Fairphone is now officially available in the United States
fairphone.com322 points by Vinnl 8 hours ago
322 points by Vinnl 8 hours ago
"[GrapheneOS] lost most interest in that hardware due to the poor way privacy, security, updates and marketing based on these things has been handled."
https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/28825-is-there-any-chance-o...
I'm sure their concerns are valid but just because GrapheneOS don't consider the Fairphone to meet their standards for security doesn't mean it is not worth considering for other people who may have different priorities. Fairphones have certain advantages over Pixels such as better repairability and more ethically sourced labour/components. IMO it's good to see the Fairphone do well (and I hope GrapheneOS's partnership with Motorola also goes well).
Unfortunately it looks like it's not just a issue of missing hardware security features:
> Their partnership with Murena along with promoting it themselves with misleading marketing means no possibility of working with us.
I want to like GrapheneOS, but the pettiness of its leadership is a real problem for the long term prospect of the project.
Is it pettiness or just sticking to their morals? Murena, as they mentioned, forwards data to OpenAI which is against pretty much everything Graphene stands for.
I think it's absolutely pettiness at this point, on both sides. I've lost track of the number of times I've seen a post about /e/OS on Mastodon with someone in the replies ranting about how everyone should use Graphene instead. It reminds me of the old joke about vegans.
GrapheneOS and /e/OS' goals are different - the former is about security tightening and the latter is about deGoogling. They just had a public falling out and refuse to let it go.
And yet GrapheneOS is better at everything that /e/ claims.
Not at running on sustainably produced, repairable hardware ;)
(Wish it was though.)
You can buy used Pixels, e.g. from 8a up. I'd claim that this is much more ecological than buying a new Fairphone. I suppose that a Pixel is of a higher quality and has less defects than a Fairphone (which changed the ODM several times). --
This said, I would never use /e/ and Murena as I read too many things I don't like.
You are trusting that your used Pixel doesn't have some non-removable rootkit installed... depending on source, and if that's even possible I don't know but I am suspect of random used hardware on FB or eBay.
Only for one voice to text feature which is completely optional to use and can be replaced with something else.
As another commenter mentioned, this voice to text feature is now an offline feature and no longer sends data outside the device.
As another note, this Fairphone can be purchased without /e/OS at all. It’s now being sold in the US without Murena being involved at all.
I was not aware of Murena forwarding data to OpenAI. I'm sympathetic to Murena and their partnership with e/OS/. I looked up what it is about. /e/OS 3 uses OpenAI for Voice to Text. This is the statement where they explain this:
> To implement this approach, we chose to use the OpenAI gpt-4 transcribe API that has been designed for this purpose, is cost-effective and efficient.
https://community.e.foundation/t/clarification-about-voice-t...
On my /e/OS phone, I've installed Whisper+ voice input and disabled 'Murena Voice to Text'. I never use this features.
In the current version of /e/OS, Voice to Text runs offline.
> The earlier Voice to Text was a Premium-only, online feature: it streamed your speech to a third-party AI transcription service [...] The new Voice to Text is free, offline and on-device
> Murena, as they mentioned, forwards data to OpenAI which is against pretty much everything Graphene stands for.
How? In what way? Source?
June 2025
Someone else shared the up to date info about this feature: https://doc.e.foundation/os/apps/voice-to-text
> The earlier Voice to Text was a Premium-only, online feature: it streamed your speech to a third-party AI transcription service through an anonymising proxy, so it required a Murena Workspace Premium subscription and an internet connection.
> The new Voice to Text is free, offline and on-device
>I want to like GrapheneOS, but the pettiness of its leadership is a real problem
I used to feel a bit similarly. But I've since realized they are one of the very few software projects that actually make sensible privacy and security choices.
That does not seem like pettiness to me. That seems like a very good reason to not work with someone.
Because they used to have one feature that they’ve since replaced with an offline feature?
The Graphene devs can be a bit obsessive about security, but with a starting price above $600, I think the average user is probably better off with a Pixel 10a bought on sale closer to $300. The stock Fairphone OS seems to include Google services, which is kind of surprising and at odds with the focus on user control and all that.
Here's a post with more specific allegations:
https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/24134-devices-lacking-stand...
i dont get it, they are comparing eOS to graphene, not talking about the hardware.
this would be like grapheneOS not using pixel because the stock android that ships with it does not respect privacy.
am i missing something?
