The Fairphone (Gen. 6)
shop.fairphone.com
shop.fairphone.com
USB-C 2.0 (OTG capable) can be used to connect USB Sticks/SD-Cards/Audio Amplifier/Network-adapters directly
I was really looking forward to use this with a pair of display glasses, like the XREAL One Pro, but this seems like the Fairphone 6 might not support display output? That's sad. Especially since the Fairphone 5 had this in their tech specs:
USB-C 3.0 (OTG capable) can be used to connect USB Sticks/SD-Cards/display (also Android™ desktop mode)/Camera/Audio Amplifier/Network-adapters directly
But maybe it was not used enough?
Likely not used enough, yet. It would be premature to drop support this quick, as Google seems to just now move Android in the direction (DEX by Samsung is the same thing, but it's Samsung specific).
At the same time, only last year I saw a device in which I'd "dock" my phone (the Nexdock looked reasonably priced) and having both a phone and the steam deck with desktop mode would make such a device more useful.
I know you're talking strictly from the perspective of display glasses, but convergence is the main category under which I'd classify this feature.
Based on what I had read yesterday, when I still hoped that it will have the same USB 3.0/DisplayPort like Fairphone 5, I was considering very seriously to upgrade my rather old ASUS smartphone to a Fairphone 6.
However, if it lacks USB 3.0/DisplayPort, which can be acceptable for a $200 smartphone, but never for a $600 smartphone, then Fairphone 6 is completely disqualified from my point of view.
Unfortunately, only some Chinese smartphones, e.g. from Motorola, offer USB 3.0/DisplayPort in smartphones with decent price/performance ratios and up-to-date Qualcomm SoCs, starting as low as $400.
Which is to say, buying the previous Fairphone is a perfectly sensible thing to do.
Shouldn't the user decide what to use it for, instead of others?
If people aren't gonna use USB 3.0, that's fine, but at least have it for those who do, it's not gonna bother the rest.
It's not like USB 3.0 is some expensive rocket science that takes a lot of effort to implement or takes up space in the phone like the headphone jack.
Except I don't want to put up with the bs that Apple does to its customers, otherwise I'd buy an iPhone. It's not outrageous to expect USB 3.0, a 15 year old standard, on a 600 Euro phone with modern internals in 2025 that users are expected to keep for a long time without upgrading.
>It's just fine.
Just because it's fine for you doesn't mean it's fine for others. For other's that's the dealbreaker. Fairphone isn't a mainstream brand, it's a niche brand which tends to draw enthusiasts (often tech workers, hackers, tinkerers, etc), and enthusiasts are more picky and expect more features than your regular Apple and Samsung "muggles".
People buy niche phone brands not because they're the most performant or sexy, but because they still provide the niche features that Apple and Samsung gave up on, like SD cards, headphone jacks, removable batteries, etc.
OnePlus had USB 3.0 and DisplayPort outputs on 500 Euro phones all the way in 2019, and that feature was a lifesaver when my laptop suddenly died. There's no excuse now for this phone.
As a product manager, if I had a dime for every time someone insisted with stridency bordering on rudeness that some fringe feature was absolutely critical to my product’s success, despite data showing no market demand even from these overconfident “experts”… I would have a lot of dimes.
Like I said, I don't care what process they did to justify that decision internally, all I said is I'm not buying it since for me it's a deal breaker, but since their competitors ship this feature my money is ging to them. Simples. Free market baby.
If they think it's gonna sell well regardless, then power to them and I wish them well, but how do you know their decision is the right one and my opinion is the wrong one? I guess only time will tell.
But the majority of mainstream users who don't care about those features tend to buy Apple and Samsung anyway, not niche brands they never heard of. So then how do they expect to sway mainstream customers away as you suggest without differentiating features?
Now with the EU repairability laws and recent product developments, changing the display or battery on a Samsung or IPhone isn't the nightmare it once was, so repairability isn't such a huge differentiator feature for Fairphone as it was 5+ years ago, so they need to offer more to stand out, not less. The goalposts have moved, in favor of the consumer.
