stones. The power-button, unprotected by the case, got scratched. The button doubles as a fingerprint reader, which ceased working due to the scratch. At first, I thought "no worries, this phone is friendly to those who want to repair it."
It turns out, this part is not available for replacement. I think this is an oversight; just like the screen, it is an outward facing part, hence, bound to be damaged for some.
Then, I brought it to my local repair shop. The owner had to tell me that they cannot repair Fairphone's, and that, for him, it is one of the worst companies to deal with. They try to centralise all repairs in their own repair center. Which means sending the phone -- which I need -- away for 2 weeks; paying a fee for diagnosis, an unknown cost for repair, and the hassle of a flashed phone. I already know what's broken, I just want the part.
I feel this is a real shame, as I am fully supportive of the stated aims of the company, and I want the product to be good.
[Aside: suggestions on how to deal with a scratched fingerprint reader are most welcome. E.g. can the scatch be re-painted? The phone thinks the reader is there, but it doesn't register any touch. ]
This is the problem with all of those „gadget but repairable” companies. It sounds great on paper, but the low adoption rate means that parts are hard to come by, the products get discontinued all the time, and your local electronics repair guy has never seen one of those before.
> I brought it to my local repair shop. The owner had to tell me that they cannot repair Fairphone's, and that, for him, it is one of the worst companies to deal with.
This sounds like an odd & inconsistent story (from the repair shop guy - I'm not doubting your side of this, only his). Why would he need to be dealing directly with the company for any reason other than to purchase replaceable modules which are consumer-available & what would they be giving him trouble with specifically? Unless he's sending all his phones for repair back to the OEMs, but I'm sure that's not the case.
I wouldn't be surprised if some repair shops simply have a "mainstream brands only" blanket policy & don't consider other brands worth the time it takes to read about.
Otherwise you're right that the fingerprint module is specifically a bit of an achilles heel in their repairability. Even leaving aside the fingerprint reader isn't a separate component, it's also unclear to my why they made the decision not to sell the core module for standalone replacement (even if it ended up being quite expensive).
> Then, I brought it to my local repair shop. The owner had to tell me that they cannot repair Fairphone's
I brought mine to my local repair shop as well and they were completely unwilling to even try to repair it. Then I went home and tried myself and managed by just bending back some pins. The display cable had gotten loose. Have worked fine since then.
Not certain which type of sensor it uses, but in any case painting it wouldn't fix it. The problem with a scratch is now it will register that as a fingerprint ridge, but it is in a fixed location, so theoretically if you re-register your finger on the scanner and always position your finger in *exactly* the same space it would still work, but as soon as your finger moves slightly, the scratches position relative to your fingerprint changes, thus changing the fingerprint that is read. You would have to fill the scratch with the same material that it is coated with, provided the scratch is just in the coating, and it isn't say a capacitive type which you've scratched part of that capacitive coating. Thus for a home-repair likely out of luck I'd think.
I could be wrong, any hardware guys please feel free to chime in over me.
Note: slightly simplified explanation but mostly holds for the three common types of sensors.
You could make an attempts using a scratch remover, which are available for scratched screens. There is some chance that it gets you there, though it depends on too many unknown variables to know for sure.
At least it was the finger print scanner and not your finger that needs replacing. Biometrics as an EXTRA layer of security, on SHARED devices, makes sense. As a convenient replacement for passwords, on a personal device, net negative.
This is completely out of touch with the reality of the average user. The main causes of account theft continue to be phishing and data breaches which are easily exploited because most people reuse their passwords and will never stop doing so to use a password manager. Biometric passkeys are probably the only viable way to improve the situation.
I have a friend who bought a fair phone with a view to being able to replace its modular parts. Four years later and the model had been discontinued, so he had to buy a new Fairphone.
Would it more economical and sustainable to buy a second hand / reconditioned feature phone from Samsung?
In fact, I see they still sell parts (the screen, at least) for the Fairphone 2, released in 2015. First-party parts 10 years later, what a concept! https://shop.fairphone.com/spare-parts
I don't know your friend's scenario, but this was mine.
It's not an either-or, like "either buy first-party parts for a Fairphone OR buy a second-hand Samsung". You can buy a second-hand Fairphone too. It would be nice if you got first-party parts for Samsungs, years after they're released.
I bought a second hand Fairphone, and I'm very happy with it, except that my wife, a colleague of mine, and some friends of ours now also gave Fairphones, so when one buzzes we all instinctively check our pockets because they all sound the same...
I also bought headphones from the same company, and while they're probably not the best for audio quality, it was great being able to repair them when the headband broke. Generally, I'm a very happy Fairphone customer.
Zero trolling: How did that happen? Can you share some details? (I am not doubting you.) Ideas: You are the type of person who needs to constantly charge your phone, but move frequently, so maybe you have 5x the number of "plugs" compared to an average user. Or, sadly, they used a cheap part, and it broke quickly.
This is what makes sense. You want to be able to replace the charging port, screen, and camera. And of-course update the software, where software stability is IMHO the weakest point of Fairphone.
If the logic board breaks, you want to upgrade to the newest chip model you can get. Because third-party software becomes slower every year. If you want a phone to last as long as possible, thus getting the latest chip. For Fairphone it is more interesting, since they use a particular Snapdragon model range with longer driver support.
The elephant in the room is of-course software getting too slow and developer not optimizing their apps.
> In fact, I see they still sell parts (the screen, at least) for the Fairphone 2, released in 2015.
You can still source an iPhone 4s screen+digitizer assembly on eBay for a reasonable price. There is, however, little practical value of it in everyday use.
My previous phone was a second-hand iPhone SE for which I had screen, power button, big button and battery replaced at various times. I think the battery was third-party & new, but the other parts were also 2nd+ hand. I don't know about newer models, and presumably there are other things that are more "fair" about the fairphone, but it doesn't have a monopoly on repairability in my experience.
> It would be nice if you got first-party parts for Samsungs, years after they're released.
You can? They're happy to repair even 7+ year old phones, I'm sure there's a cutoff but I haven't heard of anyone running into it. Might depend on the country though. Unless you mean buying those parts separately but they don't even let you do that for new phones, so "years after they're released" doesn't matter then.
> Four years later and the model had been discontinued
Which model? Was it the FP1? It sounds like your friend was extremely unlucky - FP2 is 11 years old & there's still (a limited subset of) parts for sale for it (display & camera). FP3 (7yo model) still has all the parts for sale.
That said - I'm critical of another aspect of device longevity: software support. I upgraded from my (still working) FP3 to the FP5 because apps I needed stopped working on the highest version of Android supported by FP3. That Android version is still officially supported by Fairphone & receiving security updates but without major version upgrades the app support can be problematic. Obviously that's ultiamtely the fault of bad app devs, but ultimately it's hard to overcome.
More like google's fault. They made a huge mess of completely different permission and behaviour changes between 11, 12, 13. At least since 14 they have stopped fucking around so much.
It is really much simpler for us to cut off all versions before 12, but it's unfeasible. So many devices still with 10/11. Now we cut off at 8.1, but will increase that every year starting next year as google mandates us an increase of minimum sdk version.
They are currently on the Fairphone 6, and at least in Germany the official online store still sells a wide selection of parts for the Fairphones 3-6, and the display and camera for the Fairphone 2.
