INFO!!! fairphone DOES SUPPORT CUSTOM ROMS!!!
i like the idea of a fairphone. i dun wana buy one tho - if it doesn hav the features i need/wan.
if fairphone had all dis stuff - it would hav a genuine moat, besides the sustainability stff-
alternative image link (blahaj zone)
The back accessories are pretty neat. I like the finger loop, and I’m pretty sure they’ve published the files for making your own 3D printed versions of the backplate.
“But hotswappable battery”
Yeah, I guess missing that feature is bit unfortunate, but the reasoning of being able to offer more capacity in the (soft case?) design makes sense. The hardcase of the hotswap battery reduces internal capacity. And it’s still easily replaceable enough when the time does come.Custom ROMs I’ve already seen mentioned elsewhere, them offering to ship you e/OS/ directly from their store should be proof enough of their commitment.
The “moments” slider is (somewhat) programmable. As alternatives to Moments they offer DND, Flight Mode, Torch, Dark/Light mode, and battery saver.
It may not offer a dual SIM tray, but it does offer dual SIM through the use of eSIMs. Which, not ideal, but it’s there.
The things I personally miss on the FP6 are HD haptics, the basic rumble motor has brought me back in time in a way I would not have preferred. Speaker quality could be better too. As could the cameras, but those were a sacrifice I was prepared to make.
My bigger complaints are about stock Android itself; Samsung offers so many nice tools to customise the phone to your liking. Base Android is so limited by comparison. And Samsung Gallery is just the best.
Yes, and missing powerful flagship CPUs.
Features ‘people’ want? Like being able to easily use the device, have a decent battery life, a good set of apps, built in security and not having to care AT ALL about most of things mentioned in that meme?
I don’t get what’s mentioned either. Fairphone literally partners with Murena /e/OS, other ROMs are also flashable on the device. What “people” want is to buy and be happy though, and their partnership does just that for at least the EU.
The only thing that’s both a fair argument and something I commonly hear from average users is that a 3.5mm audio jack indeed would be nice. By now USB-C to 3.5mm cables with built-in DAC (which also work on any PC, very handy) are available for less than 10€ though, so it’s absolutely more of a “nice to have” thing.
This post really resonates with me and I’ve already said my piece about jack removal and BT buds arriving at the same time by FP.
The realization I came to is that FP is not an enthusiast brand and doesn’t want to be; it is not the Framework of phones.
They cater to the broadest market segment, they want to be the repairable Samsung, rather. And it shows.
Is there any brand that does want to be the Framework of phones?
Xiaomi and OnePlus used to be. Repairability, cheap(er), good specs, reliable. Now Xiaomis are stupidly unreliable and practically not bl-unlockable and OnePlus is starting to block bl unlocking in some regions, they don’t allow avb-yellow and are expensive as shit. Nowy maybe nothing if we ignore the light bullshit.
They were able to capture various national markets by competing on being favorable to consumer wants, now that they have a strong foothold, or straight up control whole markets, they get to juice their profits.
Used to have a OnePlus Nord. Broke the screen 3 years after the phone released and there were no replacement parts anywhere, besides a single AliExpress seller. It didn’t make things better that they released multiple versions of the same model, most, if not all, had incompatible screens.
The screen protectors for both Nord and 8T were out of stock less than a year after the phones were released, never to be seen again.
I’ve recently come across this: https://www.shift.eco/en/shiftphone-8/. Unfortunately also no headphone jack… But when my current phone breaks this might be the phone to get, for me at least.
Damn, the is so sick… except for the missing jack. What a bummer :(
Interesting. Any idea how compatible it would be with US mobile networks? I’m currently using Mint/T-Mobile (not Verizon, which is notoriously incompatible) but every time I’ve found an EU phone that looks appealing in the past compatibility was always a possible concern so I never got any.
I don’t speak German and after some searching I am still not sure. Most of the results are full of speculative/preview type info and focused on performance.
I think I’ve heard them being fully compatible (would be surprised if they weren’t), but I might be wrong.
TLDR - focus on features people want.
You think people don’t want accessories…?
naw- i agree, peeps want accessories. i was just mad that they made the backplate accessorie so that even the basic bavkplate has screws on the back… which triggers somthin evil in me - iduno-
If people, not only lemmy’s people and a small minority care about the jack people would buy phones with jacks, there are good options but very few people do.
Most people actually like and prefere bluethooth.
Same for ROMs, when was the last time you said “wow, I sure miss custom roms” and the whole room went “meeetooo”. Hell, most people don’t even know what a custom rom is.
This is not what “the people want” is “what lemmy thinks everyone ones, but is actually only them circle jerking”.
