I would like to support them, but it is lacking in several features. Kinda wish they would take their modular and user-replaceable components and let us upgrade, like a better camera module for example.
that said, it’s missing the most important thing… Network compatibility.
I wish they were more similar to Framework except in the smartphone space. Because when I buy a Fairphone I’m still stuck with the specs I bought and when I want to have better specs I need to buy a new phone regardless of how repairable it is. WIth a Framework laptop I can upgrade the mainboard to one with better specs and can keep the rest.
I’m so tired of phone without bezels and tiny batteries.
I really really want a phone that has like 12 screws on the back, around the edge of the device that pinch down on a gasket for the seal instead of adhesives and plastic clips. Phones are plateauing in power now where most people don’t need to upgrade the SOC or memory for the better part of 5-10 years. The only reason I ever really need to replace a phone is because the phone isn’t getting updates or the battery is cooked.
If done well enough, the screws could even allow modular backs and shells. You could mount your phone’s internals into a shell and lock it in with a different back. So people could have phones with a big ol ass on them and a big ol battery if they want. The SOC, memory, and storage could all be on one singular board with headers to all of the buttons and shit. Because it could be user serviceable you can even put the SIM card, SD card or whatever onboard and not have to deal with a water tight seal for those.
I’m not sure the fairphone is even waterproof. Plus for what it offers it is way more costly than it needs to be. 20W charging, 3904 mAh battery, and for some reason no headphone jack.
Plus I’m American and I don’t think they even sell the thing over here but for nearly $700 it’d have to be a very convincing phone for anyone who isn’t thinking “I will fight climate change and ewaste by buying a phone” because you can buy a pixel 7a for $450 currently.
Your example with the camera module is exactly what happened to the FP3. They released the FP3+ which featured a better camera and users of the original model could upgrade by just buying this module.
However this is definetly not the focus of Fairphone as a company as too many or regular new modules would introduce new e-waste again.
The Fairphone 2 actually had 7 years of security updates before the support was withdrawn, so it’s pretty likely the Fairphone 3 will last at least 7 years, maybe even longer.
Considering all the comments I’ve seen about their phone basically falling apart it kind of sounds like you should just get an iPhone SE and factor in a battery replacement after 3 years. Day one updates for 5 years and I am severely doubtful you’ll have as many hardware problems if you don’t damage it. Better camera, too.
I wanted to get a Fairphone 4 until I saw I saw it didn’t have a headphone jack. Made me think all their “sustainable” mottos are just marketing.
Purism with their Librem phones took people’s money and didn’t send them the product so I didn’t want to chance it or support a company that does that.
So in the end I got a Pixel 7 instead and put Graphene OS on it. Not particularly happy but didn’t seem like there was a better choice.
Recently found out from a Louis Rossman video that the lead dev of Graphene has some mental health issues that don’t make him a very trustworthy individual. Supposedly he stepped down but he’s probably still contributing code.
When I heard the Fairphone 4 didn’t have any waterproofing I decided to skip this version. My coworker is replacing their Samsung S10 just because the USB port is getting loose but they’re an avid boater. For some, water resistance really matters.
Yup, I’m in the market for a new phone soon, and here’s my assessment of my options, in rough order of preference:
PinePhone Pro - probably not ready since I’m not confident in calls waking it from sleep; not sure if it’ll support the apps I need (mostly need a specific 2FA app for work)
Fairphone - expensive and no headphone jack
Pixel + alternate ROM - not sure I trust the devs
iPhone - don’t like the ecosystem much, and I don’t really trust Apple
regular Android - software support ends too soon
feature phones - don’t have the apps I need
I’m probably going to get an older Pixel and a PinePhone Pro, and I’ll hack on the PinePhone until it does what I need. I don’t think I can add reliable suspend/resume, but I can probably build a couple small apps I need (i.e. a lemmy client, I’m already working on one), get a few Android apps working, and tune the OS a bit. Worst case scenario, it’s a fun hobby project.
Any idea of what phone is best for postmarketos? I intend to use it as a daily driver and potentially submit patches for things like MMS (my family still uses it occasionally).
I guess, if money were no object, which phone offers the best postmarketos experience?
pinephone pro -
is defintely getting better as the software improves. The battery life is definitely something that holds it back i bought a keyboard battery case and it improved it however the edges of the case that connects to the phone have cracked over time and ive super glued it twice (near headphone port & opposite side near type c port.) When they crack it can cause a misalignment on the pins and not charge/keyboard doesnt function so i have to press back into the case(hence the glue to fix that).
It will eventually get better for me to completely jump over.
Pixel phones degoogled - works great especially calyx or graphene os. I have always bought used but if i want change to happen i need to stop funding google indirectly through the used market with buying their phones. I am speaking for myself here.
Fairphone , Teracube, Murena - i eventually want to just buy from these moving forward. They hit 80% + of the checkboxes i need and improvements come quicker when this companys market improves especially when their direction aligns with what i want in a phone.
Tl;dr - i am letting my money do the talking on where i want phone improvement to occur.
Pinephone (not pro) seems to have the most support its on the main line.
Other than that under “community” & “phone” you would decide which phone in that list meets what you need and get peoples opinion on those specific phone with usage.
your selection on which direction to take via pinephone or android based on your needs and tollerances.
If you dont mind tinkering go pinephone however if you need it to work for various uses based on what you/friends/family use and compromises need to be done then go android.
Contribution can be bug reports, donations, assistance to other users ect. Anything is possible if you want.