Sure, you don't get meaningful hardware upgrades (apparently there were some small ones), and Fairphone are far from the only ones selling spare parts for their phones. But in terms of keeping old phones alive with authentic parts and easy to execute disassembly steps, they are pretty good
I guess maybe if the comparison you're looking at is the one you mentioned? Second hand normally beats everything else since it's avoiding what would other wise be waste, and there's nothing new that needs to be manufactured.
That said, I bought a fairphone about 4 years ago, in that time, I've had a bunch of issues that'd have meant replacing the phone for other non-fairphone models (this list doesn't make me look great at taking care of things):
- USB charger broke after getting mortar in it
- Screen broke after dropping the phone directly onto screen
- Battery replacement (due to age, not my fault this time!)
- Screen broken yesterday after dropping my phone onto concrete after falling over during a run.
If I'd had a Samsung, or non-repairable phone of another kind, I'd be buying my fourth phone today, instead I ordered a spare part and will repair things easily in a couple of days when it arrives.
So, hard to beat the sustainability of second hand tech, but definitely from an economical point of view, my fairphone has easily been a good call.
Of course your mileage may vary, especially if you are better at taking care of things than me.
Edit: worth saying, the fairphone 4 was discontinued a year or so ago, but that isn't the same as saying parts aren't made for it. Spare parts are still really easy to get hold of.
Not sure that's valid; in my experience Samsung phones are fairly repairable* and have spare parts available worldwide. Guessing Fairphone parts are much more limited.
* probably much more fiddly than a fairphone though
> Second hand normally beats everything else since it's avoiding what would other wise be waste, and there's nothing new that needs to be manufactured.
That's a fallacy. By buying second hand, you enable the second hand market (people get better prices for selling their first hand phones). There are users who always buy the latest iPhones (or other flagship device) and sell their previous one. In effect you, as a second hand buyer, use the devices in the second part of their full lifetime, the first buyer uses the device in the first part. The device is used the full duration of its usability, which is good, but it's not better than if the first buyer would use it for the full duration. Nothing is saved overall.
Well, also buying out-of-production new phones (i.e. 1 or 2 gen behind) it's saving phones to be e-waste without having been used even once. Although I guess that companies manage stocks also with this signal in mind, so a 2nd-hand is always better.
I bought a Fairphone 3+ years ago and, as much as I want to support this company, it was a huge disappointment. I switched to an iPhone after using it for less than three years, which is less than the life span I was hoping to use it for.
Within a year, the USB port wore out. Contacted the support as the phone was under warranty and was given two options: Order the replacement part online and get reimbursed for it. Or send the entire phone back, but it would get wiped clean.
I had some data that wasn't backed up and didn't want to loose, and because I couldn't charge it, I decided to go for the first option. It's supposed to be easily reparable, why go through the hassle of sending it back? Well the problem was that the part was unavailable on their store for months. I even looked at third party stores, that specific part couldn't be found anywhere in Europe. After three months of having a "repairable" paperweight on my desk, the part was finally available and I could change it (replacing it took seconds and I've done it while sitting at a café, gotta give credit to Fairphone for that).
Meanwhile, I see my friends with their iPhones getting them repaired within a few days or even the same day! Battery change, charging port replacement, screen change, etc. All could be easily and quickly done by a local repair shop.
In the end I realised it's not about how easy it is to repair your phone, it's about the availability of spare parts. iPhones, especially a few years ago, make it difficult to be repaired. Yet, they are the easiest to get repaired. Fairphone's spare parts are specific to their phones, and even specific to some models. Using generic parts or having some compatible across models would create more need for them = more parts available.
I am fine with having a phone with specs that are 3+ years old. I'm not, however, fine with loosing software support shortly buying it or the first repair knocking it out, because the parts are not available or the labour cost makes the repair unreasonable for its value.
Actually, taking on used phones with unknown history means that you'll likely end up 'bottom-feeding' where each unit bought is cheap, but you'll need to exchange them often. This strategy is even harder for less-interested who can't say what's the EOL for a phone model.
Maybe my argument doesn't hold in richer societies where you are effectively subsidised by people who'd still exchange phones every 2 years making them better value.
Absolutely. If you want to even pretend to care about the environment, the very first step is starting to buy almost everything over $100 second hand. The added benefit is that it has lots of other societally positive effects! It has one of the very highest "sacrifices made vs. societal benefit" ratios there is. Please stop buying "environmentally friendly" gadgets and equipment and start buying "unfriendly" ones second-hand. There are very few categories of products where the efficiency gains made over the last decade mean you should buy new. Certainly less than 1% of purchases we make.
I often wonder why there still hasn't been a YC-backed attempt to disrupt the "replace your phone every couple of years because your battery became slower" cartel in 2026. Seems like such a low-hanging fruit, especially given the very visible success of companies like Framework.
Am I missing something? I've kept the iPhones I bought for 6 years or so. I replaced the battery on each phone, and all it cost me was 50€ and half an hour waiting for the local non-Apple phone shop to do the work. That surely counts as batteries being replaceable in all but name?
> Seems like such a low-hanging fruit, especially given the very visible success of companies like Framework.
Is there very visible success of Framework? How many people in your everyday live have you encountered with a Framework laptop?
I love there mission, but Framework from all the feedback from users online seems to still be a product that you'll only buy if you put sustainability over performance/convenience.
> a YC-backed attempt
If any successful attempt would be launched, there would be no reason for it to go through YC. In the mass consumer hardware market their little funding and the network they provide doesn't do much. I would strongly assume that a challenger would appear in a similar form as it did with framework with nrp.
Is the average Framework truly more environmentally than an average MacBook.
MacBooks tend to last a long time. I used my 2012 Macbook Air for 7-8 years easily. It's still working today. My M1 Pro 16" has had no issues at all for nearly 4 years. They’re extremely reliable (except butterfly era).
Personally, I don’t think Framework laptops are. I think they are only more environmentally if you upgrade your MacBook every year or every other year. I think this is extremely niche. Not only are you getting a laptop with much worse battery life, noise, heat, screen, build quality, you are also getting a significantly slower CPU and GPU. AMD and Intel chips simply can't keep up with Apple Silicon.
Because phones are incredibly cheap and its hard to compete with that.
You can get something like a "Motorola Moto G86 5G" for less than 200$ and that comes with a 120 hz full hd screen, 8 gigs of ram, 5200 mAh battery and so on. Basically everything you could ever need unless you're deep into photography or gaming.
Instead of ordering a battery at 40$ and replacing it, I might as well buy an entire new phone and get a minor upgrade on everything every few years.
My wife has a Fairphone 4, released 2021. The earpiece broke. I ordered a replacement; it arrived within 3 days and was very easy to replace. So a good experience with that.
I gave my 7 year old iPhone XS (which still works perfectly and fast, and gets updates) to my mum. The battery was at 70% so I decided to get a replacement. The local malls repair shop had a spare battery in stock - they fixed it while I bought groceries.
> I have a friend who bought a fair phone with a view to being able to replace its modular parts. Four years later and the model had been discontinued
I was also very surprised to learn this. Incompatible models are the opposite of modular parts. Fairphone apparently was happy to throw away 95%+ of the value of having "modular" parts.
The easily replacable parts feature sounds like it'd work great in a university context. The uni's service desk could stock up on replacement parts and fix the phones right there instead of having to send it in for repairs.
If e.g. someone's mainboard breaks, they can just give them a new phone and take in the old one, and then use the remaining parts to repair other employees' phones with working mainboards.
Universities in the Netherlands usually do not have the free cash for stocking up on parts, in general they take them in your get a loaner and they repair it afterwards or send it back to the manufacturer. But i guess it is a plus the design team is in the same country.