Downvote me to hell, but is the truth.
Headphone jacks are less important to me than other features but that doesn’t mean I don’t want one. I have to use a stupid USB to headphone adapter thingy to use my headphones and I cant charge it while I do, which yes, is a thing I wanted to do a few times.
Well i know a lot of people irl who miss the headphone jack and none are lemmy users and not all are nerds
I know a lot of people who don’t, so? Anecdotal information.
We don’t have independant studies in this debate afaik sor anecdotal info is relevant here
Alright. I know no one outside of lemmy who cares about the jack, you do. Where does that leave us?
Well, some people care about it then
i said in the post “to get me interested”, not “to get the majority of people interested”.
It says clearly down to the right “Focus on features people want”.
I straight up refuse to ever buy bt headphones. I never really had a desire to use them, and having them as the only option pisses off some deep part of my soul that hates the power being exerted for such a selfish reason.
I just don’t listen to audio on my phone without playing it through a wireless speaker, or playing it through the built in speaker(in private of course). I honestly don’t miss it, instead finding other ways to pass the time around other people.
hates the power being exerted for such a selfish reason.
I just don’t listen to audio on my phone without playing it through a wireless speaker, or playing it through the built in speaker.
You do realize that playing music on anything but a tiny speaker requires more power than BT+headphones? Even playing it loud in the built-in speakers can be note wasteful than later versions of Bluetooth.
Bluetooth transmission power costs are insignificant. But you don’t need to justify preferring the option to have regular wired earbuds on a phone.
well played
As a firm believer in wired headphones: you can buy an adapter to plug your 3.5mm in the USB-C. IMO it’s not ideal, but they’re small pieces and you can keep them connected to your headphones at all times, so you don’t even have to think about bringing them with you.
Personally, I made a 3.5mm jack non-negotiable for my phone, which severely limited my options. Next time I’ll probably have to get an adapter… :(
I’ve been forced to resort to them since it seems pin on my power port that handles audio signal has failed.
I hate playing stuff I’m listening to on speakers, even in private, I just always feel like someone else might be around, and I don’t want to annoy them, or even worse, have them judge me. It just makes me uncomfortable.
What I want from fairphone:
- Take security and long-term support seriously
I would add proper Linux mainline support here.
That would allow other non-android options as well, and makes it be supported for the near future. And will likely have a network effect, allowing other phones with similar hardware to be supported as well.
Mainline Linux support is a chipset feature, the manufacturer has little control over it. And even then, you have manufacturers like Mediatek that theoretically have full mainline support, but the bootloader is totally locked and no custom ROMs exist.
Most mainlining effort is financed by the people that build products with it, not the chipset vendors. Chipset vendors are only interested in providing a working demo application, not much more. If someone promises 8 years maintenance, they could also in parallel work on mainline support, so that it can continue to be supported.
About locked bootloaders, sure you need to be able to unlock them as well, but that often also is a decision of the product manufacturers, not the chipset vendors.
If a manufacturer wants to lock the bootloader, they can, true. But sometimes, you have phones in the same family where the Qualcomm chipset supports unlocking and the Mediatek one doesn’t. E.g. Xiaomi before they restricted unlocking further.
Don’t mistake correleation and causation. I don’t know the specifics, but bootloaders are software and socs are hardware. The bootloaders keys are fused into the hardware, so that only that bootloaders can boot. When you buy a soc, no keys are fused in, this happens at the manufacturer factory deployment process. The bootloaders can then decide if the device supports an ‘unlocked’ state, and displays the warnings if unlocked. The bootloaders are build and configured by the manufacturer. However, the soc vendors will give the product vendors a SDK containing tested sources and configuration for their soc.
Here is what could explain your observation, manufacturer is lazy and doesn’t care to change the default configuration of the bootloader. And the default configuration of Mediatek and Qualcomm SDKs are different.
There is a semi-recent thread about Mediatek at https://www.reddit.com/r/PocoPhones/comments/1cuwkm0/lies_about_mediatek/ where it started that their source code is incomplete, they don’t provide it at all. Hence no manufacturer can mainline it. And this is one of the reasons custom ROM development for them is so slow compared to Qualcomm SOCs.
Yes, as your link states, it is the product manufacturers responsibility to release the code. And if they don’t have it, they can sue Mediatek.
But very likely have access to the source, otherwise they couldn’t adapt the kernel & co. to their boards. Soc is just one part of the whole board, full of other components that need kernel configurations…
But anyway, this thread it about the kernel, we talked about the bootloader and why it cannot be unlocked, which is a separate issue.