You still need to rely on the OEM to properly configure the bootloader, not leak the keys, and provide updated vendor blobs.
Maybe I did not dig deep enough, but I did not see concrete claims that fairphone doesn't do this on either of the linked conversations? It was all suspicion dropped on murena and e/os, and some bad marketing by fairphone?
Fairphone also had the publicly available test key flagged as trusted by the boot loader at one point, which probably discourages projects like GOS, since it makes it harder to trust the hardware to not be a weak link in security.
One thing in the story is that the SPU - the secure enclave on Qualcomm chips that is separate from just running on TrustZone on the main processor - is only available on Snapdragon 8 and X tier products. It's market segmented away from 7 series and below.
Also, I think Qualcomm has only started supporting MTE on Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. Older and cheaper SoCs do not support it yet. Outside that, I think only Google Tensor, recent Exynos generations, and Apple A-series support MTE (though IIRC Apple has an improved extension of it).
The Fairphone (Gen. 6+) comes with upgraded internal hardware that doesn’t compromise on our industry-leading repairability standards. The ‘plus’ isn't about adding features for a longer spec sheet; it's about intentional improvements that keep your device capable for longer.
AI-like typing detected.
It really irks me that it still can't get the contrastive clauses right. "it's not about adding (more features), it's about (more features, but with a different emphasis)" is so empty of meaning. how do people copy edit this and not notice?
The sloppiness in the AI comes from the human sloppiness on this topic. This seems like a variant of what I've seen called the "fake because", which is the idea that people don't generally analyze whether or not a given reason actually makes sense. For example, the common advertising "You need to buy this beer because it'll get you the girls". It is obvious to conscious examination by pretty much everyone that this is obviously false... the problem is getting it up to that conscious examination in the first place.
I've also noticed several times the deployment of "It's not about the X, {because} it's actually about the Y" where the connection between the X and the Y has no real logic in it upon examination. That can often be translated to "I want to change the topic to Y" without much loss. I think this is one of the primary ways that AI writing can be really exhausting to work through logically and it gets people who are for whatever reason thinking sloppily, including just the sheer exhaustion of the amount of thinking navigating the modern world takes even for someone who nominally understands how to penetrate this sort of sloppy thinking, into so much trouble when they just trust the torrent of words going by. AIs can very easily hallucinate "fake becauses" at a rate no human could possibly keep up with.
I agree that it's marketing mumbo jumbo, but it's saying "we haven't added more features because more is better, we added them because they actually improve the longevity of the product."
If anything, that sentence tells me that they are insecure of their features being perceived as bullshit.
It's phrased poorly for that point, though. "Unlike the competition, we aren't just adding these features to pad out a spec sheet. Each change we've made for the plus model this year will pay off in improved lifespan and better functionality for you."
Or something in that vein. Like this isn't very hard to write?
12 GB RAM instead of 8 and Snapdragon 7s Gen4 vs Gen3.
For an MSRP increase from 599€ to 649€ that seems like a decent deal to me.
The root problem is that all marketing copy is like this, generated by meat sacks or weight arrays. It’s all borderline nonsense.
>how do people copy edit this and not notice?
I would assume they don’t, and they assume many people aren’t reading it either. Which includes me, even before LLMs came out. I would always skip the marketing and jump to tech specs and pictures/video.
Why have the marketing blurbs at all then? it's just throwing away tokens if most people don't read it.
$0.10 for a marketing blurb isn’t exactly throwing away tokens, and if it conforms to society’s expectations then probably worth the spend.
Because you need to show something that executives can parse and people that only want to eat slop writing to read. People literally took marketing material as gospel before. They still do now.
Nice try, but it's generated slop all the way down, Mr. Feynman.
The tech specs aren't safe either. Last year the official Google Store had some laughable AI translations in the specs for their Pixel phones. Eg. "Rear video" was translated to "Rückansicht" ("Rear view"). That nonsensical translation for an audience of 80 million persisted for months. In 2025 blessed vibe-translation of formerly reputable sites really stood out to me.
Nobody gives a fuck about anything anymore.
Right? As opposed to all those unintentional improvements they usually put in their products.
how do people copy edit this and not notice?
If they wanted to pay trained copy editors, they wouldn't use A.I.
Where do copy editors train?
(to the sibling comment's point)
Professional Editor and Proofreading Course - https://careertraining.uwp.edu/training-programs/professiona...
