Kudos on Fairphone for offering 8 years of software updates.
As an owner of FP4, my biggest gripes with the FP4 are the software updates. Bugs keep languishing for months before they are acknowledged and then months pass before the bugs are fixed. Three annoying issues with my FP4 that I deal with on a daily basis:
Screen dimming bug. First reported in Feb and the earliest possible fix is in October. My phone is useless when I’m out and about and the level of urgency implied by FP4 for this issue baffles me.
NFC stops working randomly
5 GHz hotspot was broken for months and only fixed recently
I don’t care much about Android 13 as long as I get timely security patches. What I want is a bug free experience and that’s something FP4 fails to deliver.
An annoying hardware decision is the SIM card can’t be hot swapped. Not sure why this wasn’t addressed with FP5.
The Fairphone is always just such an odd decision for me. On one hand, I would love to have a phone with long support and swappable parts. On the other hand, I hear so many complaints about the software and wait for major version updates that I am not enterily sure if it really is a good buy.
The price is pretty okay, a bit less than 100€ per expected usable year. This is in line with other manufacturers. Also, the biggest bull of the expenses probably comes from the way the manufacturing and materials are checked.
Is there any sense in installing a custom ROM on the phone to get rid of the software issues?
Or maybe there will be less issues this time? From what I heard some of the problems where caused by Qualcomms support windows being closed and the company actually updating everything themself. Which might be solved by using a SoC with somewhat decent support now.
As far as I know, Fairphone uses “conflict free” materials. This is more expensive and harder to get than just searching for the cheapest seller of any material (e.g. lithium) and just going with them. In theory this should help against child or prison labor.
Additionally, they aim to pay everyone in the chain a living wage. Which is also more expensive than just using foxxcon to produce as cheap as possible and telling them to “just add more suicide prevention nets”.
This is a good thing, but makes cost go up quite a bit I would assume. Additionally, the SoC is probably more expensive than the Snapdragon equivalent, as it is build “for industrial uses”, which normally commands a premium.
Is there any sense in installing a custom ROM on the phone to get rid of the software issues?
Custom ROM will help with some issues, but not all. If the issue is in a proprietary blob, like the random screen dimming issue that’s plagued FP4 for months now, you’d still be stuck with the issue.
No, what they did was pick an SoC called QCM6490 which is used for embedded and industrial applications, and Qualcomm officially supports those for 8 years, unlike the snapdragon SoCs. According to gsmarena it should have performance similar to a snapdragon 778G.
Yeah, just read about it. That said Qualcomm’s part of the support is said to be 5 years by Ron at Ars:
Let’s talk about that industry-leading 8–10 years of Android support, which doesn’t necessarily mean 8–10 major OS updates. For now, Fairphone is promising “at least five operating system upgrades” because that is how long its weird Qualcomm chipset will officially be supported. Fairphone says Qualcomm will support that chip “until 2028” and after that, “Fairphone commits to extend support until 2031 and is aiming for 2033, giving users a total of eight to ten years of software support.”
It won’t be top of the line, but I don’t really see why it wouldn’t still be usable at least.
And even if the person buying the phone today won’t consider it usable for their needs in eight years time, they can still sell it to someone who doesn’t have a need for a high spec’ed phone.
I think you can look at it similarly to how one would look at an 8 year old laptop today.
A decently spec’ed laptop from 2015 is still very usable today, as long as you keep your expectations reasonable.
Browsers will never have a higher requirement. It’s the particular websites that will use newer technologies that older browsers may not support.
It may not be a mainline browser, but there’s no reason you couldn’t grab a new browser made to allow your currently out of date phone to use newer features, or at least the features your phone supported at launch. A cursory search on fdroid showed at least 1 browser with a requirement of android 4.4+.
The main thing to remember is that every website doesn’t take more power or newer technologies than the last. It’s only very specific situations where anything will need more power than something had 5 years ago. 99% of my apps could run on anything probably just fine. Email, Music, Audiobooks, VPN, 2FA etc. Most of those probably have security checks requiring a minimum OS version. Meaning they would actually work for longer on a phone with longterm OS updates than a phone that’s much stronger.
With the obvious exception being games. But I would never recommend thinking long term about games in any circumstance.
My phone is 2 years old for me. I bought a oneplus 8 refurb in 2020 for Christmas. Unlocked and outright. I got it because my Galaxy S9 before that was Verizon locked, and I just got off my parent’s phone plan. Verizon is very expensive.
I’ll still use my old phone from time to time. Mainly for dual account Pokemon Go, or plug it up to a TV to watch something that doesn’t support cast, like Newpipe.
I’ll keep this phone as long as I can. It’s on its last update, though. I’ll use LineageOS when I can.
That’s a valid concern, but it also assumes that the requirements for apps will go up in a similar trend as they did in the previous 8-10 years.
I’m not entirely convinced that they will. Smartphones 10 years ago were still very much a developing product category, whereas I think today they are generally matured.
Just look at laptops as a comparison. When they were still rapidly developing, an eight year old laptop would have pretty much been obsolete. But today an eight year old laptop will still serve most people perfectly fine.
Not that sure, to be honest. I remember how a few (5 I think) years old midrange laptop became hardly usable for internet browsing.
It will be very interesting to get data about real life usage of fair phones (and other phones as well) - like what % of sold phones are still used in 1, 2, 5, 8.
That's rubbish, 2018 most laptops were using 8th gen Intel CPUs, and they still work fine today for web-browsing and doing word processing and not too heavy spreadsheet work. An i5 from that era is still perfectly usable.