Seeing news like this, I wonder whether there is a market for an OSS Android and/or Linux distribution that provides the management comfort of Chromebooks without being tied to Google, Apple or Microsoft. A little like Keycloak but one layer higher.
With all the US/EU issues currently, you might even be able to spin up a company to support European services that need management based on OSS management software.
Ubuntu is pretty strong already in that niche - either using Landscape as a first party management solution, but it also tends to be the distro most-commonly recommended by the big third-party MDM vendors like Scalefusion and Jumpcloud. Not sure what their mobile story is like, but they certainly cover laptop / desktops.
If Android is not a blocker, maybe even then, Jolla, a Finnish company, has been offering a Linux based mobile OS for quite some time. I frankly don't get why other EU companies building the hardware, like Fairphone and Volta, don't partner up with them.
Good move from a service perspective, repairs while you wait instead of backing up, transfer to new phone, sending the old one in for service, yada yada yada. Also great for Fairphone's growth to have a stable business partner.
The default OS is not de-googled Android though, but regular Android. You have to buy the /e/OS variant, which is slightly more expensive (or flash it yourself).
But with the long-term support and access to spare parts (the university can stock them), this seems like a good move. Also happy for FairPhone that they are getting more traction.
As far as I know only Gigaset and HMD manufacture in Europe. And even those two only do final assembly in Europe, the components are still made in China.
Technically Fairphone could ship you a box of parts and have you assemble the phone yourself. Then it would be "Made in Europe" (or where-ever you live).
Technically correct but Holland has long been used as a strong branding name for the entire country. It wasn't until recent that they started to make a better distinction between the two.
Philips, ASML, Inventum and many other companies used "Made in Holland" on their products despite not being in the provinces of North and South Holland.
I like how they’re re-using old Samsung stock where possible and only switching people over as needed. It avoids unnecessary waste while still shifting to a more sustainable standard.
Tangential to the article but I’m on year 6 of waiting for the alternative smartphone market to offer what I’m actually looking for and here seems as good a place as any to complain about it:
I just want a screen with a headphone jack and a web browser on a device that isn’t serviced by Apple or Google.
I don’t even care about having the battery being removable. It doesn’t even have to be able to make phone calls.
I’m getting ready to go back to a dumbphone and digital camera because no one is making what I’m looking for, and it sort of seems like they never will.
They’re hardly pioneers; my wife’s employer switched from Apple to Fairphone as the pre-selected option a few years ago. They have about 10k employees.
Interesting that they settled on a standard model at all. The announcement implies that the university is responsible for phone maintenance and repair, which makes sense as a motivation, but is not something I would expect in itself from a cost/expertise standpoint. I would be curious to know if a Fairphone makes servicing cheap enough to warrant doing it in-house for an IT department.
It’s also tacit, but I assume it helps them to interface with a Dutch company. Did they get any financial incentive for it?
The university should push the maintainance to the holder of the phone? That seems unreasonable.
As mentioned in another comment. Universities already have in house it services. Being able to fix the phone right there with spare parts is likely very cost efficient.
If it is like my usual experience with European academia, it may be intended to more heavily push use of Microsoft 365 services, which tend to somewhat assume phone availability. I think that usually universities cannot force the use of personal devices for work, so providing mobile phones on request is one way of moving to a more purely Microsoft service infrastructure. It looks like Radboud is a Microsoft shop, so I would not be surprised.
My university, for example, is gradually removing all office phones (already voip) and replacing them with Teams voip as the only phone system for the university, encouraging personal phone use of Teams, but having computer-based use as the option for people who refuse. As they don't provide mobile phones, however, they can't require Microsoft Authenticator, and so at least officially will still give hardware keys on request (and fortunately still allow TOTP, even if they don't advertise it).
There is a movement in Dutch academia to move away from Microsoft/Google services. E.g. SURF (the IT cooperative of Dutch education and research institutions) are extending their NextCloud pilot to all Dutch edu/research instututions:
If they already have an IT department, they already have the staff to take care of this additional workload (after a bit of training). How much difference is there really in repairing a "repairable" phone and a computer? Not much really as "repairing" a computer is often just fiddling with the software and / or just about changing an easily available and "standardised" parts. (When was the last time any of us saw any IT department doing actual board level servicing to repair a computer?) It will be the same with the Fairphone too (Fairphone makes it easy to change the battery, the board and the display screen).
If the university didn't make phone repairs themselves they would have to send the phones off for repair, or contract with a local phone repair shop. Or the secret third option: telling your employees to get it fixed and send you the invoice. None of them are cheap, and some of them will make you very annoyed with your billing/procurement/finance people. After a certain scale doing it inhouse makes sense, and with the right phone it's not much more difficult than fixing a business laptop, which is also commonly done inhouse with available spare parts
If they want to use an MDM solution like Microsoft Intune to enforce some security compliance they are kind of forced to provide the device. People typically don't accept their private phone to be managed by their company IT.
Providing a device doesn't require picking a standard issue model of phone. IT departments often support an employee's choice of phone (or at least, choice of manufacturer) provided it's compatible with management software.
> The announcement implies that the university is responsible for phone maintenance and repair
It says "Do you require a (replacement) smartphone for your work at Radboud University?", so it's probably for a handful of board members and the like, not the actual faculty staff.
I thought one of the issues for Fairphone is that their security update schedule / security practices are a bit lax? Their phones are regularly requested by users to be targeted by GrapheneOS, but GOS developers contend that the security practices for the Fairphone are problematic. They apparently get security updates late and don't properly implement verified boot and attestation.
I like the devices, but I've stuck with Pixel devices for the better security practices. Honestly, I'm a little surprised that a university wouldn't be concerned about late security updates and the like.
I was going to keep to myself on this one, but this is a good jump-in point.
The security capabilities of their hardware are what makes GrapheneOS incompatible to target the phone,
Not any specific security practices of the developers of Fairphone.
Having said that: if there’s a way to MDM GrapheneOS, I’d be looking at that also!
The n+ patch interval on Lineage, /e/ and the rest of them, that’s plain and simply more days your administrators are at risk of giving up the keys to your castle - and that’s a tough pill to swallow!
That's not entirely correct. There are also updates to the baseband, bootloader, binary driver blobs, etc. E.g., the bootloader for the FP3 was set to trust roms signed with the AOSP test keys (https://forum.fairphone.com/t/bootloader-avb-keys-used-in-ro...). That's not something fixable by the OS / rom maker.
The security issues stemming from such things are likely real, as well. There was a paper released some time back, about binary blobs, that found:
> Our results reveal that device manufacturers often neglect vendor blob updates. About 82% of firmware releases contain outdated GPU blobs (up to 1,281 days). A significant number of blobs also rely on obsolete LLVM core libraries released more than 15 years ago. To analyze their security implications, we develop a performant fuzzer that requires no physical access to mobile devices. We discover 289 security and behavioral bugs within the blobs. We also present a case study demonstrating how these vulnerabilities can be exploited via WebGL.
These risks don't seem to materialize if you're not targeted by something like an intelligence agency. Not sure publicly funded research has such security requirements, at least by default (they can always buy custom equipment for a project, or just not put such data on devices you take home / out and about). Might be worth it compared to the very real benefits it has around the world by paying good salaries and fairer material sourcing
That's probably true, but some of the mistakes FP has made in the past could probably be widely exploited, so it doesn't instill a lot of confidence IMO. E.g., they were signing their OS images with the AOSP test keys.