I do where i can and its my choice; same with you, your choices are your own.
I think I’ll want the PinePhone Pro because repairability is important and it’ll probably be hard to find parts for outdated mass market phones. The original PinePhone is just too slow for me (from videos, not hands-on usage), and the PinePhone Pro probably wouldn’t be a huge downgrade from my current phone in terms of performance.
I didn’t see a big selection of used OnePlus 6s (OnePlus 6T seems available though), and the ones that are available are in poor shape (shattered back, burned in screen, some kind of damage, etc), so it’s not going to be a long term option most likely. The PinePhone should have decent parts support for a few years at least.
I have a pinephone pro, while you can use use it touch. I recommend either the keyboard case(since it has a battery) or having a portable bluetooth keyboard of some sort. If configurartion is needed and there are issues with the onscreen keyboard(happens when i use certain apps like bitwarden) the keyboard helps ease that issue.
I still use stock manjaro plasma but if i jump i might go to sway/plasma arch/sway postmarket still checking put options though. I know i need waydroid to work so ill see what the doc support is on both.
Fairphone allows you to remove the battery, which, amongst other things, allows you to hard-reset the phone by just pulling the battery, which I did 2 times after owning the FP4 for 18 months. It also receives longer software support than most other phones. Negatives include a rattly top speaker above 50% volume, which was confirmed to be a design defect, the high price tag and, for me at least other small annoyances, such as the microphone volume being pretty low when on a call (not unusable, but you got to speak louder) and sometimes GPS issues, which either require patience or a restart.
An incredibly important detail of being able to remove the battery is that it enables both carrying extras for longer travel, and allows replacing and upgrading as it ages.
I have a samsung galaxy s5 and thanks to that i could straight up double the ontime with an aftermarket battery, which is comically large and came with a new backside lmao.
I heard the original PinePhone works fine, but the Pro is still WIP. I want the extra performance from the Pro, otherwise I’d probably already have a PinePhone.
His code contributions have always been high quality, and they’re audited by his peers. Its very unlikely malicious code would come from him, and even more unlikely it would make it through on to your phone.
While he’s certainly unhinged, it’s clear that he cares deeply for the project. I can’t see him doing anything intentionally malicious.
I really wish him the best, and I’m glad he stepped down. Much better for optics with him out of the way.
This might age horribly, but I never really understood the worry that a high-profile open source developer might ‘smuggle’ some dodgy code into a repo. Sure, it’s possible. Especially in large projects, but the risk/reward ratio is simply ridiculously bad and there are so many other/simpler ways out there a malicious actor could use to make a profit.
I wanted to get a Fairphone 4 until I saw I saw it didn’t have a headphone jack. Made me think all their “sustainable” mottos are just marketing.
Purism with their Librem phones took people’s money and didn’t send them the product so I didn’t want to chance it or support a company that does that.
So in the end I got a Pixel 7 instead and put Graphene OS on it. Not particularly happy but didn’t seem like there was a better choice.
Recently found out from a Louis Rossman video that the lead dev of Graphene has some mental health issues that don’t make him a very trustworthy individual. Supposedly he stepped down but he’s probably still contributing code.
it’s worth noting that while on android you can be like 4-5 major versions behind and still receive first class app support, on ios apple decides your phone no longer sparks joy and refuses you the next ios version, you’re slowly but surely going to lose all your apps. on the developer side, apple is extremely hostile to the practice of using older versions of their apis, they constantly push you toward newer apis that only work with the latest os and discourage using the older ones. some apps, like vlc, still manage to support older iphones, but it’s an ordeal and a half, so on the user side, not being on the latest ios isn’t really a proper experience.
the iphone 6s was actually the longest supported iphone, receiving the latest ios for 83 months after release. that’s just one month shy of fairphone’s 7 years. however, the average iphone only gets five years of real-world viability*, which is, yes, better than the 2-3 years android gets (usually with way more transparently planned obsolescence than apple does), but it’s not better than the 7 years of true viability that fairphone offers. they upgraded to android 13, that alone would last you until 2026 because of the way android apps are written.
*yes, you can use your iphone past that, hell, you can even use it after you stop getting security fixes, which tends to happen about 3 years later. but how is that different than using an old android device that’s also not receiving support?
Eh, you’re discounting the different development targets that the android and ios ecosystems use. From the jump almost all android developers are shooting for ancient versions of the api because no phone gets more than a few major versions. Ios developers are targeting the latest supported api so from the start it’s the latest thing.
But what’s in that api? It’s hard to develop optimized code for the gpu of android devices because it could be anything. Qualcomm stops sending out blobs after a few versions so there’s a big transition from first party blob bin libs to third party reverse engineered ones. iOS stuff is all just metal 1,2 or 3. So even the five year old phone is getting some level of gpu support. The metal api even has a fallback layer so if you wrote for 3 and the device only has a 2 gpu it’ll split the work and there’ll be some amount of acceleration. It’s like that one version of directx that broke hardware compatibility and had to be patched.
It’s also worth addressing what you said about apple pushing the latest api. It’s true, they do. They also encourage app developers to use the old apis to target security updates at platforms that aren’t getting major versions anymore.
That system is a lot more like Debian stable than some evil empire (although I’ve met ppl who think Debian stable is the evil empire).
