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Comment by Sponge5 | Hacker News Reader

I've had FP4 since the launch. I don't use a case and have dropped it a couple times, mostly on wood, but once on tiles. The screen hasn't cracked yet and I haven't had to do any repairs on it. All in all, good HW.

Since owning it, the phone froze on me twice, once during the latest system update. Other than that, the SW seems solid. I've had an issue where the bottom SW buttons would disappear and not come back, but turns out, they come back with a swipe up.

I don't particularly enjoy being in the walled gardens of Google, but feel that Apple is no better. Hopefully the EU regulation comes quick to allow me to install 3rd-party apps.

In a perfect world, I'd be able to root the phone and still be able to use the banking app, but that won't happen ever.

EDIT: By 3rd-party I mean apps from third-party app stores/package managers. Sorry about the misunderstanding.

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I have FP4 as well and I would say that they do a rather poor job on the SW side of things. The default camera up somewhere along the lines became laggy when switching to wide screen, security updates come out months late, and Android 13 still isn't out (even for Android 12 they took a long time to get that prepared and released).

I'm probably going to switch to LineageOS at some point, but I just wasn't in the mood for to go out of my way and set it up (even if I've been using LineageOS extensively on all phones I got beforehand).

btw: CalyxOS has Android 13: https://calyxos.org/docs/guide/device-support/

Thanks for pointing that out. I knew LineageOS and /e/ already had the Android 13 builds for the Fairphone 4. First time I'm hearing about CalyxOS, and the official webpage isn't in-depth enough to point how much different they are from LineageOS. Their own two bundled apps look interesting (the backup and outbound connection control ones) based on the one/two sentences I've found, but overall seems like a smaller community than LineageOS.

Might give them a go.

Unfortunately I cannot confirm that SW is solid. Massive problems with GPS when the fairphone 4 got out and still (very rarely) have to restart the phone to get a GPS fix.

Also there was this recently hot patched screen sensitive reduction for touch (where they wanted to fix some "screen ghost" issues) and you now have to press slightly more than necessary.

And then there are still problems with dual sim (not being able to see that phones come in from the other sim when you are on call) and many more (tiny) issues.

And yes, I can confirm that the HW seems to be robust. I also don't have a case only a protective glas.

The walled gardens could be avoided as there is official support for other OSes, I think calyxos and /e/os which themselves seem to support living without Google.

Can't you already install 3rd party apps on Android?

Edited my comment

> I don't particularly enjoy being in the walled gardens of Google

Note that while it's not entirely out of Google's walled gardens, there's the "degoogled" /e/OS that is a Fairphone partner: https://e.foundation/e-os/

Also: https://gitlab.com/postmarketOS/pmaports/-/merge_requests/43...

>EDIT: By 3rd-party I mean apps from third-party app stores/package managers. Sorry about the misunderstanding.

But you can do that already as well. There are commercial app stores like Amazon's, and there's F-Droid which works like a package manager for open source apps.

> I don't particularly enjoy being in the walled gardens of Google, but feel that Apple is no better. Hopefully the EU regulation comes quick to allow me to install 3rd-party apps.

You.. can't install 3rd party apps? Really? Are you sure?

Edited my comment

Noob question perhaps: is there a way to maybe root the phone but have system profiles that are/look unrooted?

Magisk used to offer the root hiding functionality, but it looks like they removed it and it's only available as an external module now: https://droidwin.com/how-to-hide-root-from-apps-via-magisk-d...

I've used F-Droid on Android for years.

> I've had an issue where the bottom SW buttons would disappear and not come back, but turns out, they come back with a swipe up.

As in, after exiting a fullscreen application it got stuck in fullscreen mode?

That sounds plausible, sadly I don't know how to reproduce it.

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