When people talk about the Fairphone there are always people bringing up the same or similar (often very valid) points. I would like to use this post sum up some Reddit discussion I took part in when the Fairphone 3 launched because the main points are still relevant for the Fairphone 4 launch:
Q: Wasn't the point of Fairphone to have ONE phone and then buy "extensions" or/and replacements only, aka modular - for the sake of preserving the environment, etc etc?!
A. No, it was always for repairability to ensure people can keep it for around five years without needing to replace the entire thing at once because the screen cracked or the audio jack broke.
This whole upgrade part stuff is something that get's hyped a lot in online discussions but from the very beginning Fairphone has been very honest and cautious when asked about possible upgrade modules in the future. They would love to offer crazy upgrade paths but cmon it's a small company in Amsterdam with limited resources.
However they did introduce an upgraded camera module in 2017.
I think the main takeaway I have for everybody regarding the Fairphone is: Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. I've preordered the Fairphone 2, got it in 2016. People ask me about it often. They usually get very excited only to get disappointed when they realize that the team behind it has to make compromises just like every other phone brand has to.
The fact that they got this product designed, launched and supported with <100 people is really amazing, so please don't feel disappointed by the fact that it doesn't offer something even Google couldn't get market ready.
These guys make really good phones that are not only as fair as it gets but also as innovative as it gets when it comes to the overall design. They introduced a camera upgrade module in 2017 which is amazing, other than that it's really just making your life easier when you want to replace parts.
I replaced the screen and the audio jack, the phone is still rock solid.
Q: What about Software? I keep my phones mostly 3 years, because even after 3 years, many LOS devs are jumping ship...?
A: They definitively do their homework. Security updates come usually ~3 weeks after Google releases them. Fairphone OS still gets bigger updates every ~2-3 months. They still support their Fairphone Open OS. Lineage OS is really popular on it and is well supported offering Android Pie for the Fairphone 2.
For the Fairphone 3, the manufacturer guaranteed five years of support. This means that replacement parts are available for five years and security updates are offered. In addition, the manufacturer promises a feature update to Android 10, but does not call for a date. Additional feature updates are planned but not guaranteed. For the sold out since March 2019 Fairphone 2 (available since the end of 2015), the manufacturer will continue to publish security updates and reserve spare parts for at least another three years.
The Fairphone 2 was delivered with Android 5.1, later came updates to 6.01 and 7.1.2 - the latter with great effort, because there were no official drivers for the Snapdragon 801 chipset used.
"Q": What an awful phone. Anyone who buys this is an idiot, you aren’t saving the world and all you’re doing is making yourself feel holier than thou because of your “ethical” decision which you can’t be quiet about.
Save your money and get a REAL phone with much better specs for the same price.
A: It's still a step in the right direction.
I also don't see the problem with feeling cool about "ethical" decisions.
I definetely think my Fairphone 2 is cool. I think it's tacky, chunky and technical look is beautiful and it sparks interesting conversations with other people that think it's cool. If fair and open... If having a seven year old phone that looks absolutely worn out becomes the new mainstream cool that would be the best thing to ever happen to us.
I for myself feel pretty cool when people ask me about my phone and how old it is. I also feel better, yes.
"Q": We shouldn’t care about the conditions our phones are made in. We should care about the best value for our money, performance and quality.
A: Well you know that's just like your opinion man.
"Q": YEA lol pay [price of the prior Fairphone] for a phone just to feel good about your enviromental impact. top kek.
A: As you may know the Fairphone is not only trying to improve the enviromental impact, the company is also doing as much as possible to improve the situation of the involved asian workers. I would like to use this moment of awareness created by the Fairphone 3 announcement to invite you to get a small glimpse into the live of Xu, your typical Foxconn phone assembly line worker. Please excuse that I just copy & pasted this together.
On the last day of September, a 24-year-old migrant worker in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen killed himself. Xu Lizhi jumped out of a window of a residential dormitory run by his employer, Foxconn, the huge electronics manufacturing company with a million-strong workforce that makes the majority of the world's Apple iPhones.