Apple isn’t good. They’re out to get money just like everyone else. I think of em like Lexus. The users are pieces of shit, but the cars are prime rib Toyotas which is honestly pretty nice.
for me, the biggest issue with the fairphone is that they attempted to embrace everything: modular, sustainable, fair trade, etc
their competitors do none of that, so the quality/cost ratio turns out way off and that prevents their market share to grow sustainably (pun intended). the few people I know who use it, are the profile that is used to do sacrifices like that (like buying sustainable food at large markups, etc) but that’s not feasible or desirable to the vast majority
imo they should have picked a concept and perfected it - preferably the modular part which is the best thing you can do and brings tangible value to users. then move on to the other things… that’s a great cautionary tale about trying to be the good guys in capitalism, the system is not in their favour
I want these people to try living with an ancient galaxy s5 for a couple months, browsing the web is borderline physically painful, it gets so hot that touching the screen almost burns you, and it has so little RAM that it struggles to keep two apps active at once.
Literally if i have music playing and i open the browser it usually kills the music in the background.
my current phone has the same soc and there are absolutely no issues there. will report back once i get my fairphone 4, hopefully tomorrow
if you’re not gaming on your phone (and if you are, 1. why, 2. get a steamdeck), i honestly don’t see how you would notice the soc. the only time i ever noticed that my phone was weak in the past five years (and my current phone is the only one that was low-mid-range, not actual low-end, save for an iphone se 3rd gen i had for half a year) was during zooming into an abnormally large upscaled r/place image. a phone’s performance is not really something that should be a consideration for the average user nowadays, anything can run basic apps that should have been websites and play back video. the mid-tier 2021 soc in the fairphone 4 definitely qualifies.
if the complaint is about the fairphone 3, then absolutely fair, i do remember that that one did manage to be hella slow. i wanted one back then and it was one of the major issues.
I do some light nuisance games on my phone, but I absolutely can tell the difference between the 888 in my phone and a 865, let alone the thing in the fairphone.
Sure, I’m spoiled, but I am not willing to give up 120hz at 120fps in my apps and instant loading in the ui nor will I ever get anything but oled again.
If you’re asking for a 5+ year commitment to the device, which is kind of what this repairability thing does, you either have to be at the leading edge or have an upgrade path.
Fairphone has neither, they’re starting at 2 years behind but want me to pay as if they’re a modern midrange.
i find their asking price fair tbh. yeah, it’s not competitive spec-wise, but it’s what they have to do to keep up their model. they’re not big enough to make their own components like screens or have someone make a screen just for them, so they need to find components that will be available for seven years. fair trade materials are also more expensive because all that slave labor and shit does give the not so fair alternatives an edge in the market. the r&d cost for a small phone manufacturer is also spread across fewer units, components also cost more when you’re ordering them in smaller amounts, supporting the phone for seven years has its associated costs (on top of not having your customers buy phones 2-3x more frequently), and the sustainable business model does also have overhead compared to riding the razor on the stock market or being VC-funded.
the fairphone is not cheap, but if you care about what they do, care about actually owning your phone (both in terms of rooting and os access, and in terms of hardware access and repairability), and would like to be able to use it for a long time, this is just what it takes. if apple or samsung or google made a fairphone, it would cost less due to their scale, but it would still cost more than the phone you have with the 888. but if you can feel a single-gen upgrade there, you’d likely want to upgrade at a higher frequency anyway.
from what i’ve seen, some people do use phones the way you do, but a lot of people only swap phones when needed. for them, a fairphone that they can keep for 5-7 years and keep alive even if something happens to it could still be cheaper than the 2-3 other phones they’d need over the same period of time.
I’m gaming in moonlight so it needs a good decoder
I’m way too poor for a steam deck
Slide in a 3 here just cause termux x11 + box64droid is really coming along well and I want to be able to play all my games in my phone lol. Especially cause where I work has a lot of down time, but obviously not room for a full pc
I’m gaming in moonlight so it needs a good decoder
Almost any modern SoC can decode 1080p60 HEVC in real-time. That part is handled in dedicated hardware; the speed of the CPU or GPU next to it does not matter.
You did not specify that you need a 10-bit capable decoder. Given that the screen is 8-bit, that would be kind of unusual to have outside of niche applications such as this one.
8 vs. 10 bit shouldn’t make the image look better outside of toning down banding artefacts. There might be an indirect colour transformation taking place here.
Reading through the comments, almost everyone missed the elephant in the room.
The big problem with long term support is not on the phone or chip manufacturers.
…::: It’s GOOGLE! :::…
Just compare the history of Android with Windows. Windows 10 is still supported for another 2 years, yet it was released in mid 2015.
Every Windows 10 capable device is still receiving updates till then.
Contrast that with Android.
Android 6.0 came out in October 2015. Yet very few devices from that era are supportable today. Why? A large part of that is based on Google’s never ending -> breaking changes <- and random new requirements that make older devices incompatible.
This got me personally when I bought a Sony Z3 with the intention of having a “future proof” phone. It was openly advertised as being a dev device for Android 7, so much so that a preview release was downloadable for it.
Only for Google to drop a new requirement for the GPU to have minimum OpenGL ES 3.1, while the GPU only had the instructions for 3.0. WTF?! I might add, the specification for 3.1 was only released to the public 2 years prior.
I seriously hope that some alternative to Android will establish itself again. We had Windows phone, which Microsoft utterly butchered. IOS is not an alternative as that’s tied to one manufacturer.
i use e/os, that replaces like everything google has like the google micro services with something else. Some apps, newer ones with more trackers, tend to break but it supports some phones from 2013. I suggest taking a look when you have phones that are not supported anymore
It seems to support Sony Xperia Z3 https://doc.e.foundation/devices
The one thing I wish google never did was introduce SafetyNet without enabling us a way to essentially say “I modified my own phone, so let me use my damn banking and tap-to-pay apps without issue” and reenable it.