For me another feature is what disqualifies it. Fairphone 6 would have been otherwise acceptable for myself, as it has quite decent specifications, but it only has USB 2.0.
Other smartphones at around the same price not only have USB 3, but also DisplayPort 1.4 (e.g. from Motorola).
I hate when I see even on many smartphones over $1000, that they save a few cents by implementing USB 2 instead of USB 3, and a few dollars at most by not implementing DisplayPort.
The SoC used in Fairphone 6 supports both USB 3 and DisplayPort, but its designers have saved a few external components by not offering these features.
Pixel is also disqualified for me by the same reason. Unfortunately only some smartphones made in China offer complete features and without excessive locking of the phone.
> Pixel is also disqualified for me by the same reason.
How so?
I think all pixels starting from 6 or 7 have DisplayPort output through USB C.
I watched a movie the other day with my projector connected to my pixel 10 running grapheneOS. Other than getting a phone call halfway through the movie and a few hiccups selecting the audio Jack output, everything ran smoothly.
Not that I disagree. I bought a Fairphone some years ago and sold it onward because it simply didn't fit in my hand, but the phone I got instead had a delicious combo of small physical battery and terribly inefficient chipset (2019 Exynos). I'd still make the same choice but it's a considerable downside (thankfully the only downside of this phone besides its age and software support by now)
"Employees who have an iPhone from Radboud University can continue to use it as long as the device is still functioning. However, returned iPhones will no longer be reissued."
I wonder what the take rate will be from people rejecting the Fairphone and requesting their own SIM instead. The inner IT purchasing cynic in me says this is just a simple way to cull out your purchasing costs by only issuing one quasi-unpopular* device.
* I used to issue out phones at a large hospital and we allowed device choice. We saw ~90% iPhones, 10% Android in our fleet.
If Holland is anything like Denmark the cost of employee phones can be budgeted as an operational cost, which means it's basically free. I doubt that is their reasoning. It's far more likely this is a part of the massive anti-US tech dependency wave which is rolling over Europe. Digital sovereignty is a hot topic these days.
As far as what people want... it depends... A lot of people have two phones anyway, since they don't want to pay the additional taxation for using a company phone privately. Also because it's easier to turn it off when you're not working. In education I would imagine a lot of teachers/professors would prefer to not give their private numbers to students.
That sounds unreal to me. Typically rich countries, like the nordics, are majority iPhone. But then again, Dutch people are know across Europe to be cheapskates so maybe that explains it ;)
The thing I would like to see is a second purpose for smart phones, an afterlife, calculator heaven?
It doesn't have to be cheap. It might for example resign into a security camera or a doorbell. A metal bracket with a connector, a button or a connection for one, a seperate psu with a bell or a relay for one, screws to attach the wires, perhaps a stripped down end of life OS (altho it could just be a mode) and it becomes a very good doorbell with motion detection, a good amount of storage, two way video if you want it. Share with someone [temporarly]. Backup footage on laptops, pc's, phones, storage devices etc etc
For $100 in parts it would be highly competitive in the space but it could be more expensive as it can basically do everything a $1000 security camera offers and more. Battery backup, sim card, etc. A big phone brand might even be able to get a contract with local law enforcement so that they can have/request [emergency] access.
It's just one example, a small/portable computer could resign into many things. The device only needs to know it is now a TV remote control.
I looked into the Jelly Star about six months ago. Downsides are the lack of dual-frequency GNSS and eSIM, and blanks in my spreadsheet are chipset speed, unlockability, warranty, slow motion camera speed, screen brightness, storage speed, and battery life (on 2Ah that might not be very much). The IR blaster and FM radio are cool benefits though, and it's very cheap. May be worth a try if you're feeling adventurous and enjoy it being a conversation starter, but I wouldn't expect much longevity from it (battery life or warranty)
I know several family members who have bought Fairphone's and been disappointed by them. It's really impressive how repairable they've managed to make such integrated devices, but it seems like they didn't do such a good job on making a reliable phone in the first place.
I think what we really need is legislation to force all phone manufacturers to at least make the batteries and screens relatively easily replaceable. Maybe a cap on the replacement costs and a minimum support time would be a reasonable way to do that.
> I think what we really need is legislation to force all phone manufacturers to at least make the batteries and screens relatively easily replaceable.
We are slowly getting there, user removable/replaceable batteries are part of the following regulation (first link I've got)
The big caveat will be that some leeway is going to be given to "waterproof" devices. Remains to be seen how many producers jump on that angle to avoid serviceability.
I've read that the Fairphone 6 is more like a "regular" phone than the previous one, because it has a standard phone chip (Snapdragon) instead of an IoT one.
They did that to get longer software support from Qualcomm, but now they can get long support for Snapdragon chips.
As Fairphone owner I have become somewhat sceptical of their repairability claim.
Mine fell on its side on some pebble stones. The power-button, unprotected by the case, got scratched. The button doubles as a fingerprint reader, which ceased working due to the scratch. At first, I thought "no worries, this phone is friendly to those who want to repair it."
It turns out, this part is not available for replacement. I think this is an oversight; just like the screen, it is an outward facing part, hence, bound to be damaged for some.
Then, I brought it to my local repair shop. The owner had to tell me that they cannot repair Fairphone's, and that, for him, it is one of the worst companies to deal with. They try to centralise all repairs in their own repair center. Which means sending the phone -- which I need -- away for 2 weeks; paying a fee for diagnosis, an unknown cost for repair, and the hassle of a flashed phone. I already know what's broken, I just want the part.
I feel this is a real shame, as I am fully supportive of the stated aims of the company, and I want the product to be good.
[Aside: suggestions on how to deal with a scratched fingerprint reader are most welcome. E.g. can the scatch be re-painted? The phone thinks the reader is there, but it doesn't register any touch. ]
This is the problem with all of those „gadget but repairable” companies. It sounds great on paper, but the low adoption rate means that parts are hard to come by, the products get discontinued all the time, and your local electronics repair guy has never seen one of those before.
> I brought it to my local repair shop. The owner had to tell me that they cannot repair Fairphone's, and that, for him, it is one of the worst companies to deal with.
This sounds like an odd & inconsistent story (from the repair shop guy - I'm not doubting your side of this, only his). Why would he need to be dealing directly with the company for any reason other than to purchase replaceable modules which are consumer-available & what would they be giving him trouble with specifically? Unless he's sending all his phones for repair back to the OEMs, but I'm sure that's not the case.
I wouldn't be surprised if some repair shops simply have a "mainstream brands only" blanket policy & don't consider other brands worth the time it takes to read about.
Otherwise you're right that the fingerprint module is specifically a bit of an achilles heel in their repairability. Even leaving aside the fingerprint reader isn't a separate component, it's also unclear to my why they made the decision not to sell the core module for standalone replacement (even if it ended up being quite expensive).
> Then, I brought it to my local repair shop. The owner had to tell me that they cannot repair Fairphone's
I brought mine to my local repair shop as well and they were completely unwilling to even try to repair it. Then I went home and tried myself and managed by just bending back some pins. The display cable had gotten loose. Have worked fine since then.