> Professional editing is both an art and a discipline of diagnosing what a text needs and applying the right level of editorial intervention without flattening voice or intent. This skillset requires language mastery, analysis, and workflow efficiency that many aspiring editors lack. This editing and proofreading course closes that gap by treating editing as a structured profession with repeatable methods. You will discover editing style systems to help you perfect your skillset, while covering specialized domains, ethical considerations, tools and technology, as well as business operations that will help you succeed in your career as a professional editor.
> You will progress through 10 sequential modules and build real-world editor workflows, such as style sheets, author queries, consistency systems, and professional deliverables. You will also strengthen your editorial judgment across various genres and contexts. This online proofreading training program culminates in a capstone editing project that produces industry-standard artifacts, including a marked-up manuscript, editorial letter, style sheet, author queries, and reflective analysis, that will help you demonstrate your competence to prospective employers and clients.
---
https://www.uww.edu/cls/academics/professional-writing-publi...
https://uww-public.courseleaf.com/undergraduate/letters-scie...
PWP 330 COPYEDITING 3 Units
Apply and further develop skills needed to work with authors and prepare a manuscript for publication. Focus is on the procedures of editing a manuscript, particularly editing for correctness and style, following the conventions of The Chicago Manual of Style.
PREREQ: (PWP 230 AND PWP 310) OR INSTRUCTOR CONSENTit sounds profound to the person that generated it
level 1 AI psychosis, really mild symptoms
IMO it all comes down to the desire to have too my "copy" without enough to say. the people who generate it don't value their own output enough to try, which is a great way of intuiting that they have had the requirement to create copy delegated to them without them expecting that copy to be useful in any way.
In other words, "doneness" is the metric of quality for most of this stuff.
This has it backwards, it is the AI that writes like cliched AD copy. Feast your eyes on this quote from a whiskey CEO, supposedly written in 2016:
> ‘When you bring people in from overseas [to Scotland], you’re working on their mindsets,’ he says. ‘You make them get a feeling for Scotch. It’s not about an advert, it’s about this magical industry with its rich heritage and this history.
> ‘It’s not about kilts and drums, but it’s about the Highlands, the water, the peat, the stories, and I call it softness – it’s very gentle marketing. A lot of what you’ve got to do is to win the hearts and minds.’
The waybackmachine has it first in 2019, but that's early enough to know this is 100% human trite bullshit. https://web.archive.org/web/20190823030911/https://scotchwhi...
This is something that frustrates me a lot when I see people jumping on a piece of writing as AI generated, these AI-isms didn't show up in a vacuum. Yes, AI commonly overuses some patterns, but it got those patterns from it's training data because real people wrote (and continue to write) that way. A few matching sentences here or there is not the smoking gun people make it out to be.
The other thing that is characteristic of AI text is messing up the underlying meaning or fine details of what it's saying. It's not just that it's imitating people who write bad contrasting clauses, it also can't write good ones reliably.
edit: Ironically that last sentence is not super clear (but hey writing is hard and I'm constantly exposed to slop). My point is the nature of AI makes its writing worse than its training data, it's not all bad training data.
This is only true if you consider those who write corporate press releases and post on LinkedIn to be real people. /s
Personally I find writing of this type grating whether the source was AI or the amalgamated output of a committee of humans in a PR department.
> This is only true if you consider those who write corporate press releases and post on LinkedIn to be real people.
You make a fair point. Objection withdrawn your honor.
To be fair to committees, the above quote is explicitly from a single person and I expect that is true of most AD copy simply because having one person write it is cheaper.
Committees are more about stamping out flavour by making what exists more bland, rather than adding endlessly regurgitated idioms.
> but that's early enough to know this is 100% human trite bullshit
It's also lacking the toaster dash. Clear bio-signature of the unaffected hearts and minds.
I wonder at what point we're just going to see people writing like AI because they read it so much? That said I'm fine with companies saving money on copywriters
I mean, AI writes copy like this because that's how copywriters did it in the training set. Honestly AI producing it so much is much more likely to make humans avoid it.
> AI writes copy like this because that's how copywriters did it in the training set
I don't think this is true. Someone probably had to write like this, but a base model has to be able to write like anyone. The specific mannerisms of AI appear in post training, either as things that are rewarded or as mode collapse artifacts. ChatGPT didn't get obsessed with goblins because that's incredibly common among humans.