In fact they’ve actively made safetynet more invasive by adding CTS profile matching alsongside basic attestation, with a system for telling what phones are compatible with the new profile matching so you can’t force disable it.
If they never added that I could’ve bypassed basic attestation and gotten google wallet back. But no. The most I can get back is banking and Pokemon GO. But there’s still a risk one of them will decide to use CTS and therefore making it impossible to use that app on my current phone, all in the name of “security”
It’s my phone, stop trying to smother my attempts to do what I want with it!
Yup. While I have a sceptical opinion of Ubuntu, it did find it sad that it didn’t gain any traction.
A possible contender is still Tizen OS. It’s essentially an entire OS build around Chromium, while not owned by Google. Samsung use that a lot in their smart TVs.
Sure, it’s not as performant as running native Android.
But boy have we seen some massive improvements in browser tech and performance increases on mobile devices. Developing web-applications is certainly a ton easier than native Android and IOS. Wrapper toolchains like React Native aren’t helping much.
Unless you really need calls to some device APIs, there isn’t too much left that a Browser can’t do compared to what the native OS permits. I’ve been developing web-apps for robots and also developed equivalent native apps in Android. In the browser you now have access to some impressive 3d capabilities, which are extending further (BabylonJS). You’ve got the ability to interact with files via tool-chains that are not too dissimilar to what you see in native Android (Google has been clamping down file-system access to app devs quite heavily in recent releases). You can also gain decent API access to the devices battery and GPS status. Add some nifty UI libraries and you can provide a more pleasant experience, faster than with an actual native app. Even video streaming works remarkably well since you can interact with multiple cameras, microphones and even the screen (Google Meet does that).
It’s now that we’re seeing PWAs (progressive web app) to gain traction. I’m using Voyager for Lemmy, which works lovely in Windows and my phone.
In the browser you only miss on some native capabilities on some hardware component and a few legacy systems. Mainly serial communication and native UDP support. Although the last one will see some more improvements with HTTP3, which is gaining traction.
I had the Fairphone 2 and I loved it.
It was like Lemmy, you never really knew if it would work the next morning but the community was great.
After replacing the battery once, without any tools whatsoever, and upgrading the camera, with a small screwdriver, it lasted for more than five years.
Since then, I’ve had a company phone but when it breaks, I will check out Fairphone first. Of course there is no such thing as a sustainable, or “fair” phone, but at least in 2016, this was often discussed in their trancparacy reports? The official forum was also very aware. Some raw materials where sourced to the exact mine, others thei openly said they couldn’t control at the time.
Additionally, they offered the phone with root acces so trying out alternative os was never any problem. It’s the closest Ive ever been to a Google free life.
I want to love my FP3 but it loves to crap out by being slow or just crash prone. I replaced my camera because it accumulated dust behind the lense, because it is replacable.
… still wouldn’t buy any other phone, it works well enough in all aspects and is a bit like the slightly crappy car you still love <3 Next one will be a FP5 :)
@pingveno That’s true, but still, most people are thinking like me unfortunately. Fairphone needs to find a way to make the phone more appealing to the masses. If they success and people start addopting it, competitors would have to adapt. I don’t know if I’m making sense, just looking at it from a John Doe perspective.
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I would like to support them, but it is lacking in several features. Kinda wish they would take their modular and user-replaceable components and let us upgrade, like a better camera module for example.
that said, it’s missing the most important thing… Network compatibility.
I wish they were more similar to Framework except in the smartphone space. Because when I buy a Fairphone I’m still stuck with the specs I bought and when I want to have better specs I need to buy a new phone regardless of how repairable it is. WIth a Framework laptop I can upgrade the mainboard to one with better specs and can keep the rest.
I’m so tired of phone without bezels and tiny batteries.
I really really want a phone that has like 12 screws on the back, around the edge of the device that pinch down on a gasket for the seal instead of adhesives and plastic clips. Phones are plateauing in power now where most people don’t need to upgrade the SOC or memory for the better part of 5-10 years. The only reason I ever really need to replace a phone is because the phone isn’t getting updates or the battery is cooked.
If done well enough, the screws could even allow modular backs and shells. You could mount your phone’s internals into a shell and lock it in with a different back. So people could have phones with a big ol ass on them and a big ol battery if they want. The SOC, memory, and storage could all be on one singular board with headers to all of the buttons and shit. Because it could be user serviceable you can even put the SIM card, SD card or whatever onboard and not have to deal with a water tight seal for those.
Boy do I have a phone for you!
Fairphone.com
I’m not sure the fairphone is even waterproof. Plus for what it offers it is way more costly than it needs to be. 20W charging, 3904 mAh battery, and for some reason no headphone jack.
Plus I’m American and I don’t think they even sell the thing over here but for nearly $700 it’d have to be a very convincing phone for anyone who isn’t thinking “I will fight climate change and ewaste by buying a phone” because you can buy a pixel 7a for $450 currently.
This solves both of your problems and means you have to buy a third as many phones.
Your example with the camera module is exactly what happened to the FP3. They released the FP3+ which featured a better camera and users of the original model could upgrade by just buying this module.
However this is definetly not the focus of Fairphone as a company as too many or regular new modules would introduce new e-waste again.
the fairphone 5 is rumored to come out this year, hopefully it will address those issues
Now let’s see if they actually follow through. I’m skeptical.