>As a product manager [...] that some fringe feature was absolutely critical to my product’s success
How niche or mass market was your product? If you have a niche product then fringe features could be important, otherwise your customers might prefer going with your tried and true IBMs since nobody ever got fired for that.
Sufficiently technical users might prefer a used flagship phone that supports custom ROMs, maybe some market segmentation like that is in play here. Case in point, the missing headphone jack, and that the tech specs have never been impressive.
It would also explain why in their forum repairability was called a non-goal from a big user group, only the fair production aspect were relevant.
I'm a fairphone user and promoter. They are a good company for what they do, but I doubt they have the finances to really do anything outside product development, software work (albeit slowly) and a bit of marketing.
If their user survey is anything to go by, they mostly ask about how the users match on their brand and mission, and less about what the users want. Their forum has a bunch of feedback on what they could do differently. Some acknowledged, like lack of communication and software updates (yet to see the results of that).
Or would there be other limitations, like compatibility with a processor/chip…?
It still works very well with CalyxOS so the rational thing to do is to keep using it.
My only issue with my FP3 is that I have to tighten all the screws from time to time otherwise whenever the screen displays too many green pixels the touchscreen will start to trigger at random.
As I near the eol of my daily driver, I'm considering a Fairphone, but what it's missing is a folding card holder, like the Satechi wallet stand for iPhone. Putting the phone in horizontal mode on a table and using a bt keyboard is how I do a lot of my writing
The makers of GrapheneOS have indicated that Fairphone doesn't meet their security requirements:
https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/114737139118874189
I think there are some fundamental flaws with how Fairphone operates, plus they don't seem to release security updates promptly.
Case in point: re-lockable bootloader requirement. Not everyone is a target for an evil maid types of physical attacks or possible state actor pressure. But when you actually need it, it's not negotiable.
GrapheneOS takes security very seriously. Your average desktop PC or laptop won't come close to their requirements. That makes GrapheneOS an excellent OS for people who want the security of iOS without the many downsides of Apple. Their patches reduce usability but make the phone more secure than Google's own, official Android build.
However, if you've ever used a Windows (or Linux) laptop, you've already experienced the kind of insecurity that GrapheneOS tries to prevent. No hardware encryption accelerators outside of the CPU, rarely any patches that roll out within a weak of announcement, firmware protection being basically nonexistent, no A/B updates, almost certainly no verified boot (even with Secure Boot enabled), and usually no firmware USB lockdown.
They did announce they're going to do daily linux patches though, so that's atleast something https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fairphone-6-Linux
It would be good if Fairphone could make a product that meets GrapheneOS requirements, but they measure the tradeoffs between security, usability, and cost (to do hardware and software things) differently. Each team is free to make the choices they deem fit. If only the intersection of GrapheneOS and Fairphone users were bigger, market forces would push them towards a common vision.
There's is no bad blood here, it's merely that fairphone doesn't meet the required standards for them to be a target the graphene team is interested in supporting offically. There's nothing preventing anyone from porting it themselves and nothing preventing fairphone from porting an inferior version of grapheneos to their phoens.
The Reason GrapheneOS isn't made for Fairphones Officially is that Fairphones lack a lot of base requirements for official support:
https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices
There's nothing preventing anyone from making a 3rd Party port of GrapheneOS to Fairphones, it just seems no one does.
The "Complete monthly Android Security Bulletin patches without any regular delays longer than a week for device support code (firmware, drivers and HALs)" part isn't even true for Pixels.
I suspect it's the features of the titan m2 security chip. It's a pretty cool piece engineering [0].
[0] https://www.androidauthority.com/titan-m2-google-3261547/
Samsung Flagships and Iphones seem to have similar level of security engineering in them (Pixels use Samsung CPUs essentially) but aren't open to the required degree for third party roms.
There's nothing else on the Market that delivers on that Level. The GrapheneOS guys are working with someone one a potential custom phone to get the required level of hardware security but nothing has materialized. Companies like Fairphone are free to deliver hardware that is competitive in the security space and i'm sure that the grapheneos team will consider them then. But until anyone else does i'll keep buying whatever phone grapheneos wants me to buy, i don't care.