Looks great! For other T-Mobile users, it actually supports the full range of frequency bands. Quite a few devices claim T-Mobile support but are then missing band 12 or 71 on LTE or n71 on 5G, all of which are critical for coverage outside of cities.
The device claims AT&T and Verizon only, I’m curious about that…
To which device are you referring?
The Fairphone 6+ is compatible with AT&T and T-Mobile in the US and their MVNOs.
Oh this is weird. They have some contradicting information.
https://us.fairphone.com/the-fairphone-gen-6-plus
Click on “see all tech specs” and under “compatibility” it says AT&T and Verizon.
But it lacks Verizon’s primary band and clearly can’t be used with it.
Exciting to see this soon after someone got the Fairphone 6 camera working on postmarketOS:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49338285
The 6+ is a different model, but the announcement says the camera module is the same.
Fairphone products have been available in the US officially for ages. This is just the ability to purchase direct from Fairphone.
I bought a Fairphone 4 from Murena years ago (and am still using it), and I bought a pair of Fairbuds XL just in April from the same.
How have the Fairbuds XL been for you? Have you used any other similar headphones before Fairbuds (asking for your comparison).
I love my Airpod Maxes but I have spend way too much money and time keeping this thing maintained. Once it finally kicks the can, I really want to try something more repair friendly.
This is still a big deal and seems to come with more expanded carrier support.
Yeah, but only the Fairphone 4 (which is very dated at this point), and only from Murena which is a can of worms in itself. Support also ranges from non-existent to atrocious.
Directly buying from FP is a huge deal for me.
USB 2.0 port is the only thing preventing me from purchasing one. A wild choice since I believe previous versions did not have this limitation.
I wonder what their reasoning behind the downgrade is. I own a FP4 and even this model features USB 3.0 with DisplayPort support.
IIRC costs and/or size. I agree, silly change. Going from the blue to green theme is another silly change, as is renaming scheme. I like many things this company does, but some decisions I question.
I also bet a smaller, less powerful smartphone with 3.5 mm would sell like hot cakes.
How often do you connect stuff to your phone, and for what purposes? I genuinely wonder!
I can't remember the last time I connected my phone to my computer for other purposes than charging the phone, but that's me and we all use our stuff different ways
You can install Linux on this device. If it had proper dock support, this would be 'the' phone I've been looking for. There is a not insignificant number of users in the forum that are skipping this phone for that reason. It would have been my first.
https://forum.fairphone.com/t/fp6-discussion-about-usb-2-and...
There are only 264 replies in that forum total, and not every reply is a unique individual.
I would say that it’s easy to make an argument that this is quite an insignificant number of users even for a niche smartphone manufacturer. I can’t imagine that a lot of people actually dock their phone to use as a desktop. I would be surprised if the percent of smartphone users who do that eclipsed 0.5%.
My understanding in the iPhone world is that the most common use case for fast USB-C connectivity tends to be people doing content creation work where they’re generating a lot of high fidelity camera footage rapidly and offloading it into external storage and other professional solutions.
> My understanding in the iPhone world is that the most common use case for fast USB-C connectivity tends to be people doing content creation work where they’re generating a lot of high fidelity camera footage rapidly and offloading it into external storage and other professional solutions.
I mean, Apple also enforces a difference in what is an iPhone vs an iPad vs a Mac, at both the OS and the application levels, regardless of what little distinction the internals have. Even without bringing mainline Linux into it, Android is generally looser about that.
> I can’t imagine that a lot of people actually dock their phone to use as a desktop.
It doesn't have to be all the time; there are lots of use cases where big displays are occasional. Pocket gaming, for instance.
See, that's all fine and dandy, but I would not recommend this phone to normal people anyway - especially with their record of introducing random bugs. Their whole strategy is going after niche buyers. Most people just want a phone and go through their carrier or Apple.
I have a friend who was looking into the phone and he was about to purchase it before I mentioned the port, but yes we are just geeks.
I think their early adopters being niche tech nerds is a very different concept than who they are targeting through their marketing.
Scroll down the marketing page and take note of which subjects take up the largest chunk of the page space:
https://us.fairphone.com/the-fairphone-gen-6-plus
The first section talks about a long warranty and sustainability. It talks about long battery life and the replaceable battery.
The next section, which is rather large, talks about the camera benefits. This is a huge section and is a very mainstream selling point.