The Fairphone 2 actually had 7 years of security updates before the support was withdrawn, so it’s pretty likely the Fairphone 3 will last at least 7 years, maybe even longer.
Security updates are easier than full OS upgrades.
Its a fairphone, they should be fair enough.
Doesn’t Qualcomm stop providing drivers after 4 years?
Yeah, but Fairphone decided to make their own drivers after Qualcomm stopped with supporting the chips.
Have they actually done this, or did they just say that they will? It won’t be easy…
They actually made a custom operating system, because Qualcomm dropped support for the SoC. Source: https://www.fairphone.com/en/2021/03/25/android9-fairphone2/
They did it twice; once for the upgrade to Android 9 (took 18 months) and once for the upgrade to android 10 (took 10 months)
Considering all the comments I’ve seen about their phone basically falling apart it kind of sounds like you should just get an iPhone SE and factor in a battery replacement after 3 years. Day one updates for 5 years and I am severely doubtful you’ll have as many hardware problems if you don’t damage it. Better camera, too.
Yes, but 2019 was like 2 years ago so we’ll be fine!
… Right?
Will it really get Android 13? I see no trace of it on the release notes
It’s already released. So yes.
Do you have the link for the manual package install? My Ota doesn’t have it yet.
They stopped the OTA, since there are some issues with the fingerprint reader. No manual package so far as well. Explanations: https://forum.fairphone.com/t/fairphone-3-and-3-a13-fingerprint-sensor-update/97654
Thanks for the info!
Screen is too small for me, otherwise, I’d love to buy one :/
I wanted to get a Fairphone 4 until I saw I saw it didn’t have a headphone jack. Made me think all their “sustainable” mottos are just marketing.
Purism with their Librem phones took people’s money and didn’t send them the product so I didn’t want to chance it or support a company that does that.
So in the end I got a Pixel 7 instead and put Graphene OS on it. Not particularly happy but didn’t seem like there was a better choice.
Recently found out from a Louis Rossman video that the lead dev of Graphene has some mental health issues that don’t make him a very trustworthy individual. Supposedly he stepped down but he’s probably still contributing code.
Tl;dr: phones = bad
When I heard the Fairphone 4 didn’t have any waterproofing I decided to skip this version. My coworker is replacing their Samsung S10 just because the USB port is getting loose but they’re an avid boater. For some, water resistance really matters.
I would assume it’s very hard to build a phone that’s easily openable and at the same time waterproof :/
S5 was both.
Plus you could just use screws and a gasket.
The pixel also doesn’t have a headphone jack, so the fairphone is still better in that it has an ethical supply chain, and much more user repairable
Yup, I’m in the market for a new phone soon, and here’s my assessment of my options, in rough order of preference:
I’m probably going to get an older Pixel and a PinePhone Pro, and I’ll hack on the PinePhone until it does what I need. I don’t think I can add reliable suspend/resume, but I can probably build a couple small apps I need (i.e. a lemmy client, I’m already working on one), get a few Android apps working, and tune the OS a bit. Worst case scenario, it’s a fun hobby project.
Oneplus6 + postmarketos
It works really, really well.
https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/OnePlus_6_(oneplus-enchilada)
Any idea of what phone is best for postmarketos? I intend to use it as a daily driver and potentially submit patches for things like MMS (my family still uses it occasionally).
I guess, if money were no object, which phone offers the best postmarketos experience?
https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices
Probably the shift6, oneplus6 (or 6t), or librem 5.
pinephone pro - is defintely getting better as the software improves. The battery life is definitely something that holds it back i bought a keyboard battery case and it improved it however the edges of the case that connects to the phone have cracked over time and ive super glued it twice (near headphone port & opposite side near type c port.) When they crack it can cause a misalignment on the pins and not charge/keyboard doesnt function so i have to press back into the case(hence the glue to fix that). It will eventually get better for me to completely jump over.
Pixel phones degoogled - works great especially calyx or graphene os. I have always bought used but if i want change to happen i need to stop funding google indirectly through the used market with buying their phones. I am speaking for myself here.
Fairphone , Teracube, Murena - i eventually want to just buy from these moving forward. They hit 80% + of the checkboxes i need and improvements come quicker when this companys market improves especially when their direction aligns with what i want in a phone.
Tl;dr - i am letting my money do the talking on where i want phone improvement to occur.
I think my problem is that I don’t know where I want to see improvement. I see two options:
If the PinePhone had better software, I’d totally just go with that, but it’ll be rough the first couple of years.
Regarding best phone for post market os
https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices
Pinephone (not pro) seems to have the most support its on the main line.
Other than that under “community” & “phone” you would decide which phone in that list meets what you need and get peoples opinion on those specific phone with usage.
If you dont mind tinkering go pinephone however if you need it to work for various uses based on what you/friends/family use and compromises need to be done then go android.
Contribution can be bug reports, donations, assistance to other users ect. Anything is possible if you want.
I do where i can and its my choice; same with you, your choices are your own.
I think I’ll want the PinePhone Pro because repairability is important and it’ll probably be hard to find parts for outdated mass market phones. The original PinePhone is just too slow for me (from videos, not hands-on usage), and the PinePhone Pro probably wouldn’t be a huge downgrade from my current phone in terms of performance.
I didn’t see a big selection of used OnePlus 6s (OnePlus 6T seems available though), and the ones that are available are in poor shape (shattered back, burned in screen, some kind of damage, etc), so it’s not going to be a long term option most likely. The PinePhone should have decent parts support for a few years at least.