Not certain which type of sensor it uses, but in any case painting it wouldn't fix it. The problem with a scratch is now it will register that as a fingerprint ridge, but it is in a fixed location, so theoretically if you re-register your finger on the scanner and always position your finger in *exactly* the same space it would still work, but as soon as your finger moves slightly, the scratches position relative to your fingerprint changes, thus changing the fingerprint that is read. You would have to fill the scratch with the same material that it is coated with, provided the scratch is just in the coating, and it isn't say a capacitive type which you've scratched part of that capacitive coating. Thus for a home-repair likely out of luck I'd think.
I could be wrong, any hardware guys please feel free to chime in over me.
Note: slightly simplified explanation but mostly holds for the three common types of sensors.
You could make an attempts using a scratch remover, which are available for scratched screens. There is some chance that it gets you there, though it depends on too many unknown variables to know for sure.
2 replies →
What about sanding it down, then..? This way it won't be a ridge anymore
At least it was the finger print scanner and not your finger that needs replacing. Biometrics as an EXTRA layer of security, on SHARED devices, makes sense. As a convenient replacement for passwords, on a personal device, net negative.
This is completely out of touch with the reality of the average user. The main causes of account theft continue to be phishing and data breaches which are easily exploited because most people reuse their passwords and will never stop doing so to use a password manager. Biometric passkeys are probably the only viable way to improve the situation.
3 replies →
Please explain how my life has been made worse in any concrete way since the introduction of FaceID.
[dead]
I have a friend who bought a fair phone with a view to being able to replace its modular parts. Four years later and the model had been discontinued, so he had to buy a new Fairphone.
Would it more economical and sustainable to buy a second hand / reconditioned feature phone from Samsung?
I bought a Fairphone 3, released in 2019.
The charging port wore out. I bought another one in 2023. They still sell that part today. https://shop.fairphone.com/shop/fairphone-3-bottom-module-37
In fact, I see they still sell parts (the screen, at least) for the Fairphone 2, released in 2015. First-party parts 10 years later, what a concept! https://shop.fairphone.com/spare-parts
I don't know your friend's scenario, but this was mine.
It's not an either-or, like "either buy first-party parts for a Fairphone OR buy a second-hand Samsung". You can buy a second-hand Fairphone too. It would be nice if you got first-party parts for Samsungs, years after they're released.
I bought a second hand Fairphone, and I'm very happy with it, except that my wife, a colleague of mine, and some friends of ours now also gave Fairphones, so when one buzzes we all instinctively check our pockets because they all sound the same...
I also bought headphones from the same company, and while they're probably not the best for audio quality, it was great being able to repair them when the headband broke. Generally, I'm a very happy Fairphone customer.
5 replies →
Zero trolling: How did that happen? Can you share some details? (I am not doubting you.) Ideas: You are the type of person who needs to constantly charge your phone, but move frequently, so maybe you have 5x the number of "plugs" compared to an average user. Or, sadly, they used a cheap part, and it broke quickly.
2 replies →
This is what makes sense. You want to be able to replace the charging port, screen, and camera. And of-course update the software, where software stability is IMHO the weakest point of Fairphone.
If the logic board breaks, you want to upgrade to the newest chip model you can get. Because third-party software becomes slower every year. If you want a phone to last as long as possible, thus getting the latest chip. For Fairphone it is more interesting, since they use a particular Snapdragon model range with longer driver support.
The elephant in the room is of-course software getting too slow and developer not optimizing their apps.
> In fact, I see they still sell parts (the screen, at least) for the Fairphone 2, released in 2015.
You can still source an iPhone 4s screen+digitizer assembly on eBay for a reasonable price. There is, however, little practical value of it in everyday use.
My previous phone was a second-hand iPhone SE for which I had screen, power button, big button and battery replaced at various times. I think the battery was third-party & new, but the other parts were also 2nd+ hand. I don't know about newer models, and presumably there are other things that are more "fair" about the fairphone, but it doesn't have a monopoly on repairability in my experience.
5 replies →
> It would be nice if you got first-party parts for Samsungs, years after they're released.
You can? They're happy to repair even 7+ year old phones, I'm sure there's a cutoff but I haven't heard of anyone running into it. Might depend on the country though. Unless you mean buying those parts separately but they don't even let you do that for new phones, so "years after they're released" doesn't matter then.
1 reply →
> It would be nice if you got first-party parts for Samsungs, years after they're released.
I managed to have the curved screen in my 2017 Galaxy S8 replaced in 2023 or so. I don't recall there being an alternative manufacturer of those.
For flagships at least there seems to be a pool of new-old-stock parts.
> Four years later and the model had been discontinued
Which model? Was it the FP1? It sounds like your friend was extremely unlucky - FP2 is 11 years old & there's still (a limited subset of) parts for sale for it (display & camera). FP3 (7yo model) still has all the parts for sale.
That said - I'm critical of another aspect of device longevity: software support. I upgraded from my (still working) FP3 to the FP5 because apps I needed stopped working on the highest version of Android supported by FP3. That Android version is still officially supported by Fairphone & receiving security updates but without major version upgrades the app support can be problematic. Obviously that's ultiamtely the fault of bad app devs, but ultimately it's hard to overcome.
>ultimately the fault of bad app devs
More like google's fault. They made a huge mess of completely different permission and behaviour changes between 11, 12, 13. At least since 14 they have stopped fucking around so much.
It is really much simpler for us to cut off all versions before 12, but it's unfeasible. So many devices still with 10/11. Now we cut off at 8.1, but will increase that every year starting next year as google mandates us an increase of minimum sdk version.
4 replies →
What apps?
I use a FP3 too, but I am a little surprised
2 replies →
They are currently on the Fairphone 6, and at least in Germany the official online store still sells a wide selection of parts for the Fairphones 3-6, and the display and camera for the Fairphone 2.
Sure, you don't get meaningful hardware upgrades (apparently there were some small ones), and Fairphone are far from the only ones selling spare parts for their phones. But in terms of keeping old phones alive with authentic parts and easy to execute disassembly steps, they are pretty good
Plus you can buy them second hand pretty eaeily too.
I guess maybe if the comparison you're looking at is the one you mentioned? Second hand normally beats everything else since it's avoiding what would other wise be waste, and there's nothing new that needs to be manufactured.
That said, I bought a fairphone about 4 years ago, in that time, I've had a bunch of issues that'd have meant replacing the phone for other non-fairphone models (this list doesn't make me look great at taking care of things): - USB charger broke after getting mortar in it - Screen broke after dropping the phone directly onto screen - Battery replacement (due to age, not my fault this time!) - Screen broken yesterday after dropping my phone onto concrete after falling over during a run.
If I'd had a Samsung, or non-repairable phone of another kind, I'd be buying my fourth phone today, instead I ordered a spare part and will repair things easily in a couple of days when it arrives.
So, hard to beat the sustainability of second hand tech, but definitely from an economical point of view, my fairphone has easily been a good call.
Of course your mileage may vary, especially if you are better at taking care of things than me.
Edit: worth saying, the fairphone 4 was discontinued a year or so ago, but that isn't the same as saying parts aren't made for it. Spare parts are still really easy to get hold of.
Not sure that's valid; in my experience Samsung phones are fairly repairable* and have spare parts available worldwide. Guessing Fairphone parts are much more limited.
* probably much more fiddly than a fairphone though
Many repair shops will replace your screen and battery for you. It’s pretty standard. You don’t need a Fair phone to do that.
5 replies →
> Second hand normally beats everything else since it's avoiding what would other wise be waste, and there's nothing new that needs to be manufactured.