Manufacturer needs access to the bootloader to put their Android key for the image, which contains their special apps, in place. So they have sources. To be able to flash a different bootloader, they need to be able to fuse the bootloader key into the SOC, so they have a unlocked soc. So they have everything to offer unlockable bootloaders, if they care for it.
Yeah sorry, I kind of went on a tangent.
Regarding the source, I was under the impression that manufacturers get some kind of devkit for the SoC that works against a given kernel version (one of the LTS ones Android usually uses) and binary drivers for the non-open parts. One could sue the manufacturer after buying a phone and demand release of the source, but this won’t hit meditated because the vendors won’t go after them or their license gets terminated. Legally difficult but similar to the grsecurity situation: yeah you have rights, but if you exercise them, we choose not to do business with you anymore.
Shameful situation and I think Google wanted to get out of this legal area when they developed Fuchsia as this concept would solve technical and legal issues for manufacturers.
I’m not sure where this discussion stemmed from because from my knowledge, the Fairphone does allow custom ROMs, though you lose some boot security functionality? I didn’t read too much into it yet
Not sure I get the point of dual Sims when esims are a thing.
ESims (at least on GrapheneOs) require google play services
That’s a pretty good reason, I wasn’t aware. Although looking at the docs it appears you only need it to add the esim not to use the esim so you can install google play install the esim and then remove it again.
If it requires a connection to google play, then that rather defeats the purpose of completely removing google from a device.
Honestly, I still like what they do have. Not having to deal with a service center and being able to easily replace my own battery or charging port when something goes tits up.
But it does really sting that there just isn’t any phone that comes close to approaching what I want.
Honestly I don’t even really care about having a flagship level SOC. I don’t need a processor that can run more sophisticated programs. So long as it loads web pages and plays media, at most runs a doc like program, I’m quite happy.
But given that my main use case is media, I’d really like to have something where I can listen to stuff, not using speakers, not having to worry about the charge on a Bluetooth device, and be able to have my phone charging at the same time. Like, there are those splitter dongles but I’ve found them to be just such a head ache to use, inconsistent in their function, and so easy to lose or break.
Also the fact that FP are kind of hard to get where I live is annoying, but, that’s hardly the fault of FP.
I know this is a shitty ask (and impossible atm), but like a 1" periscope camera (or any decent zoom snapper) for me pls :(.
That and actual Linux.
Same here, I can’t go back to carrying a camera everywhere, that’s dangerous
I just want a home button :(
Settings -> System -> Gestures -> Navigation
I couldnt get used to gestures either. Much prefer actual buttons for that. Thankfully it’s customisable.
but I want a phone with a real button you can press :<
My main issue with the Fairphone is price. Kinda expensive, innit? I mean, I don’t know how much is too much when it comes to prices. When I got my current phone, company I was working at at the time gave me 200 monies discount on a phone at a select online platform / store. So mine, slightly above 200, came out almost free of charge on my end. And 200 was also the price my dad advised my sister looking into for a new phone. So when I decided “let me peek that Fairphone”, it’s like, damn. 500? 600? (I don’t remember the price, but I think it was something like that).
Maybe it pays for itself in the long run, if it indeed lasts longer (assuming you don’t upgrade needlessly)
It is also way more expensive because they pay a decent wage to the factory workers and use more environmently friendly methods of extracting materials.
Yeah, I can see that. Sucks that the best stuff usually costs more, whereas the cheap garbage* tends to be… well… cheaper.
Well, phones used to be max 300€ in 2017-18. Now they’re min 300 to be actually usable in ~5 years. So the actual reason is as always capitalism (and slight inflation).
I would like a lower end option from them, but even that would probably be more expensive than normal because they’re not a huge company and aren’t squeezing margins on assembly and supply for ethical reasons.
500 for a phone you can use for 6-8 years is more than enough. Fairphone is going to fail because nobody is financially literate enough to realise how better off they’ll be. Even more so when a screen breaks or the charging port stops working.
Ps been using resolable boots for years, I have the same chef knife for ten years, a cast iron pan for 15y. My motto is to always buy the product that is going to save me money in the long term, not until the next paycheck
Been using Fairphone 5 with /e/OS and I’m fully content with it. I’m sure your critique is fair, and they could do better on several fronts. Still I’m very happy to support this company, and I’ve not seen anything on the market that seems to do better overall than fairphone, according to what I value that is. It feels good to contribute to ‘an alternative’. I can’t help but see regular smartphones as a disease that try to colonize your brain and reduce you to a remote-controlled zombie. I don’t feel that way with the Fairphone. I see most of it’s limitations as a blessing in disguise. None of this is to refute anything you’re saying, it’s just trying to balance it out with some genuine love for Fairphone. :)