Sounds good,
I have a pinephone pro, while you can use use it touch. I recommend either the keyboard case(since it has a battery) or having a portable bluetooth keyboard of some sort. If configurartion is needed and there are issues with the onscreen keyboard(happens when i use certain apps like bitwarden) the keyboard helps ease that issue.
I still use stock manjaro plasma but if i jump i might go to sway/plasma arch/sway postmarket still checking put options though. I know i need waydroid to work so ill see what the doc support is on both.
Fairphone allows you to remove the battery, which, amongst other things, allows you to hard-reset the phone by just pulling the battery, which I did 2 times after owning the FP4 for 18 months. It also receives longer software support than most other phones. Negatives include a rattly top speaker above 50% volume, which was confirmed to be a design defect, the high price tag and, for me at least other small annoyances, such as the microphone volume being pretty low when on a call (not unusable, but you got to speak louder) and sometimes GPS issues, which either require patience or a restart.
An incredibly important detail of being able to remove the battery is that it enables both carrying extras for longer travel, and allows replacing and upgrading as it ages.
I have a samsung galaxy s5 and thanks to that i could straight up double the ontime with an aftermarket battery, which is comically large and came with a new backside lmao.
Owner of PinePhone(Pro), calls and alarm from sleep works.
Which distro and enviornment do you use and how is your battery experience?
I use ArchLinux with Plasma Mobile. Battery life is bad, but I bought the Pine keyboard which makes the battery life normal.
How long have you had it? Have any cracks devoloped as time has passed with the keyboard case?
PP about two years, PPP about six months. Yes, there is a small crack with the keyboard case with PPP.
I heard the original PinePhone works fine, but the Pro is still WIP. I want the extra performance from the Pro, otherwise I’d probably already have a PinePhone.
I guess I’ll find out when I get one though.
Not anymore, I have both and call and alarms from sleep works :)
Awesome, I’ll have to pick it up then. :)
His code contributions have always been high quality, and they’re audited by his peers. Its very unlikely malicious code would come from him, and even more unlikely it would make it through on to your phone.
While he’s certainly unhinged, it’s clear that he cares deeply for the project. I can’t see him doing anything intentionally malicious.
I really wish him the best, and I’m glad he stepped down. Much better for optics with him out of the way.
This might age horribly, but I never really understood the worry that a high-profile open source developer might ‘smuggle’ some dodgy code into a repo. Sure, it’s possible. Especially in large projects, but the risk/reward ratio is simply ridiculously bad and there are so many other/simpler ways out there a malicious actor could use to make a profit.
The risk is definitely not higher than the risk of some closed sorce dev smuggling something dodgy into a high profile project like e.g. Windows.
That said, I would trust an unknown git repo about as much as I would trust some exe I found on a random website.
That alone is worth a lot. Their endeavour for longevity is also great. I hope they get the attention they need.
By supporting the very manufacture to blame for short support times? Qualcomm is the root of the problem.
They don’t provide the bloody drivers for newer Android versions.
Manufacturers can only provide security updates after 2 major updates.
Are other Chipmakers better? It’s not like they could just have no chip at all…
Ok, than they are alright and green, very fair much phone
I wanted to get a Fairphone 4 until I saw I saw it didn’t have a headphone jack. Made me think all their “sustainable” mottos are just marketing.
Purism with their Librem phones took people’s money and didn’t send them the product so I didn’t want to chance it or support a company that does that.
So in the end I got a Pixel 7 instead and put Graphene OS on it. Not particularly happy but didn’t seem like there was a better choice.
Recently found out from a Louis Rossman video that the lead dev of Graphene has some mental health issues that don’t make him a very trustworthy individual. Supposedly he stepped down but he’s probably still contributing code.
Tl;dr: phones = bad
Better than any other Android, but less than the average iPhone. (The 2015 iPhone 6S had an update less than a month ago.)
it’s worth noting that while on android you can be like 4-5 major versions behind and still receive first class app support, on ios apple decides your phone no longer sparks joy and refuses you the next ios version, you’re slowly but surely going to lose all your apps. on the developer side, apple is extremely hostile to the practice of using older versions of their apis, they constantly push you toward newer apis that only work with the latest os and discourage using the older ones. some apps, like vlc, still manage to support older iphones, but it’s an ordeal and a half, so on the user side, not being on the latest ios isn’t really a proper experience.
the iphone 6s was actually the longest supported iphone, receiving the latest ios for 83 months after release. that’s just one month shy of fairphone’s 7 years. however, the average iphone only gets five years of real-world viability*, which is, yes, better than the 2-3 years android gets (usually with way more transparently planned obsolescence than apple does), but it’s not better than the 7 years of true viability that fairphone offers. they upgraded to android 13, that alone would last you until 2026 because of the way android apps are written.
*yes, you can use your iphone past that, hell, you can even use it after you stop getting security fixes, which tends to happen about 3 years later. but how is that different than using an old android device that’s also not receiving support?
Eh, you’re discounting the different development targets that the android and ios ecosystems use. From the jump almost all android developers are shooting for ancient versions of the api because no phone gets more than a few major versions. Ios developers are targeting the latest supported api so from the start it’s the latest thing.