I don’t really feel that my 4a slowed down, but the battery is degraded for sure. Battery life was never amazing, but now it’s just bad. So this is why I am looking at the Fairphone: If I could just swap my battery easily, I would just continue using my 4a.
As the owner of an FP4, I will not get any further FP products.
The hardware is mostly fine, but it’s also meh. The speaker sucks, the microphone sucks, the camera sucks. Just talking to people on the phone is a pain, since people just can’t understand me.
But worse is the software. Updates are slow (still no Android 13 on the FP4) and terribly buggy. Each update brings new bugs with it, old bugs are resolved only very slowly. One example of this is that some devices experience ghost touches. So in the newest update, they just lowered the sensitivity, so that the devices that didn’t have ghost touches before now often don’t register touch at all. On the forums there is a long list of known bugs. The weird thing here is that every user seems to get a random grab bag of bugs.
And lastly: There is the price. It’s so incredibly expensive, that it basically invalidates any benefit you get from the repairability. If I buy a comparable phone for ~€400 less, I can use that money to get the battery and screen professionally replaced a few times.
So all in all, I am really not happy with the FP4, and this will most likely be my last Fairphone, unless Fairphone will finally migrate their software development to an in-house team where the devs actually use the phone themselves. Software QA is so terrible, that I can’t imagine anyone at Fairphone actually using the phone themselves.
There definitely are bugs. But to be fair, for every phone I ever owned the forum looked the same: so many people complaining about so many different problems/bugs/hardware issues that you question why you even bought the phone in the first place. Most often the average user is perfectly fine but would never open up a forum post to announce this.
In terms of the price, to be fair, it’s supposed to last like 8 years. You’re basically buying your next phone too when you buy one of these. It’s also more expensive to do what they’re doing.
You could look into CalyxOS. I don’t know if you’d consider installing an alternative System on your phone, but the FP4 is one of the few ones that let you unlock and relock the bootloader. Mine has been on Android 13 for a while now with very few software issues.
Well when you install CalyxOS you can relock the bootloader afterwards, it comes with microg, which vanilla Lineage dodn’t support at all last time I checked, and it comes with a firewall app as well. So, different focus than Lineage I’d say.
I remember I read that statistically foxconn actually has smaller suicide rank that population in average. It is simply a huge company where more than 1 milion people work. Take a million people and few of them do suicide. Media oversell this, and foxconn tryes to avoid this making their factories harder place to act.
Also would like to add that Fairphone works very closely with the manufacturer for OS and firmware customisations after the product has launched, based on feedback from the forum, this can be for things like decreasing the minimum brightness to go even darker (proprietary blob driver, only the factory can to do this) and support for new Bluetooth codecs, as they’ve done for the FP3.
Would be nice if any of these new parts could be used in the older phones. Is that the case?
After all the Fairphone 4 only came out less than 2 years ago.
Would be better for Fairphone to focus on some kind of upgradeable platform which is better for the environment than keep making new phones. For now I’ll stick to buying second hand phones whenever mine breaks.
Tbf, FP4 will still have replacement parts available for years to come. Not as good as having a (potentially indefinite) upgrade path, but FP4 isn’t obsolete.
I don’t think this will ever happen, it’s an anomaly unique to the PC market. The first time Fairphone did this with the FP3, allowing users to upgrade their camera, there was some minor OS workaround added to make this work, because the hardware in phones just isn’t set up to handle this.
IIRC I believe the workaround involved trying to get the installed camera to do something that the old one was not capable of doing, and if that operation failed it would spin up the driver for the upgraded camera. PCs use shared memory and a bunch of other standardised stuff I’m unfamiliar with to simply ask a device what it is, but phones can’t do that for their internals (for the most part)
Well it’s just up to Fairphone to add the right drivers.
Things like phone screens are such a waste if you think about it. Every phone has a screen built for it’s specific model and it doesn’t have to be like this.
Yes, it does have a microSD card slot. The website isn’t the most clear website ever, but if you click on “Specifications” and then “See all specifications” everything will be shown, including a MicroSD card slot
In theory, but phones do soooo much with the NAND that I think it varies quite largely.
I’ve struggled to get more than 3-5 years out of my devices, and its seemed to be the NAND causing the failure in my limited experience
My galaxy S4 failed after two years and would go straight into firmware flashing mode when connected to a computer. Leading up to this, it was reallllyyyy slow. I eventually narrowed this down to the internal storage, and moved my apps to the SD card where things sped up again. It would also frequently reboot.
My Galaxy S5 (RIP 🤧) failed after a good 6 year run, now it goes straight to recovery with MMC_READ failed sadly
On the opposite end of things I’ve got an old Android 4 tablet from 2013 that still works perfectly fine, although I don’t really have any reason to use it, it’s kinda just existing as a time capsule.
Thanks for sharing your experience :) Glad I never had such issues with my devices, but I guess it heavily depends on the specific device and the usecases.
My current Op 7 Pro has also been running without a problem. But in case it happens I know what might be the cause
Music mostly. I have over a terabyte of FLAC files stored on my home NAS and whilst I do have a Navidrome instance setup to stream it all, it’s not as reliable as just playing locally.
I have a 512GB microSD card in my current phone that is about half full. I don’t have any interest in paying a subscription to store my stuff on someone else’s server (“the cloud”), when the SD card only cost me a couple of months of what a subscription would. I periodically back up the SD card at home.
As to what’s on it? The usual stuff like pictures and videos, but also game ROMs, call recordings, shows/movies, ISOs, utilities (I can make my phone appear to be a flash drive, bootable even). I also backup my texts and other records using a third party app. When I do have to swap phones, transferring the SD card over and then restoring stuff like settings, messages, records, etc is way faster than any of the OEM transfer tools.
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