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I agree with everything you said about Fairphone, but their software support is decent when it comes for security updates (major Android versions upgrades are not guaranteed). They offer 5 years which is way better than average.

Their track record is also good I would say. Fairphone 2 started with Android 5 and it currently offered Android 10 upgrade.

https://support.fairphone.com/hc/en-us/articles/997918043739...

I've been exclusively on Fairphones since Fairphone 1.

Recently switched from FairphoneOS (the stripped, bloatfree, google-free Android) back to stock Android¹

Its updates are fast, steady and consistently good (and improving). The FP1 is ten years old, and still works (though android there is EOL and old, and spare parts no longer available), my FP2 and an FP3 work fine, I can still get parts and Android isn't too old. The hardware is slow, and old, though (e.g. no 5G, power hungry BT, puny camera by current standards). The FP4 is top notch. Spare parts are cheap (e.g. Replaceable battery only €29, new screen only €80), android 12 good enough. But it does have stuff like Google Meet or TV that I would like to remove but cannot.

¹I'm diabetic. Monitoring and Pump control is moving from dedicated electronics to native apps. And they often require Google Android, cannot or will not run on degoogled android. Same for banking and payment apps.

Did you ever try /e/OS? All my banking apps surprisingly worked on FP4 with /e/OS

/e/OS is currently 7 months behind security updates for the browser/webview for the second time in a row and has a PDF viewer not updated since 2016 yet considers itself the "state of the art" in security. See my full list of issues with it here: https://divestos.org/misc/e.txt

Ok thanks for sharing, this was all new to me. Honestly it was just such a good user experience for me with their app store and just installing all apps seamlessly. It all just worked. Not sure if other custom ROMs have similar experiences since that's the only one I tried

The only reason I sold my FP4 and went back to samsung and their android experience was that everybod kept complaininh about mic quality during calls and I couldn't seem to fix it. Seemed like others also had similar issues

iodéOS workd fine as well.

It's based on a LineageOS, but they already have added all the apps and services to use it seamlessly.

iodeOS just recently had a 3 month long gap where they didn't publish their source code. See my full list of issues here: https://divestos.org/misc/i.txt

I did. I didn't like it. Many apps lacking or couldn't run. Non of my diabetes monitoring apps would run. Many other apps lacked features or crashen on using these features, like push notifications.

I'm pragmatic though, I think Googles services (some, certainly not all) are just so good that I think paying with my data is OK. Like Google Maps. Even though I contribute to OSM, I think all the OSM apps range from "completely suck" to "fancy, but not on par".

> The FP4 is top notch.

I think find the camera poor though. It takes passable pictures in good conditions. Do you have a better camera app that does a better job?

I probably don't have a reference?

I use both android stock photo app and openphoto (more to tweak).

I think the pictures are good. I'm also old-school in that I think composition, focus, cutout, subject matters far more than pixel quality.

My wife, also FP4 user, sold her canon DSLR 800 (I think?), used for product images in her webshops, because the FP4 made pictures that were just as good or better, without all the hassle.

> currently offered Android 10 upgrade

released in september 2019

Fairphone's support periods are a lie, they last longer than the Qualcomm or the Linux kernel stable version they use actually offers.

Fairphone 3 users despite still having "support" until next year are over a year behind Qualcomm and run the end of life Linux 4.9 kernel.

As long as you don't consider Play services bloatware, yes Pixel is quite clean. I'm still happy with a Pixel 5a. Camera is good enough even with that older model.

I like Android though because compared to others I know with iPhones, there seems to be more ways to customize Android. Termux is one obvious example -- with a BT keyboard, feels like a pocket Linux device. I also use a different launcher as well as different browser and search engine.

> That camera is really nice though

I disagree. It overprocesses a lot and it's the worst on people's faces (very unnatural colors).

Other phone makers do that as well with various trade-offs. Samsung is better for portraits, but struggles in other places.

I miss my Huawei Mate 20 Pro, somehow it seems to me that today's flagships are still taking worse SOOC pictures than it.

Somewhat sadly, the Pixel 5 takes flawless photos of faces—fast forward to my Pixel 7 and it does a poor job.

> But it has limited updates and proprietary software for things like the camera

It gets as many updates as other Android phones, and there is no blotware whatsoever. Not sure what your comments here are about the camera app. It's just an improved version to use the features of the pixel camera.

Google play services is arguably bloatware.

I hate this website sometimes.

Fairphone looks great, BUT they don't sell outside Europe.

I’d love to have a Fairphone as a dev test device but yep, they don’t sell in NA.

It seems to be a common thread with interesting phones… back when there was still some buzz around Sailfish you couldn’t get a device running that in NA either, which may have contributed to that project fizzling. There’s a lot of mobile devs with disposable income you’re opting out of by not selling in North America.

>There’s a lot of mobile devs with disposable income you’re opting out of by not selling in North America.

I'm not in this specific industry, but there are some generic trends with the USA

There could be a lot of non tariff trade barriers if you go to the USA.

And you get exposed to a lot of laws, like having to give up all of your data to uncle Sam, having to run specific programs in the company on top of what the EU wants you to do, and be exposed to the maybe not so independent DOJ.

Negociations for industrial products also seem to attract ears at the homeland security, because it's a national security risk when you sell cheaper than American companies.

Contracts are trickiest to write, because justice is based on what you write in the contract, and century of precedents (contracts in mainland Europe are much thinner because there are laws)

And nobody would want to have to report women who get an abortion out of state, nor to dispute the requests, nor to run several legal programs when you're a smallish company, nor to risk having your board held up in jail until you sell to GE (then charges can be dropped).

Also, there is the Buy American act, so you can't just sell in bulk to the government.

European car manufacturers no longer sell in NA, because meeting the weird standards would cost more than they would do by selling their little cars.

Fresh food like cheeses were sometimes suddenly bumped back to Europe.

Overall, if you're a small company, you avoid the USA to not be crushed.

Been using a FP4 in Washington State USA under T-Mobile for about 6 months now. Bought it from a British reseller.

Very occasionally I need to bounce the cellular connection, I suspect because I land on an unsupported band/channel. Otherwise LineageOS runs on it like a charm.

Where do you recommend looking for a reseller?

The panorama function of Open Camera is terrible, and I only keep using that app because I'm too lazy to find a suitable replacement.

Any suggestions?

Samsung's default Camera app is quite good for panoramas. I think you could probably grab the latest from one of the APK downloading websites and sideload it.