Next is AI and Gemini, a small section.
Next is Moments, their phone mindfulness suite aimed at people battling smartphone attention/addiction issues, a very common concern among users.
Finally, the last section talks about sustainability as well as tips on switching and “what’s in the box.”
So really, zero of the marketing is aimed at niche buyers. They’re looking to sell to people who want a very normal phone experience but want something long-lasting, intentional, and sustainable, and they still need it primarily as a device to capture photos and memories as well as all the normal daily life use you’d expect.
There is zero mention of niche/nerdy features in the marketing. Tinkering and software customization is never mentioned. Professional/enthusiast use cases are never mentioned. There’s nothing talking about terminal emulation or alternative operating systems or anything of that sort.
Ah, that makes sense, thanks! I tried that way back when Windows phone was a thing (using my phone as a desktop), I even had a small dock for my Lumia 925. It worked well enough for presentations and RDPing into my workstation.
I for one would have loved to be able to plug a screen into the phone for a somewhat better experience + peripherals. With the 12 GB RAM though I hope to be able to runs minimal VMs and then rustdesk/VNC into those for work on the phone? It's not the same though...
I don't need USB for speed, it's all via the network anyway, even pics and videos are in Immich by the time I've found my cable.
DisplayPort Alt-Mode is important for when you smash your phone but you _need_ to access data that is on it. Maybe its your photos, text messages, or access to a banking app. Without DP Alt-Mode you're going to be waiting for a screen replacement to ship, with DP Alt-Mode you're just plugging your phone into your dock like a laptop.
Personally I would have seriously considered this phone if it wasn't for the lack of DP Alt-Mode. It would be a tiny portable Linux computer with an unlimited internet connection available anywhere. It would be the perfect thin-client. My cellular plan limits my tethered bandwidth so using the phone as my computer rather than as my computer's modem has real benefits.
I saved al my sons data from this Samsung S10 using their Dex thing after his screen broke. Was really nice.
FP6+ would have been a no brainer for me if it had such a feature (would need to work on /e/ though) for some light dev work. Still going to buy one though (just messed up my iPhone 12 mini cams and faceID with some of Malaysia's high humidity.)
When we are travelling, we often hook up our phones to a hotel/apartment TV with a DP-Alt to HDMI adapter to use our own streaming services/apps. A phone without DP-Alt would be a no-go.
Syncing music is my main use case where USB 2 is annoying. Beyond that, pulling photos of the phone, but I rarely do that to an extent that USB 2 speeds become a problem.
that said, Fairphones habe a micro SD card slot which you can use for such things
Yes, and I'd prefer to not have to take it out all the time. Especially since taking out the SD card means also taking out the SIM card.
Is wireless connectivity a barrier there? My home WiFi goes about twice as fast as USB 2.0.
My photos (I use Ente, not Google or Apple) sync in the background on WiFi, primarily while I sleep. It’s my understanding that Immich works the same way.
For music syncing I’d probably set up Syncthing-Fork and then never manually transfer again.
When I transfer ROMs to my Android gaming handheld I just use my local NAS and connect with CX File Manager. My handheld has USB 3.0 but I don’t find that plugging in a cable is particularly convenient, especially since the NAS box is in my closet.
My iPhone 17 Pro Max has very fast USB-C but I’ve never used it for anything besides charging. I’m sure professional content creation folks know of a workflow where fast USB is helpful but for my smartphone user I can’t think of a reason to use it.
The app I use to sync, Musicbee, doesn't work on Linux, so I have to use Wine, which for stupid reasons prevents me from syncing wirelessly. Just syncing the files isn't the problem. Syncing the metadata (number of times a song has been played, favourites) is the problem, and just dragging-and-dropping the the files onto my phone doesn't solve for this.
If I could do it wirelessly, I would, but I've never found it to be reliable in the first place the few times I've used it before (times may have changed).
Having to remove your SIM card (since it uses the same tray) and potentially switch off your phone to transfer files at a decent speed is meh.
Honestly, if it was a linux phone...
I currently travel between two office locations, with identical setup (screen, dock, mouse and keyboard, ...) so i just close the laptop lid and plug in the office's type C cable coming from the screen.
Sometimes i bring along my laptop so i keep my work laptop where it's at and RDP into it from the other location (laptop just plugs into the type C cable).