Samsung has devices providing all of the major security features listed at https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices and they could easily add the couple things they may be missing such as reset attack protection. The issue is that they don't allow another OS to use a bunch of the hardware-based security features.
Samsung devices aren't on the same level as Pixels in terms of quality of implementation for security, but they would meet our security feature requirements if they let us use the security features.
Whether Samsung's security update approach meets our requirements is a different story. They do provide long term support but it isn't necessarily what we expect. There are often long delays even from the beginning and they tend to switch to doing the security updates with months in between for older devices. Huge delays for yearly updates and not shipping the monthly/quarterly updates is an issue too since we'd be running a newer OS version on top of components from an older one, relying on Treble for compatibility, which is likely to cause issues and therefore delays. We can accept having to use Treble that way but it would be significantly harder to provide the OS updates as quickly as we expect.
As a side note, GrapheneOS has always avoided using the term ROM to refer to any Android-based OS. They're not actually ROMs and it leads to misconceptions.
> The GrapheneOS guys are working with someone one a potential custom phone to get the required level of hardware security but nothing has materialized.
The current OEM we're working with started working with us in June 2025 so it hasn't been a long time. The previous OEM went bankrupt, but this is a larger and more established company.
Thanks for giving me a freedom respecting alternative to Google and Apples duopoly.
GrapheneOS is actively working with a non-Google Android OEM towards their devices officially supported GrapheneOS and it's certainly something we're interested in providing. Existing non-Pixel devices with proper support for using another OS don't meet our hardware security and update requirements.
As a side note, GrapheneOS has always avoided using the term ROM to refer to any Android-based OS. They're not actually ROMs and it leads to misconceptions.
Doesn't the ASB get published at the same time as pixel updates? So by definition it's up to date.
I did, for instance, find a case where Google Project Zero published a blog post on a vulnerability while their Pixel 6 was still four days away from the first updates: https://9to5google.com/2023/03/20/pixel-6-march-2023-update/
I myself regularly find my Pixel only noticing updates half a month later unless I manually check while my Samsung tablet notifies me immediately once my quarterly update is available. It's quite annoying to have to check for updates manually every week, but I suppose updates are technically available.
Android Security Bulletin are standalone backports of High and Critical severity security patches to older initial yearly releases. Those older releases are currently Android 13, 14, 15 and 16. They're not the full security patches. Many backports included in the ASB were often included in the stable OS updates a month or two earlier.
There are 2 officially supported paths for updates:
1) The path taken by Pixels of shipping each monthly, quarterly and yearly OS release in the month they come out, which they always do unless something goes very wrong and an update is pulled without them having a replacement ready. It's extremely rare for them not end up rolling out the latest OS release to users. 2) The path taken by most non-Pixel OEMs where they stick with an initial yearly release and apply Android Security Bulletin backports, eventually moving to a new initial yearly release. Pixels have never really used this, with the exception of the Pixel 8a and Pixel 9a launching on a branch of the previous quarterly release and then moving to the regular OS releases with the next quarterly/yearly release. That's a special case at launch from them saving resources.
GrapheneOS follows the Pixel path and would need to make that work on hardware not doing it if we supported it. That would mean dealing with issues created by relying on the forward compatibility system (Treble) and not having improvements to the device support code tied to newer Android releases. Our hardware requirements require that this would work and that they would be providing the OS updates for the lower level code without a huge delay.
Using older code below the OS layer would also mean not building it with the OS but rather separately, and would imply that it's probably a lot more closed source than Pixels were.
> The "Complete monthly Android Security Bulletin patches without any regular delays longer than a week for device support code (firmware, drivers and HALs)" part isn't even true for Pixels.
That's not correct. Pixels also ship the monthly, quarterly and yearly OS updates rather than the Android Security Bulletin backports to older releases. Android Security Bulletins are backports of High and Critical severity patches to the initial yearly releases from the past several years. Stock Pixel OS and AOSP have a new release each month and often ship those patches before they're backporting.
Android Security Bulletins also include a small subset of SoC vendor patches, but the remaining SoC vendor patches and other hardware component patches also need to be provided as part of meeting our requirements.