But what’s in that api? It’s hard to develop optimized code for the gpu of android devices because it could be anything. Qualcomm stops sending out blobs after a few versions so there’s a big transition from first party blob bin libs to third party reverse engineered ones. iOS stuff is all just metal 1,2 or 3. So even the five year old phone is getting some level of gpu support. The metal api even has a fallback layer so if you wrote for 3 and the device only has a 2 gpu it’ll split the work and there’ll be some amount of acceleration. It’s like that one version of directx that broke hardware compatibility and had to be patched.
It’s also worth addressing what you said about apple pushing the latest api. It’s true, they do. They also encourage app developers to use the old apis to target security updates at platforms that aren’t getting major versions anymore.
That system is a lot more like Debian stable than some evil empire (although I’ve met ppl who think Debian stable is the evil empire).
Apple isn’t good. They’re out to get money just like everyone else. I think of em like Lexus. The users are pieces of shit, but the cars are prime rib Toyotas which is honestly pretty nice.
for me, the biggest issue with the fairphone is that they attempted to embrace everything: modular, sustainable, fair trade, etc
their competitors do none of that, so the quality/cost ratio turns out way off and that prevents their market share to grow sustainably (pun intended). the few people I know who use it, are the profile that is used to do sacrifices like that (like buying sustainable food at large markups, etc) but that’s not feasible or desirable to the vast majority
imo they should have picked a concept and perfected it - preferably the modular part which is the best thing you can do and brings tangible value to users. then move on to the other things… that’s a great cautionary tale about trying to be the good guys in capitalism, the system is not in their favour
For me the problem is the SoC they chose was too slow to be viable in 2018, let alone today.
“Too slow to be viable” is a bit strong. I’ve had a fairphone 4 for at least a year now and I’ve had no issues.
I want these people to try living with an ancient galaxy s5 for a couple months, browsing the web is borderline physically painful, it gets so hot that touching the screen almost burns you, and it has so little RAM that it struggles to keep two apps active at once.
Literally if i have music playing and i open the browser it usually kills the music in the background.
my current phone has the same soc and there are absolutely no issues there. will report back once i get my fairphone 4, hopefully tomorrow
if you’re not gaming on your phone (and if you are, 1. why, 2. get a steamdeck), i honestly don’t see how you would notice the soc. the only time i ever noticed that my phone was weak in the past five years (and my current phone is the only one that was low-mid-range, not actual low-end, save for an iphone se 3rd gen i had for half a year) was during zooming into an abnormally large upscaled r/place image. a phone’s performance is not really something that should be a consideration for the average user nowadays, anything can run basic apps that should have been websites and play back video. the mid-tier 2021 soc in the fairphone 4 definitely qualifies.
if the complaint is about the fairphone 3, then absolutely fair, i do remember that that one did manage to be hella slow. i wanted one back then and it was one of the major issues.
I do some light nuisance games on my phone, but I absolutely can tell the difference between the 888 in my phone and a 865, let alone the thing in the fairphone.
Sure, I’m spoiled, but I am not willing to give up 120hz at 120fps in my apps and instant loading in the ui nor will I ever get anything but oled again.
If you’re asking for a 5+ year commitment to the device, which is kind of what this repairability thing does, you either have to be at the leading edge or have an upgrade path.
Fairphone has neither, they’re starting at 2 years behind but want me to pay as if they’re a modern midrange.
i find their asking price fair tbh. yeah, it’s not competitive spec-wise, but it’s what they have to do to keep up their model. they’re not big enough to make their own components like screens or have someone make a screen just for them, so they need to find components that will be available for seven years. fair trade materials are also more expensive because all that slave labor and shit does give the not so fair alternatives an edge in the market. the r&d cost for a small phone manufacturer is also spread across fewer units, components also cost more when you’re ordering them in smaller amounts, supporting the phone for seven years has its associated costs (on top of not having your customers buy phones 2-3x more frequently), and the sustainable business model does also have overhead compared to riding the razor on the stock market or being VC-funded.
the fairphone is not cheap, but if you care about what they do, care about actually owning your phone (both in terms of rooting and os access, and in terms of hardware access and repairability), and would like to be able to use it for a long time, this is just what it takes. if apple or samsung or google made a fairphone, it would cost less due to their scale, but it would still cost more than the phone you have with the 888. but if you can feel a single-gen upgrade there, you’d likely want to upgrade at a higher frequency anyway.
from what i’ve seen, some people do use phones the way you do, but a lot of people only swap phones when needed. for them, a fairphone that they can keep for 5-7 years and keep alive even if something happens to it could still be cheaper than the 2-3 other phones they’d need over the same period of time.
Slide in a 3 here just cause termux x11 + box64droid is really coming along well and I want to be able to play all my games in my phone lol. Especially cause where I work has a lot of down time, but obviously not room for a full pc
Almost any modern SoC can decode 1080p60 HEVC in real-time. That part is handled in dedicated hardware; the speed of the CPU or GPU next to it does not matter.
Thank God I referred to that dedicated hardware by name eh? Did some research and the fair phone supports hvec at 8 bit, not 10.
Personally that looks a bit washed out, and the battery wouldn’t hold up too well - so it’d be a pass for me
Edit: the fair phone 4 would fair (lol) a lot better though
You did not specify that you need a 10-bit capable decoder. Given that the screen is 8-bit, that would be kind of unusual to have outside of niche applications such as this one.
8 vs. 10 bit shouldn’t make the image look better outside of toning down banding artefacts. There might be an indirect colour transformation taking place here.
Reading through the comments, almost everyone missed the elephant in the room. The big problem with long term support is not on the phone or chip manufacturers.