Nothing really special, but it's really nice.
Then, back when google enabled desktop mode on most pixels, i of course tried it. Neat, but it's just a shittier gnome desktop with very few desktop apps. If it was a full fledged windows phone with a KDE-Touch interface that rendered a full desktop when docked, oh boy wouldn't it be neat?
Another thing to consider: For some goddamn reason i have a couple of samsung flaships that will refuse to talk to ADB if i use a 2.0 Cable. Has to be 3.0 or type C <-> Type C
You need to transfer more than 480Mbps over a hard line to and from your phone? Seems like a niche requirement that even iPhone 17 doesn't bother with. Or is it psychological 'nunber must go up and usb number went from 2 to 3 many years ago so now 2 bad'
Previous versions of the Fairphone did have USB3, and also Displayport Alt Mode, so you could plug the phone into a display and use Android Desktop. There's more to a given version of USB than line rate.
I have a fairphone 5 and actively don't like it when it asks me if I want to mirror my screen when I plug it into a charging cable attached to a monitor.
That's an issue that would be solved with a better UX on Fairphone's side though, not removing the feature entirely.
Then you can make a tidy profit upgrading to the Fairphone 6 series and selling your phone to someone who wants that functionality. What is the point you're trying to make? We already knew different people have different preferences.
A friend had the Fair Phone 4. It broke after a year. Hostile customer support, not worth her time. Idk. Stories of "good guy" indie companies who drop you as soon as you fell for their marketing keep piling up. It may be greed, short sightedness or an incompetent understanding of what it means to have customers, the results are the same. See Framework for another example of this.
Supply Chain is hard, Apple is the pro at it. Small companies struggle. Who are the founders? Are they experienced in hardware? They are doing something ambitious (keeping old stuff in stock costs money).
Just checked, as of now all the Fairbud parts seem to be out of stock defeating the entire purpose. Maybe they will get more stock once the sales kick off.
My Prusa Core One 3D printer has had two upgrades available at reasonable prices since I purchased it. These upgrade kits are a bit more involved than swapping out a battery or camera but in the end, I will have the latest hardware. They are a great example of "good guys" continuing to hold up their end of the bargain. I hope they make some profit from the upgrade kits because this kind of relationship is worth rewarding.
No standard audio jack?
That's a dealbreaker for me, especially for something touting modularity, repairability, and user control.
It's a ten dollar dongle that can stay attached to your audio cable out of the way when not using it and has no perceptible affect on sound quality, and there's even passthrough options for when you need to charge, so the whole no-audio-jack thing is a moot point nowadays. It's a solved problem for years now.
Using a dongle makes it impossible to charge the phone or connect it to any other device while using audio, which I do all the time. I also frequently interchange my wired earbuds between my phone and laptop, and don't want to be bothered with an extra loose dongle when I disconnect the earbuds.
Sorry, this isn't a solved problem at all, apart from the solution of only buying phones that have audio jacks.
> dongle makes it impossible to charge the phone or connect it to any other device while using audio
I feel like you missed the part where the parent comment said "[...] and there's even passthrough options for when you need to charge".
I have a passthrough dongle so I can charge my iPhone in the car and use an aux audio patch cable, and it's quite a large thing, certainly not unobtrusive but if you're charging maybe that doesn't really matter.
Something like https://www.belkin.com/p/3.5mm-audio-plus-usb-c-charge-adapt...
https://www.amazon.com/UGREEN-Magnetic-Adapter-Charger-Charg... is pretty compact.
I'm not saying they're related, but they also make and sell wireless headphones...
In this case, you may be interested in Librem 5, although the hardware is weaker.
'You may be interested in this $800 product.'
'I'm not interested.'
'Here's why you should be.'
What you call activism, others call shilling: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49324418
This is not shilling. The OP explicitly told what they wanted from a phone, and there is only one phone on the market with such features. I mentioned the downside of the hardware, too.
And the reply was far from 'I'm not interested.' Your comments are unsubstantiated hate of Linux phones.
Why don't you attack the shilling comments by the GrapheneOS crowd who constantly and without basis accuse other projects of all the sins in the world? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49345327. They keep pushing GrapheneOS even when replies explicitly say it's not for them and when it's off-topic. (Neither Pixels nor Motorola support the fairness as defined by Fairphone.) I am not the only one who noticed this trend, too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47312651
Also, this link is hilarious: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47312790
I missed that at the time. I'm flattered that you elevated me to strcat's level, as if your two links are remotely comparative. I'm just a dude hoping to find a viable way out of this tech duopoly hellscape on a reasonably viable and high-performing stack.