However you could also install eOS yourself instead of course, if you prefer.
Yes, the closed-source camera app that does not work on Lineage OS and other alternative firmwares has a 50MP switch, however the quality of the 50MP photo is as poor if not worse than the processed 13MP photo...
I believe the app I was referring to is not installed by default; you have to explicitly choose it from settings.
However I also find some of the supporters of consumer friendliness unbearable (e.g. Framework or Thinkpad fans).
I get that tribalism is present in many layers of our society and culture (politics, sports, music), but I always found it weirder when people do it for products. The only goal of a company is to maximize their profits, why someone becomes a die hard supporter of them is beyond me.
To summarize, I just wish people would put less emphasis on consumer practices. Buy a product you like and is beneficial for you, but don’t judge others for their choices.
Overall this is effectively true, but it is not a law of the universe or anything.
Why can't a collection of people have ideals, want to support and realize those ideals through action, and also find a way to financially support themselves and even profit by pursuing those ideals?
The hypothesis you've put forth is that the group that founded Framework were sitting around thinking about the best way they could invest money to make money, and the best option they could come up with was to make modular laptops. What has their return on investment been thus far, and does it clearly and readily beat all other options they had for investing?
I agree with a live and let live view of purchasing decisions, and I agree that tribalism about companies is weird, but at the end of the day it’s far too reductive to say all companies prioritize profits equally.
A large amount of energy is wasted on "infighting" where people spend significant effort on attacking projects that, seen from a distance, are actually allies¹.
Or where people dismiss the entire project because it's not 100 aligned with their view of perfection².
Or, indeed, where people who don't even use or want to use a project, spend significant effort to discredit this project.
¹ an example is the enormous amount of effort and campaigning within the "mastodon" community against projects like bluesky or nostr. But also gnome vs kde, Ubuntu vs Redhat, Etc
² an example is Opensource software being discredited because they use GitHub, or host on AWS. It's Patagonia being discredited because they use plastic. Or Fairtrade coffee being dismissed because it transports coffee with trucks and ships burning oil.
People seem to flock to smaller phone companies and demand they fill in their one feature. Whether it's USB-OTG display functionality, headphone jack, slider to kill all connections, etc, everybody is convinced their one feature is holding this phone company back, just because they want this one feature.
It's just disappointing. I'm just happy with my long-lasting repairable phone.
Framework/Oura/Whoop/Garmin/Fairphone etc etc it's all the same.
I just bought their 2025 model for that reason.
I've got a Fairphone 4 and the most useful thing about it is the replaceable battery. I can't count the number of times an extra battery in my backpack has saved me.
Sure, maybe it's not that big of a deal to bring a screwdriver with me as well. But I just know I'm going to lose those tiny screws and changing the battery at the back of a taxi goes out the window.
Popped it back in and booted and went on my way.
I wish there is compact android phone with open bootloadet option.
If the latter, do you have a source or some research to point to?
If the former, why did you choose to present a personal preference as a common truth?
Just because majoroty repeat something, it doeant meant that it is true. Conformity behavior shape opinions on observable facts, look at Asch experiments.
For this phone in particular, it's 5% for women and 85% for men. Assuming a lot of things, the majority of the population cannot fit this in their pocket.
It's hard to find research about this, but I think a lot of people might think that yes, phones are too big. (And that's not even thinking about hand size and how it affect comfort of use).
[0] https://www.fairphone.com/en/2024/01/24/have-you-seen-the-sc...
[1] https://www.fairphone.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Fairpho...
Now Apple has removed that ... and I am not happy. Yes, the functionality is theoretically available by configuring the 'smart button'. But I don't physically see the state of the device without picking it up.
At least in the US geofencing warrants are a thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geofence_warrant
It is prudent to protect oneself against that.
For protests, the physical switch is an attempt to find a technical solution to a societal problem, which rarely works out. You may as well keep your (Android) phone in your pocket (but turned off, though that won't help with iOS' Find My network).
That might be true on planet Ogo, but not on planet Earth.
> "For protests, the physical switch is an attempt to find a technical solution to a societal problem, which rarely works out."