In most cases, Xu's suicide would have been yet another footnote in the vast, sweeping story of China's economic boom and transformation. He is one of a legion of young Chinese migrants who emerge out of rural obscurity to find work in China's teeming cities, only to end up crushed by both the dullness and stress of factory jobs, insufficient wages and a steady accumulation of personal disappointments.
But Xu was a poet. And, after his death, his friends collected his work and got some published in a local Shenzhen newspaper.
《一颗螺丝掉在地上》 "A Screw Fell to the Ground"
一颗螺丝掉在地上 A screw fell to the ground
在这个加班的夜晚 In this dark night of overtime
垂直降落，轻轻一响 Plunging vertically, lightly clinking
不会引起任何人的注意 It won’t attract anyone’s attention
就像在此之前 Just like last time
某个相同的夜晚 On a night like this
有个人掉在地上 When someone plunged to the ground
-- 9 January 2014
Reading through the poems, one in particular stood out to me, ‘A screw Fell to the Ground.’ While it was done eight months before his suicide, the context seems to be relatable to how he may have been feeling—mostly the sound of “someone” plunging and nobody hearing.
We ran along the railway,
arriving in some place called ‘the City’
where we trade in our youth, and our muscle.
Finally we have nothing to trade, only a cough
and a skeleton nobody cares about.
‘Sleepless’
The poems, translated at the leftist website Libcom.org, are a wrenching echo of the alienation and hardship felt by countless people in modern China and, for that matter, in other parts of the developing world. They lament the grinding ennui of the assembly line, the squalor of a migrant worker's narrow, frustrated existence.
But don't let me guilt trip you into buying this phone. The Fairphone 2 was an amazing device and I am sure the Fairphone 3 will be a solid upgrade. This is a great phone line and not some shitty alternative. The Fairphone 2 definetely had some reliability issues. I believe it was the right decision to introduce more screws and flat cables to make it more reliable and decrease additional material was needed for all the pogo pin connectors that made the Fairphone 2 extremely quick and easy to disassemble but also prone to all the random connectivity issues.
The FP3 is still as good as it gets when it comes to repairability. The changes to the FP3 give me hope that it could finally become a reliable phone as well.
Every gripe I had about the Fairphone 2 after using it since 2015 got addressed in this new iteration.
I just wanna toot a horn for good old prince2 here. I know it's not the cool new thing on the bloc but I would prefer it for stuff like infrastructure or organizational change projects any day.
In case it comes accross a little bit to advertisy: I am not affiliated with the prince2 publisher. Just someone who suffered through a lot of unnecessary agile, has been working in a prince2 org for two years now and really likes it.
If any Figma are interested in an alternative, try the free & open source alternative Penpot (https://penpot.app/). I like it and the team behind it (Kaleidos) always does great work (I love their JIRA alternative Taiga to bits).
Q: Wasn't the point of Fairphone to have ONE phone and then buy "extensions" or/and replacements only, aka modular - for the sake of preserving the environment, etc etc?!
A. No, it was always for repairability to ensure people can keep it for around five years without needing to replace the entire thing at once because the screen cracked or the audio jack broke.
This whole upgrade part stuff is something that get's hyped a lot in online discussions but from the very beginning Fairphone has been very honest and cautious when asked about possible upgrade modules in the future. They would love to offer crazy upgrade paths but cmon it's a small company in Amsterdam with limited resources.
However they did introduce an upgraded camera module in 2017.
I think the main takeaway I have for everybody regarding the Fairphone is: Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. I've preordered the Fairphone 2, got it in 2016. People ask me about it often. They usually get very excited only to get disappointed when they realize that the team behind it has to make compromises just like every other phone brand has to.
The fact that they got this product designed, launched and supported with <100 people is really amazing, so please don't feel disappointed by the fact that it doesn't offer something even Google couldn't get market ready.
These guys make really good phones that are not only as fair as it gets but also as innovative as it gets when it comes to the overall design. They introduced a camera upgrade module in 2017 which is amazing, other than that it's really just making your life easier when you want to replace parts.
I replaced the screen and the audio jack, the phone is still rock solid.
Q: What about Software? I keep my phones mostly 3 years, because even after 3 years, many LOS devs are jumping ship...?
