The Fairphone 5 price has been dropped to €499. The phone is designed to be the most advanced environmentally friendly smartphone.

I agree that nobody should trust any corpo, including Apple, but there's nuance to that story that never gets mentioned in these discussions.

Apple used to slow down devices whose batteries were starting to fail, in order to reduce the likelihood that your device suddenly turns off before the battery reads as empty. Simply put, if the battery couldn't guarantee a certain power output down until empty, they'd throttle the CPU.

The notably scummy part here is that they didn't tell users, and it wasn't an option you could change. To make up for it, they had a cheap battery replacement program for several years and informed users about the issue, and I believe it's optional now?

This was also several years before other manufacturers started offering OS support timelines comparable to Apple's. Apple still let you update a 6 year old iPhone when others were doing 3 years for flagships. Fairphone of course was an exception.

You should still get a Fairphone if it meets your actual needs or a Pixel if you need GrapheneOS, but if you're a non technical user who actually can make the most of a flagship, I'd recommend an iPhone over Samsung (just as expensive as Apple and these are the guys who put ads in TV UI nowadays) or Google (questionable stability with the Tensor chips in some iterations) at least. 5 years ago I'd recommend OnePlus, but those days are over. The stock ROM is now ass. I keep my old 7 pro around to play Real Racing 3 and with a custom rom I'm like 3 android versions beyond OEM support and it's actually super smooth. But I won't recommend it to a non techy user.

PS: I'm an Apple user, but not a diehard fan boy. I make comments explaining or defending them often because I feel Apple gets way more flak than their competitors who are usually equally scummy.

I use Arch and am fairly familiar with a terminal.

Avoid their Easy Installer, it just doesn't work. And pay a lot of attention to the anti downgrade feature of the Bootloader. It's described in their guide for the FP4.

Outside of that, just follow the guide, it was pretty straightforward.

It was honestly way more work to backup everything I had on the phone...

For how long did you had the FP3+? How much did it costs?

I currently have the Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 Pro and bought it for 250€. Ofcourse I'm awear that it's a Chinese phone but I bought it when I didn't know any better. This year it will be 5 or 6 years old but still works for the daily needs and I like to use things till the break or aren't really useable anymore.

So I'm curious how much yours had cost and for how long you used it. Also some other questions:

1. How much do you use the phone?
2. How long does one charged battery lasts?

If you don't feel comfortable with sharing information don't answer the question but I would be interested as I maybe want my next phone to be a Fairphone too.

I am honestly willing to have patience and cut some slack to someone that I feel is working with me, whereas I have zero patience for companies who tries to bullshit me all the time.

To put it differently, I prefer to put in some effort to use my tech, then to put in effort to defend myself from my tech. So that's my bias.

Commenting more in detail.

There have been bugs that have come and gone. Once, two years ago, they screwed up real bad and for a month the phone would randomly reboot a couple times a week. That sucked, until it got fixes. Otherwise it seemed just fine. The occasional issue was no worse than the Huawei I had two phones ago, and people seemed to think those were fine.

The camera was truly awful, but now after an update it's also OK. Not amazing, not wowing anybody, but just fine. My wife's Pixel 8a in the meantime keeps screwing up the color balance of the pictures so not all that shines is gold.

When I had the stock rom I used Android Auto on several cars, and all of them have been fine, but it's only been Volkswagens (and Skoda, Seat etc.) and one Opel, my sample is biased. With /e/OS (which I have since January) I'm actually very happy that Android Auto works at all, so far I only tried in my car.

I have 256GB of flash and that seems plenty. I honestly have no idea how anyone fills that up, but if it ever happens I can indeed add a SD card. Also it's dual SIM which, for somebody who moved around Europe a bit, is very very handy.

I replaced the stock apps with better ones from fdroid and a friend's car just doesn't seem to like Android Auto from any phone, so maybe the bugs aren't with the phone?

I don't use Android Auto either (because it's 99.9% Google), but I know my car (Merc A220) just sometimes won't connect to my Fairphone over bluetooth... and it's definitely the car. Literally pull over, get out of the car, lock it... unlock it, get back in and bluetooth connects again. Not touched the phone... ffs

Ah that sucks! What kind of issues did she have?

I'm obviously one person, so not a good sample, but I've had F4 with stock android for about 3 uears and haven't seen any bugs yet, even with android auto.

As to the camera, I'd agree it's "fine" but if you ignore the repairability and ethical supply chain angle, you can definitely get a much better camera for the same price range.

They're OK. They used to suck ass on a cosmic level, until a firmware update made it actually just fine.

Noone is going to be amazed, but they're fine.

My wife has a Pixel 8 with stock firmware which is supposed to be oh-so-great as a camera...

But the whatever built in AI Google put in that thing keeps messing with the colours worse than a Netflix show. So half the times I end up prefering the pictures I take.

According to Fairphone the cameras in the FP5 are actually much better, but I have yet to see an FP5 in the wild so...

You mean Murena?

That's cool. At least its degoogled. GOS's security is a must for me though, after using it I don't ever want to go without. But I'm glad fairPhone is offering alternatives.

I get the reason gOS only supports the pixel, its the most secure hardware. Would never want them to water down their security for anything. I would very much like fairPhone to meet or exceed gOS security demands. That way they could be paired together to achieve a true completely degoogled secure phone.

yeah just postmarketOS.

Someones working on porting SailfishOS: https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/sailfish-os-for-fairphones-devices/21516/76

The Fairphone 4 is fully supported by Ubuntu touch though (and Fairphone5 is in the works) : https://devices.ubuntu-touch.io/device/fp4/

I would assume so, Its probably only broken when using a linux distro like postmarket and not the stock android it comes with.

I hoped this was a linux phone where all the features just worked but sadly not.

I ended up drawing my vision of economy of scale

Using public keys for verification and beinh severly late on security updates, yeah not good