Fairphone 3 gets 7 years of updates, besting every other Android OEM

Fairphone proves the usual excuses for ending Android support aren't valid.

That alone is worth a lot. Their endeavour for longevity is also great. I hope they get the attention they need.

I bought my Fairphone 3 at the start of 2020. I love it. I love the fact I can dissamble it with the provided screwdriver in two minutes.

I love that I can buy replacement parts for it if anything breaks without having to get some kind of expensive repair from Apple or Samsung. Ive replaced the charging port on this phone and I'll be replacing the battery soon too. Giving people the ability to fix and maintain their own devices is fantastic.

I am hoping to get a decade out of this device and I'm nearing 4 years with no complaints so far. I'm a little bit dissapointed they got rid of the headphone jack on the Fairphone 4. While you can get adapters etc, it shouldn't be necessary imo. That alone is my biggest gripe with that device. Aside from that though, they make great devices and I highly reccomend them

This is really good to hear. The worst thing about mid range android phones is the lack of future software support. Even flagship androids aren’t anything to write home about. As much as people like shitting on apple, they support their devices for quite a while compared to other manufacturers.

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

I'm not really conviced by fairphone. They claim they have an ethical and ecological supply chain / manufacturing but there is very little on their website to support that claim. The phone is made in China like any other smartphone. The "Fairtrade Gold" label doesn't mean Gold-rank fairtrade materials, it means that only the actual gold that's inside the phone has the fairtrade label. The amount of gold in a phone is ridiculously small and doesn't represent the major part of the phone's emissions footprint. They have another label which name I can't remember but I looked it up and the terms are very vague. After all the electronic components are still electronic components : copper wires made from copper, qualcomm CPU made in the same qualcomm factory, etc. I don't think a label changes that.

All in all I don't think that buying a brand new, 580 € smartphone with subpar performance is a good move if you care about the environment. Buying a used phone sounds like a much better option to me : cheaper, better performance, probably not as serviceable BUT it's already living a second life anyways.

I tried to be enthusiatic but FP looks way too much like a cash grab aimed at people that care about the environment

I guess having only one phone every year makes it immensely easier to support than having multiple models at every price range every year. Apple does it, why couldn't Android phone manufacturers do it?

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 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.

From what I heard many Fairphone 3s didn't even survive that long. Quality, audio quality and performance all seem to be pretty bad. That combined with its very high price point kinda defeats the point of it. The idea is great, but the execution isn't.

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

Updates on a phone is a important topic. When i choose a smartphone i look for software support period. But i think software updates sometimes make graphical improvements and that causes performance decrease. Or the company wants to slow that thing down. Nowadays you can't see the difference.

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 :)

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.

That is amazing! I had a Fairphone 1 and used it until the 'on' button broke which was about the only thing not available from the parts store. Now I have a Fairphone 3, have had it for a few years now. I might get the camera module upgrade as I still have an old one and it's the only disappointing thing about the phone. I've been looking forward to fixing my phone because the modular design they made is amazing, but absolutely nothing has broken yet in my 3 years of use!

It is a valid reason from the OEMs because they have to rely on their chip manufacturers for security updates. It's literally out of their control to do updates that long except when it comes to the OS.

Bring it to Canada!

Now let’s see if they actually follow through. I’m skeptical.

It's nice. For me.

I wouldn't recommend it to anyone though. People who know how to handle the issues (i.e. how to replace the stock OS - it sucks, but /e/OS is okay) don't need my recommendation.

For most people it's just a pretty expensive mid-range-specced phone.

Will this mean that GrapheneOS can finally support it?

This is awesome, but makes me salty. When I first heard about them I was stoked and wanted one. But at the time they weren't selling in the US. I needed a new phone so I caved and went with Samsung for the s23. And recently they announced they'd be selling to the US. This is great but hind sight is 20/20...

How do you share post ? I wanted to tell my friends about this, there is no share button in jerboa

Promises, promises...

Here's hoping they're still around in 7 years.

Do those 7 years of updates come at a steady clip for the Android security patches as Google and Samsung mostly do it, or is it a patch here and there with massive swaths of time with no patches more like Motorola?

The former is progress, the latter is functionally not much better than every other OEM.

Will it really get Android 13? I see no trace of it on the release notes

Better than any other Android, but less than the average iPhone. (The 2015 iPhone 6S had an update less than a month ago.)

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

Screen is too small for me, otherwise, I'd love to buy one :/

Is the company even 7 yrs old? Will they be here in another 7?

@dl007 Nice. Still for the price I could get a really better phone. They need to lower the price.

This is commendable, but is 7 years really necessary? I think 5 years is plenty long before phones get outdated.