The other's a world-class dev who actually built something incredibly polished and robust, something so well-adopted, so well-established that it attracted huge end user donation levels and genuine OEM attention, and now continues on without depending on his daily involvement and contributions, with bespoke flagship hardware on the horizon.
You made my day. Thanks. Have an upvote.
> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47312651
Enumerating why they won't build for specific devices people frequently ask them to seems like a good thing.
In the past you've asked them to support certain hardware. They took the time to explain why they wouldn't. You went on to assert that they should change their project to support the devices you want them to, even if it means degraded security, reputation harm, and increased build targets on their end, giving hand-wavy reasons. You've done that repeatedly. As if you have some right to another open source project's labor. I've explained all this to you numerous times. Why are we doing it again?
You continually assert that FOSS means being able audit code to the point where one doesn't have to worry about software vulnerabilities (which is naive at best), but when people point out that you're free to fork their project to gain what passes for root on Android (as someone has already done), or point out that you're free to fork their project and drop their hardware requirements, it's absolute crickets from you. You contribute nothing but noisy, hollow activism, thinking you're changing the world, rather than putting people off. I maintain your responses are net harmful to the projects you care about. I've explained this to you before, too.
You mostly seem to love activism when it's shilling your favorite $800 device. Everything else, not so much.
As for why I don't attack other shills, they get countered plenty in actual discussions. That's how it's supposed to work. I have no deep-seated need to bother with this.
Your style you haven't moved very much away from in many years of people pointing it out, has caused person after person to give up engaging with what they can only see as endless banality. Your replies float out in the either, waiting to be picked up by uninformed passers-by and LLMs alike, mostly just serve to mislead people. I've explained this to you before multiple times. I'm not doing it to change your mind. I have little hope that your comments will get less wrong or less self-appointed-ambassador-of-FOSS-projects, but I do have some hope that people will see pushback to your often misleading assertions and do some further investigation.
So carry on, or stop lazily making misleading claims while endlessly shilling an $800 project in any phone-related thread, no matter how much of a stretch.
It's also extremely expensive. I'm more interested on seeing the next iteration of the PinePhone to fulfill the full Linux phone dream. In the meantime, commodity Android phones are still good enough.
$800 is not much more expensive than the Fairphone. Also, the next generation of Pinephones (Pinephone Pro) has been discontinued, because Pine64 don't want to support any firmware/driver development and rely on volunteers too much.
It is $800 but the hardware is nowhere near equal, since Fairphone are usibg newer standards (for midrange 2026 smartphones).
You'd also have issues running backwards compatible applications. You won't have such issue on /e/, SFOS, or GrapheneOS. Of these, /e/ works on Fairphone. SFOS recently got released for latest Jolla smartphone, and GrapheneOS continues being a good option for Google Pixel and perhaps Motorola in near future.
Yes, the hardware is significantly weaker, but instead it has other benefits. It's just a different tradeoff for different preferences. It also runs a desktop OS and no proprietary drivers unlike anything else on the market. So it will get lifetime updates and can be used as, e.g., a server when you buy something new.
> issues running backwards compatible applications
Which issues? Waydroid should work.
> no proprietary drivers unlike anything else on the market
You continue to be misleading with your wording.
https://docs.puri.sm/Hardware/Librem_5/Maintenance/Modem.htm...
You dishonestly promote an $800 product in comment after comment.
Hiding your obvious shilling behind the moral cloak of "activism" is pathetic. It's worse than pathetic, as it runs the risk of harming genuine activism.
What are you trying to tell with you link? You did not provide any arguments or explanation. Yes, it has a modem with update-able firmware, so what? It's a separate card with its own firmware that you can remove or replace. The firmware sits on the modem, not in the OS and does not affect it.
PureOS is endorsed by the FSF and contains no proprietary software.
They really probably aren't going to get lifetime updates to their modem's closed-source firmware. They can't even get timely updates to their modem's closed-source firmware.
It's great that the OS is open source, it really is. But all bits going out over the cellular radio are handled by proprietary firmware, same as every other phone out there.
Educate me: Is there a way to know when the modem's firmware needs updating? When was the last update shipped?