That's a fallacy. By buying second hand, you enable the second hand market (people get better prices for selling their first hand phones). There are users who always buy the latest iPhones (or other flagship device) and sell their previous one. In effect you, as a second hand buyer, use the devices in the second part of their full lifetime, the first buyer uses the device in the first part. The device is used the full duration of its usability, which is good, but it's not better than if the first buyer would use it for the full duration. Nothing is saved overall.
2 replies →
> Second hand normally beats everything else
Well, also buying out-of-production new phones (i.e. 1 or 2 gen behind) it's saving phones to be e-waste without having been used even once. Although I guess that companies manage stocks also with this signal in mind, so a 2nd-hand is always better.
I guess it was a Fairphone 2 from 2015? They are still selling screens, cases and camera modules but not the rest of the parts unfortunately:
https://shop.fairphone.com/shop/category/spare-parts-4?categ...
I bought a Fairphone 3+ years ago and, as much as I want to support this company, it was a huge disappointment. I switched to an iPhone after using it for less than three years, which is less than the life span I was hoping to use it for.
Within a year, the USB port wore out. Contacted the support as the phone was under warranty and was given two options: Order the replacement part online and get reimbursed for it. Or send the entire phone back, but it would get wiped clean.
I had some data that wasn't backed up and didn't want to loose, and because I couldn't charge it, I decided to go for the first option. It's supposed to be easily reparable, why go through the hassle of sending it back? Well the problem was that the part was unavailable on their store for months. I even looked at third party stores, that specific part couldn't be found anywhere in Europe. After three months of having a "repairable" paperweight on my desk, the part was finally available and I could change it (replacing it took seconds and I've done it while sitting at a café, gotta give credit to Fairphone for that).
Meanwhile, I see my friends with their iPhones getting them repaired within a few days or even the same day! Battery change, charging port replacement, screen change, etc. All could be easily and quickly done by a local repair shop.
In the end I realised it's not about how easy it is to repair your phone, it's about the availability of spare parts. iPhones, especially a few years ago, make it difficult to be repaired. Yet, they are the easiest to get repaired. Fairphone's spare parts are specific to their phones, and even specific to some models. Using generic parts or having some compatible across models would create more need for them = more parts available.
I am fine with having a phone with specs that are 3+ years old. I'm not, however, fine with loosing software support shortly buying it or the first repair knocking it out, because the parts are not available or the labour cost makes the repair unreasonable for its value.
Actually, taking on used phones with unknown history means that you'll likely end up 'bottom-feeding' where each unit bought is cheap, but you'll need to exchange them often. This strategy is even harder for less-interested who can't say what's the EOL for a phone model.
Maybe my argument doesn't hold in richer societies where you are effectively subsidised by people who'd still exchange phones every 2 years making them better value.
Environmentally speaking, (re)using existing hardware / buying second hand probably beats everything.
Absolutely. If you want to even pretend to care about the environment, the very first step is starting to buy almost everything over $100 second hand. The added benefit is that it has lots of other societally positive effects! It has one of the very highest "sacrifices made vs. societal benefit" ratios there is. Please stop buying "environmentally friendly" gadgets and equipment and start buying "unfriendly" ones second-hand. There are very few categories of products where the efficiency gains made over the last decade mean you should buy new. Certainly less than 1% of purchases we make.
3 replies →
What matters is how long devices are used, not how often the owner changes.
1 reply →
This. Fairphone is not much different from any other company or actual hardware. Electronics are modular already…
Too much hearsay. Details please
I often wonder why there still hasn't been a YC-backed attempt to disrupt the "replace your phone every couple of years because your battery became slower" cartel in 2026. Seems like such a low-hanging fruit, especially given the very visible success of companies like Framework.
Am I missing something? I've kept the iPhones I bought for 6 years or so. I replaced the battery on each phone, and all it cost me was 50€ and half an hour waiting for the local non-Apple phone shop to do the work. That surely counts as batteries being replaceable in all but name?
3 replies →
> Seems like such a low-hanging fruit, especially given the very visible success of companies like Framework.
Is there very visible success of Framework? How many people in your everyday live have you encountered with a Framework laptop?
I love there mission, but Framework from all the feedback from users online seems to still be a product that you'll only buy if you put sustainability over performance/convenience.
> a YC-backed attempt
If any successful attempt would be launched, there would be no reason for it to go through YC. In the mass consumer hardware market their little funding and the network they provide doesn't do much. I would strongly assume that a challenger would appear in a similar form as it did with framework with nrp.
7 replies →
Is the average Framework truly more environmentally than an average MacBook.
MacBooks tend to last a long time. I used my 2012 Macbook Air for 7-8 years easily. It's still working today. My M1 Pro 16" has had no issues at all for nearly 4 years. They’re extremely reliable (except butterfly era).
Personally, I don’t think Framework laptops are. I think they are only more environmentally if you upgrade your MacBook every year or every other year. I think this is extremely niche. Not only are you getting a laptop with much worse battery life, noise, heat, screen, build quality, you are also getting a significantly slower CPU and GPU. AMD and Intel chips simply can't keep up with Apple Silicon.
9 replies →
Because phones are incredibly cheap and its hard to compete with that.
You can get something like a "Motorola Moto G86 5G" for less than 200$ and that comes with a 120 hz full hd screen, 8 gigs of ram, 5200 mAh battery and so on. Basically everything you could ever need unless you're deep into photography or gaming. Instead of ordering a battery at 40$ and replacing it, I might as well buy an entire new phone and get a minor upgrade on everything every few years.
1 reply →
Because people who don't want to buy a shiny gadget every couple of years and would rather pay more upfront and use for longer are a small minority.
My wife has a Fairphone 4, released 2021. The earpiece broke. I ordered a replacement; it arrived within 3 days and was very easy to replace. So a good experience with that.
I gave my 7 year old iPhone XS (which still works perfectly and fast, and gets updates) to my mum. The battery was at 70% so I decided to get a replacement. The local malls repair shop had a spare battery in stock - they fixed it while I bought groceries.
> I have a friend who bought a fair phone with a view to being able to replace its modular parts. Four years later and the model had been discontinued
I was also very surprised to learn this. Incompatible models are the opposite of modular parts. Fairphone apparently was happy to throw away 95%+ of the value of having "modular" parts.
You get longer support than that on Pixels
The easily replacable parts feature sounds like it'd work great in a university context. The uni's service desk could stock up on replacement parts and fix the phones right there instead of having to send it in for repairs.
If e.g. someone's mainboard breaks, they can just give them a new phone and take in the old one, and then use the remaining parts to repair other employees' phones with working mainboards.
Same as any other major employer, surely? At least, you’re describing how it works at my previous employer (large private enterprise).
Universities in the Netherlands usually do not have the free cash for stocking up on parts, in general they take them in your get a loaner and they repair it afterwards or send it back to the manufacturer. But i guess it is a plus the design team is in the same country.
Seeing news like this, I wonder whether there is a market for an OSS Android and/or Linux distribution that provides the management comfort of Chromebooks without being tied to Google, Apple or Microsoft. A little like Keycloak but one layer higher.
With all the US/EU issues currently, you might even be able to spin up a company to support European services that need management based on OSS management software.
Ubuntu is pretty strong already in that niche - either using Landscape as a first party management solution, but it also tends to be the distro most-commonly recommended by the big third-party MDM vendors like Scalefusion and Jumpcloud. Not sure what their mobile story is like, but they certainly cover laptop / desktops.
If Android is not a blocker, maybe even then, Jolla, a Finnish company, has been offering a Linux based mobile OS for quite some time. I frankly don't get why other EU companies building the hardware, like Fairphone and Volta, don't partner up with them.
