It's a great thing, and I hope the industry (with motivation by EU) will follow a trend towards repairability and sustainability. However I think the most sustainable way is buying used devices.
this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
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Unfortunately you need something with long firmware and software support. Qualcomm is your enemy, they stop updating the firmware of their chips after about two years and that's why android phones often stop getting updates less than 2 years after you buy them.
That's true. I use LineageOS to get at least OS updates, but firmware is definitely problematic. I just wished mobile hardware would be more generic like in Desktop PCs, that would solve a lot of problems.
Used devices still break and end in landfills, though, used might be better than new for carbon output today, but repairable is gonna win out in that regard long term
Hopefully in the future repairable and used can go hand in hand! Those are not mutually exclusive attributes.
Sadly, their software QA sucks and thus the phone is buggy as hell.
Whitch is really frustrating because otherwise it's a pretty good (if oversized and overly expensive) phone.
Do report these on the FP forum when you encounter them, the staff seem pretty proactive at getting these fixed, although it takes them a while... (at least they were for the FP3 - even community requests for a very low screen brightness were honored, and now they're supporting two versions of android for the FP3 due to Google's fingerprint sensor requirement nonsense on Android 13)
Sure, done that. But the issues I have have been open for months (e.g. the really unresponsive screen since they "fixed" the ghost touch issue by reducing the screen sensitivity for all phones, even the ones not affected by ghost touches, making other phones ignore touches all the time).
Or Android 13 frequently crashing, resetting or freezing if you dare to use 5G. That's a blocker level bug that is open since Android 13 was released and support told me a week ago that they still have no clue why this happens.
And even though some of these bugs are super easy to fix (and I proposed some fixes that I got running on my phone using root, with no access to any source code) they still spend months not fixing them.
The very low screen brightness for example took from February to October to fix, even though it took me 15min and I sent my fix to support and posted it on the forums. No change happened until they updated to A13, which rewrote that part of AOSP.
And the ghost touch/screen sensitivity issue, which has a dead simple fix, is still open since launch. The issue there is that the screens have very different levels of sensitivity from the factory. So if they set one software sensitivity level, either some get ghost touches or others get an unresponsive screen. So the fix is to just add a toggle or a slider in the settings that users can use to adjust the screen sensitivity, just like e.g. Samsung has done for a long time. Instead, they just arbitrarily change that value to ruin the experience for someone else.
And yes, that proposed solution has been on the forums for years and it was also sent to support.
the main complaint from me is still the headphone jack. they faced insane backlash when they released the FP4. i thought this company cares about the user as well as the environment. but it seems they didn't realize that people want actual features (like wireless charging, the headphone jack, or a usable battery size).
don't get me wrong, i own a Fairphone 4 and love using it. but making these mistakes 2 times in a row now is just pathetic.
The problem is there is no competition here. I’d love to see several repairable smartphones with slightly different features that create some competition. For example something with a max 5.5” screen and only a single camera.
Actually, there is at least one other company specializing in sustainable / repairable electronics - besides Fairphone - I'm aware of.
Check out Shiftphone: Their new Shiftphone 8 (still under development / construction) will be a pretty solid deal with a reasonable price-performance ratio - already pre ordered mine and very excited for final delivery in March.
... Their previous models as well as spare parts, etc. are also still available through their shop.