A: They definitively do their homework. Security updates come usually ~3 weeks after Google releases them. Fairphone OS still gets bigger updates every ~2-3 months. They still support their Fairphone Open OS. Lineage OS is really popular on it and is well supported offering Android Pie for the Fairphone 2.
For the Fairphone 3, the manufacturer guaranteed five years of support. This means that replacement parts are available for five years and security updates are offered. In addition, the manufacturer promises a feature update to Android 10, but does not call for a date. Additional feature updates are planned but not guaranteed. For the sold out since March 2019 Fairphone 2 (available since the end of 2015), the manufacturer will continue to publish security updates and reserve spare parts for at least another three years.
The Fairphone 2 was delivered with Android 5.1, later came updates to 6.01 and 7.1.2 - the latter with great effort, because there were no official drivers for the Snapdragon 801 chipset used.
"Q": What an awful phone. Anyone who buys this is an idiot, you aren’t saving the world and all you’re doing is making yourself feel holier than thou because of your “ethical” decision which you can’t be quiet about.
Save your money and get a REAL phone with much better specs for the same price.
A: It's still a step in the right direction.
I also don't see the problem with feeling cool about "ethical" decisions.
I definetely think my Fairphone 2 is cool. I think it's tacky, chunky and technical look is beautiful and it sparks interesting conversations with other people that think it's cool. If fair and open... If having a seven year old phone that looks absolutely worn out becomes the new mainstream cool that would be the best thing to ever happen to us.
I for myself feel pretty cool when people ask me about my phone and how old it is. I also feel better, yes.
"Q": We shouldn’t care about the conditions our phones are made in. We should care about the best value for our money, performance and quality.
A: Well you know that's just like your opinion man.
"Q": YEA lol pay [price of the prior Fairphone] for a phone just to feel good about your enviromental impact. top kek.
A: As you may know the Fairphone is not only trying to improve the enviromental impact, the company is also doing as much as possible to improve the situation of the involved asian workers. I would like to use this moment of awareness created by the Fairphone 3 announcement to invite you to get a small glimpse into the live of Xu, your typical Foxconn phone assembly line worker. Please excuse that I just copy & pasted this together.
On the last day of September, a 24-year-old migrant worker in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen killed himself. Xu Lizhi jumped out of a window of a residential dormitory run by his employer, Foxconn, the huge electronics manufacturing company with a million-strong workforce that makes the majority of the world's Apple iPhones.
In most cases, Xu's suicide would have been yet another footnote in the vast, sweeping story of China's economic boom and transformation. He is one of a legion of young Chinese migrants who emerge out of rural obscurity to find work in China's teeming cities, only to end up crushed by both the dullness and stress of factory jobs, insufficient wages and a steady accumulation of personal disappointments.
But Xu was a poet. And, after his death, his friends collected his work and got some published in a local Shenzhen newspaper.
Reading through the poems, one in particular stood out to me, ‘A screw Fell to the Ground.’ While it was done eight months before his suicide, the context seems to be relatable to how he may have been feeling—mostly the sound of “someone” plunging and nobody hearing.
The poems, translated at the leftist website Libcom.org, are a wrenching echo of the alienation and hardship felt by countless people in modern China and, for that matter, in other parts of the developing world. They lament the grinding ennui of the assembly line, the squalor of a migrant worker's narrow, frustrated existence.
You can find more of his works here: https://libcom.org/blog/xulizhi-foxconn-suicide-poetry
You can also check out the complete cost breakdown of the Fairphone 2 here: https://www.fairphone.com/de/2015/09/09/cost-breakdown-of-th...
But don't let me guilt trip you into buying this phone. The Fairphone 2 was an amazing device and I am sure the Fairphone 3 will be a solid upgrade. This is a great phone line and not some shitty alternative. The Fairphone 2 definetely had some reliability issues. I believe it was the right decision to introduce more screws and flat cables to make it more reliable and decrease additional material was needed for all the pogo pin connectors that made the Fairphone 2 extremely quick and easy to disassemble but also prone to all the random connectivity issues.
The FP3 is still as good as it gets when it comes to repairability. The changes to the FP3 give me hope that it could finally become a reliable phone as well.
Every gripe I had about the Fairphone 2 after using it since 2015 got addressed in this new iteration.