> Android
> without being tied to Google
That's a contradiction.
No. I'm on GrapheneOS and not tied to Google.
You must be thinking of the Google Play Services but these aren't required by GrapheneOS.
16 replies →
Posting from an FP4 with slashyslash! (/e/)
Good move from a service perspective, repairs while you wait instead of backing up, transfer to new phone, sending the old one in for service, yada yada yada. Also great for Fairphone's growth to have a stable business partner.
Fairphones are awesome, and they even come with a de-googled version of android. Also: Made in Holland!
The default OS is not de-googled Android though, but regular Android. You have to buy the /e/OS variant, which is slightly more expensive (or flash it yourself).
But with the long-term support and access to spare parts (the university can stock them), this seems like a good move. Also happy for FairPhone that they are getting more traction.
Made in Suzhou, China.
As far as I know only Gigaset and HMD manufacture in Europe. And even those two only do final assembly in Europe, the components are still made in China.
Technically Fairphone could ship you a box of parts and have you assemble the phone yourself. Then it would be "Made in Europe" (or where-ever you live).
So? Step by step. Once the FairPhone gets a large-enough market, they may be able to move parts of the production to Europe.
Perfect is the enemy of the good (it also took HMD a while to have a model that was manufactured in Europe).
3 replies →
*designed in holland
In the province* Holland, but the country The Netherlands :)
Pars pro toto... ;)
Technically correct but Holland has long been used as a strong branding name for the entire country. It wasn't until recent that they started to make a better distinction between the two.
Philips, ASML, Inventum and many other companies used "Made in Holland" on their products despite not being in the provinces of North and South Holland.
Partially, AOSP is still made by Google.
This no different from the fallacy of using Chrome and VSCode forks.
I like how they’re re-using old Samsung stock where possible and only switching people over as needed. It avoids unnecessary waste while still shifting to a more sustainable standard.
Fairphone is going to enjoy the next few weeks. Radboud isn't the only one!
Tangential to the article but I’m on year 6 of waiting for the alternative smartphone market to offer what I’m actually looking for and here seems as good a place as any to complain about it:
I just want a screen with a headphone jack and a web browser on a device that isn’t serviced by Apple or Google.
I don’t even care about having the battery being removable. It doesn’t even have to be able to make phone calls.
I’m getting ready to go back to a dumbphone and digital camera because no one is making what I’m looking for, and it sort of seems like they never will.
> web browser on a device that isn’t serviced by Apple or Google
Which browser though? But what you're describing sounds a lot like a Linux tablet, which do exist: https://itsfoss.com/linux-tablets/
https://www.gsmarena.com/sony_xperia_10_v-12264.php + https://docs.sailfishos.org/Support/Supported_Devices/
This looks promising. Is the camera any good?
4 replies →
I was going to refer to the new Jolla Phone, but then I realized that it doesn't have a headphone jack.
They’re hardly pioneers; my wife’s employer switched from Apple to Fairphone as the pre-selected option a few years ago. They have about 10k employees.
Interesting that they settled on a standard model at all. The announcement implies that the university is responsible for phone maintenance and repair, which makes sense as a motivation, but is not something I would expect in itself from a cost/expertise standpoint. I would be curious to know if a Fairphone makes servicing cheap enough to warrant doing it in-house for an IT department.
It’s also tacit, but I assume it helps them to interface with a Dutch company. Did they get any financial incentive for it?
The university should push the maintainance to the holder of the phone? That seems unreasonable.
As mentioned in another comment. Universities already have in house it services. Being able to fix the phone right there with spare parts is likely very cost efficient.
I think the alternative was to contract it out to an IT company rather than push it to the holder. Same as company phones in corporate environments
If it is like my usual experience with European academia, it may be intended to more heavily push use of Microsoft 365 services, which tend to somewhat assume phone availability. I think that usually universities cannot force the use of personal devices for work, so providing mobile phones on request is one way of moving to a more purely Microsoft service infrastructure. It looks like Radboud is a Microsoft shop, so I would not be surprised.
My university, for example, is gradually removing all office phones (already voip) and replacing them with Teams voip as the only phone system for the university, encouraging personal phone use of Teams, but having computer-based use as the option for people who refuse. As they don't provide mobile phones, however, they can't require Microsoft Authenticator, and so at least officially will still give hardware keys on request (and fortunately still allow TOTP, even if they don't advertise it).
There is a movement in Dutch academia to move away from Microsoft/Google services. E.g. SURF (the IT cooperative of Dutch education and research institutions) are extending their NextCloud pilot to all Dutch edu/research instututions:
https://tweakers.net/nieuws/241846/surf-biedt-opensource-nex...
Many individual universities are also making decisions to reduce dependence on US tech, see e.g.:
https://rug.my-meeting.nl/Documenten/Keuzevrijheid-IT-oploss...
(Apologies for the Dutch links.)
If they already have an IT department, they already have the staff to take care of this additional workload (after a bit of training). How much difference is there really in repairing a "repairable" phone and a computer? Not much really as "repairing" a computer is often just fiddling with the software and / or just about changing an easily available and "standardised" parts. (When was the last time any of us saw any IT department doing actual board level servicing to repair a computer?) It will be the same with the Fairphone too (Fairphone makes it easy to change the battery, the board and the display screen).
If the university didn't make phone repairs themselves they would have to send the phones off for repair, or contract with a local phone repair shop. Or the secret third option: telling your employees to get it fixed and send you the invoice. None of them are cheap, and some of them will make you very annoyed with your billing/procurement/finance people. After a certain scale doing it inhouse makes sense, and with the right phone it's not much more difficult than fixing a business laptop, which is also commonly done inhouse with available spare parts
[dead]
If they want to use an MDM solution like Microsoft Intune to enforce some security compliance they are kind of forced to provide the device. People typically don't accept their private phone to be managed by their company IT.
Providing a device doesn't require picking a standard issue model of phone. IT departments often support an employee's choice of phone (or at least, choice of manufacturer) provided it's compatible with management software.
1 reply →
> The announcement implies that the university is responsible for phone maintenance and repair
It says "Do you require a (replacement) smartphone for your work at Radboud University?", so it's probably for a handful of board members and the like, not the actual faculty staff.
I thought one of the issues for Fairphone is that their security update schedule / security practices are a bit lax? Their phones are regularly requested by users to be targeted by GrapheneOS, but GOS developers contend that the security practices for the Fairphone are problematic. They apparently get security updates late and don't properly implement verified boot and attestation.
I like the devices, but I've stuck with Pixel devices for the better security practices. Honestly, I'm a little surprised that a university wouldn't be concerned about late security updates and the like.
I was going to keep to myself on this one, but this is a good jump-in point.
The security capabilities of their hardware are what makes GrapheneOS incompatible to target the phone, Not any specific security practices of the developers of Fairphone.
Having said that: if there’s a way to MDM GrapheneOS, I’d be looking at that also!
The n+ patch interval on Lineage, /e/ and the rest of them, that’s plain and simply more days your administrators are at risk of giving up the keys to your castle - and that’s a tough pill to swallow!
>They apparently get security updates late and don't properly implement verified boot and attestation.
It doesn't matter if their os gets security updates late, becase security updates depend on the rom maker this case grapheneos.