…::: It’s GOOGLE! :::… Just compare the history of Android with Windows. Windows 10 is still supported for another 2 years, yet it was released in mid 2015. Every Windows 10 capable device is still receiving updates till then.
Contrast that with Android. Android 6.0 came out in October 2015. Yet very few devices from that era are supportable today. Why? A large part of that is based on Google’s never ending -> breaking changes <- and random new requirements that make older devices incompatible.
This got me personally when I bought a Sony Z3 with the intention of having a “future proof” phone. It was openly advertised as being a dev device for Android 7, so much so that a preview release was downloadable for it.
Only for Google to drop a new requirement for the GPU to have minimum OpenGL ES 3.1, while the GPU only had the instructions for 3.0. WTF?! I might add, the specification for 3.1 was only released to the public 2 years prior.
I seriously hope that some alternative to Android will establish itself again. We had Windows phone, which Microsoft utterly butchered. IOS is not an alternative as that’s tied to one manufacturer.
i use e/os, that replaces like everything google has like the google micro services with something else. Some apps, newer ones with more trackers, tend to break but it supports some phones from 2013. I suggest taking a look when you have phones that are not supported anymore
It seems to support Sony Xperia Z3
https://doc.e.foundation/devices
The one thing I wish google never did was introduce SafetyNet without enabling us a way to essentially say “I modified my own phone, so let me use my damn banking and tap-to-pay apps without issue” and reenable it.
In fact they’ve actively made safetynet more invasive by adding CTS profile matching alsongside basic attestation, with a system for telling what phones are compatible with the new profile matching so you can’t force disable it.
If they never added that I could’ve bypassed basic attestation and gotten google wallet back. But no. The most I can get back is banking and Pokemon GO. But there’s still a risk one of them will decide to use CTS and therefore making it impossible to use that app on my current phone, all in the name of “security”
It’s my phone, stop trying to smother my attempts to do what I want with it!
I’m still in mourning over the Ubuntu phone OS :(
Yup. While I have a sceptical opinion of Ubuntu, it did find it sad that it didn’t gain any traction. A possible contender is still Tizen OS. It’s essentially an entire OS build around Chromium, while not owned by Google. Samsung use that a lot in their smart TVs.
Sure, it’s not as performant as running native Android.
But boy have we seen some massive improvements in browser tech and performance increases on mobile devices. Developing web-applications is certainly a ton easier than native Android and IOS. Wrapper toolchains like React Native aren’t helping much.
Unless you really need calls to some device APIs, there isn’t too much left that a Browser can’t do compared to what the native OS permits. I’ve been developing web-apps for robots and also developed equivalent native apps in Android. In the browser you now have access to some impressive 3d capabilities, which are extending further (BabylonJS). You’ve got the ability to interact with files via tool-chains that are not too dissimilar to what you see in native Android (Google has been clamping down file-system access to app devs quite heavily in recent releases). You can also gain decent API access to the devices battery and GPS status. Add some nifty UI libraries and you can provide a more pleasant experience, faster than with an actual native app. Even video streaming works remarkably well since you can interact with multiple cameras, microphones and even the screen (Google Meet does that).
It’s now that we’re seeing PWAs (progressive web app) to gain traction. I’m using Voyager for Lemmy, which works lovely in Windows and my phone.
In the browser you only miss on some native capabilities on some hardware component and a few legacy systems. Mainly serial communication and native UDP support. Although the last one will see some more improvements with HTTP3, which is gaining traction.
I had the Fairphone 2 and I loved it. It was like Lemmy, you never really knew if it would work the next morning but the community was great.
After replacing the battery once, without any tools whatsoever, and upgrading the camera, with a small screwdriver, it lasted for more than five years.
Since then, I’ve had a company phone but when it breaks, I will check out Fairphone first. Of course there is no such thing as a sustainable, or “fair” phone, but at least in 2016, this was often discussed in their trancparacy reports? The official forum was also very aware. Some raw materials where sourced to the exact mine, others thei openly said they couldn’t control at the time.
Additionally, they offered the phone with root acces so trying out alternative os was never any problem. It’s the closest Ive ever been to a Google free life.
Is the company even 7 yrs old? Will they be here in another 7?
https://www.fairphone.com/en/about/about-us/?ref=footer
10 years old and greater than ever.
Also the Fairphone 3 is already 4 years old. So they only need to “be here” another 3 years.
I want to love my FP3 but it loves to crap out by being slow or just crash prone. I replaced my camera because it accumulated dust behind the lense, because it is replacable.
… still wouldn’t buy any other phone, it works well enough in all aspects and is a bit like the slightly crappy car you still love <3 Next one will be a FP5 :)
Will this mean that GrapheneOS can finally support it?
Supported by calyxos though.
Looks like they’re not doing that any time soon since Fairphones don’t meet their minimum requirements. See: https://www.reddit.com/r/GrapheneOS/comments/10b5x4n/has_anyone_managed_to_install_grapheneos_on_a/
@dl007 Nice. Still for the price I could get a really better phone. They need to lower the price.
But if you’re getting a better phone much more frequently, then you’re winding up spending more and having a much higher environmental/social impact.
@pingveno That’s true, but still, most people are thinking like me unfortunately. Fairphone needs to find a way to make the phone more appealing to the masses. If they success and people start addopting it, competitors would have to adapt. I don’t know if I’m making sense, just looking at it from a John Doe perspective.
What do you mean lower the price? It’s Fairphone, meaning, Fairtrade and all that. You’re supposed to pay more.
@Squiglet Right XD lmao