That's not entirely correct. There are also updates to the baseband, bootloader, binary driver blobs, etc. E.g., the bootloader for the FP3 was set to trust roms signed with the AOSP test keys (https://forum.fairphone.com/t/bootloader-avb-keys-used-in-ro...). That's not something fixable by the OS / rom maker.
The security issues stemming from such things are likely real, as well. There was a paper released some time back, about binary blobs, that found:
> Our results reveal that device manufacturers often neglect vendor blob updates. About 82% of firmware releases contain outdated GPU blobs (up to 1,281 days). A significant number of blobs also rely on obsolete LLVM core libraries released more than 15 years ago. To analyze their security implications, we develop a performant fuzzer that requires no physical access to mobile devices. We discover 289 security and behavioral bugs within the blobs. We also present a case study demonstrating how these vulnerabilities can be exploited via WebGL.
(From https://arxiv.org/html/2410.11075)
These risks don't seem to materialize if you're not targeted by something like an intelligence agency. Not sure publicly funded research has such security requirements, at least by default (they can always buy custom equipment for a project, or just not put such data on devices you take home / out and about). Might be worth it compared to the very real benefits it has around the world by paying good salaries and fairer material sourcing
That's probably true, but some of the mistakes FP has made in the past could probably be widely exploited, so it doesn't instill a lot of confidence IMO. E.g., they were signing their OS images with the AOSP test keys.
1 reply →
I'm on board as soon as they include a zoom camera.
But for now it seems like I'll remain with a Pixel and GrapheneOS.
A camera with optical zoom would be indeed nice.
For me another feature is what disqualifies it. Fairphone 6 would have been otherwise acceptable for myself, as it has quite decent specifications, but it only has USB 2.0.
Other smartphones at around the same price not only have USB 3, but also DisplayPort 1.4 (e.g. from Motorola).
I hate when I see even on many smartphones over $1000, that they save a few cents by implementing USB 2 instead of USB 3, and a few dollars at most by not implementing DisplayPort.
The SoC used in Fairphone 6 supports both USB 3 and DisplayPort, but its designers have saved a few external components by not offering these features.
Pixel is also disqualified for me by the same reason. Unfortunately only some smartphones made in China offer complete features and without excessive locking of the phone.
> Pixel is also disqualified for me by the same reason.
How so?
I think all pixels starting from 6 or 7 have DisplayPort output through USB C.
I watched a movie the other day with my projector connected to my pixel 10 running grapheneOS. Other than getting a phone call halfway through the movie and a few hiccups selecting the audio Jack output, everything ran smoothly.
1 reply →
I second this, although since the Pixel 8(a) they all come with USB-C 3.2 and DisplayPort support. You have to buy a cable that supports it, though.
Please, make a Fairphone mini. I'd buy it right away, whatever the price.
Also whatever the battery size though?
Not that I disagree. I bought a Fairphone some years ago and sold it onward because it simply didn't fit in my hand, but the phone I got instead had a delicious combo of small physical battery and terribly inefficient chipset (2019 Exynos). I'd still make the same choice but it's a considerable downside (thankfully the only downside of this phone besides its age and software support by now)
"Employees who have an iPhone from Radboud University can continue to use it as long as the device is still functioning. However, returned iPhones will no longer be reissued."
I wonder what the take rate will be from people rejecting the Fairphone and requesting their own SIM instead. The inner IT purchasing cynic in me says this is just a simple way to cull out your purchasing costs by only issuing one quasi-unpopular* device.
* I used to issue out phones at a large hospital and we allowed device choice. We saw ~90% iPhones, 10% Android in our fleet.
If Holland is anything like Denmark the cost of employee phones can be budgeted as an operational cost, which means it's basically free. I doubt that is their reasoning. It's far more likely this is a part of the massive anti-US tech dependency wave which is rolling over Europe. Digital sovereignty is a hot topic these days.
As far as what people want... it depends... A lot of people have two phones anyway, since they don't want to pay the additional taxation for using a company phone privately. Also because it's easier to turn it off when you're not working. In education I would imagine a lot of teachers/professors would prefer to not give their private numbers to students.
Probably not many, the iPhone only has a 35% market share in the Netherlands.
The Fairphone 6 is a pretty good phone.
According to the WhatsApp-leak, it is 51.41% Android and 48.59% iOS in the Netherlands.
https://github.com/sbaresearch/whatsapp-census/blob/main/cou...
1 reply →
That sounds unreal to me. Typically rich countries, like the nordics, are majority iPhone. But then again, Dutch people are know across Europe to be cheapskates so maybe that explains it ;)
4 replies →
What ROM are they use FP with?
They need to make a small diagonal model, 5" screen max, 1/2" thick, PCBs inside a rubber frame ( so no extra case needed ).
Also nice would be replaceable plug-in modules a` la Frame.work laptops.
The thing I would like to see is a second purpose for smart phones, an afterlife, calculator heaven?
It doesn't have to be cheap. It might for example resign into a security camera or a doorbell. A metal bracket with a connector, a button or a connection for one, a seperate psu with a bell or a relay for one, screws to attach the wires, perhaps a stripped down end of life OS (altho it could just be a mode) and it becomes a very good doorbell with motion detection, a good amount of storage, two way video if you want it. Share with someone [temporarly]. Backup footage on laptops, pc's, phones, storage devices etc etc
For $100 in parts it would be highly competitive in the space but it could be more expensive as it can basically do everything a $1000 security camera offers and more. Battery backup, sim card, etc. A big phone brand might even be able to get a contract with local law enforcement so that they can have/request [emergency] access.
It's just one example, a small/portable computer could resign into many things. The device only needs to know it is now a TV remote control.
Looking to replace my iphone 12 mini. Alas the fairphone is also obnoxiosuly large. Seems the only phone available today under 65mm is the Jelly Star
I looked into the Jelly Star about six months ago. Downsides are the lack of dual-frequency GNSS and eSIM, and blanks in my spreadsheet are chipset speed, unlockability, warranty, slow motion camera speed, screen brightness, storage speed, and battery life (on 2Ah that might not be very much). The IR blaster and FM radio are cool benefits though, and it's very cheap. May be worth a try if you're feeling adventurous and enjoy it being a conversation starter, but I wouldn't expect much longevity from it (battery life or warranty)
The thing is the apps themselves start to be unusable on smaller screens as DEV don't take them into account anymore.
Me too. I've seen that horror too :-)
I know several family members who have bought Fairphone's and been disappointed by them. It's really impressive how repairable they've managed to make such integrated devices, but it seems like they didn't do such a good job on making a reliable phone in the first place.
I think what we really need is legislation to force all phone manufacturers to at least make the batteries and screens relatively easily replaceable. Maybe a cap on the replacement costs and a minimum support time would be a reasonable way to do that.
> I think what we really need is legislation to force all phone manufacturers to at least make the batteries and screens relatively easily replaceable.
We are slowly getting there, user removable/replaceable batteries are part of the following regulation (first link I've got)
https://www.brownejacobson.com/insights/compliance-obligatio...
The big caveat will be that some leeway is going to be given to "waterproof" devices. Remains to be seen how many producers jump on that angle to avoid serviceability.
And with an unlockable bootloader (that can be easily unlocked without needing to contact the manufacturer or require any special software).
I've read that the Fairphone 6 is more like a "regular" phone than the previous one, because it has a standard phone chip (Snapdragon) instead of an IoT one.
They did that to get longer software support from Qualcomm, but now they can get long support for Snapdragon chips.
[dead]
[flagged]
cant stand big phones. thats my contribution to this discussion.