Another utterly absurd statement. Killswitches are, amongst other places and situations, useful on the battlefield (and therefore urban "battlefield", e. g. protests). And turning a practical solution to tactical and operational problems into a discussion about the inapplicability of such solutions to cure the "ills of society" at large is just... bizarre.
2. That advice sounds more reasonable if you assume a reasonable government that is only interested in tracking people who are torching cars. Governments have retaliated against political dissidents in the past who have committed no crimes.
I wear a helmet and leather when I ride my motorcycle. Obviously, it'd be safer to never ride the motorcycle. But, I want to the ride the motorcycle, so, if I'm going to do it, it makes sense to mitigate my risk on it.
If people want to go to protests, they should, however a killswitch isn't good enough imo - you should leave your phone at home so the cops don't steal it from you, force you to unlock it with your fingerprint or faceID (a valid legal order in the USA), and then hunt through the contents to hit you with some bogus charge.
First and foremost, it would be less noisy! What MC riders tend to conveniently forget is that they are putting the burden of having to deal with the noise they produce on everyone around them. Yes, your safety is also important (for you), but the noise you're producing is an issue for everyone around you.
Also, imo cars and their driver's dependence on them are a significantly greater cause of noise pollution than me and my stock pipe motorcycle, or even a harley. Hundreds of car tires rolling by on the road all day every day is so horrendously loud I can hear it from the 21st floor of my parent's apartment. When the 3 nearby red lights line up perfectly it's suddenly so quiet you can hear the cidadas on the mountain.
Not to mention the beeping, in the city I can hear a car beep from hundreds of meters away, echoing off the buildings. Or sometimes when I'm a pedestrian they'll dare to beep at me for the crime of walking in a way that inconveniences them, that's very very loud!
I take my motorcycle from my apartment straight into the basically unlived-on mountain roads, two weekends a month at most. I highly doubt I'm burdening anyone even a fraction what the average car driver does to tens of thousands of people every week.
Governments and carriers retaining months of location history data is a risk. If the Russians invade and get a hold of that data, a lot of people suddenly become at risk, for no good reason other than it being around "just in case".
We've seen it happen here in the Netherlands when the nazis came in and happily browsed through the city archives, which contained a details count of how many people of what religion lived in each neighbourhood.
I have nothing to fear from the current government, but with the rise in ultraconservative, anti-intellectual, extreme right wing politicians across the globe, a lot of people may not want to be recorded having been to things that are perfectly safe today.
All of that said, as long as you don't have an iPhone, you can just turn your phone off. It'll power down the CPU. If you don't believe the manufacturer, then you'll have to measure the voltage on the PCB traces yourself, but so should you when you buy phones with a physical off switch.
Turning off connectivity doesn't help as much to guarantee your privacy as the phone could theoretically be recording and then upload the recording later, when you turn it back on (if it was thoroughly compromised, which admittedly seems unlikely, but nevertheless it would be nice to have some guarantee that it's impossible).
Then once I'm there, what do I do with the phone? Ask to put it in a separate room and hope that the microphone isn't powerful enough to pick up our conversation?
I could turn it off entirely, but what if someone needs to call me for an emergency?
For me, as a user, the easiest solution would be to have a killswitch. I understand that building it would be more work, of course :)
Yes, that's what I had to do for meetings that the organizer thought were important enough. Also, in very sensitive areas special rooms with anti-eavesdropping gear are common [1].
> I could turn it off entirely, but what if someone needs to call me for an emergency?
But you would also not be reachable if the killswitch is active ;)
Don't get me wrong, I think a killswitch can make a lot of sense for highly sensitive areas (R&D, politics, military, ...), but I don't think Fairphone 6 are the devices that target this demographic and thus should not include one. Furthermore, current "offline" measure seem to mitigate the problem okay enough to not need such a killswitch - else we would already have phones with such features. And lastly, killswitches can only mitigate parts of the features modern spyware [2] implements and does not protect from simple human-based errors like the United States government group chat leaks [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitive_compartmented_inform... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(spyware) [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_government_group...
I would be, because I asked for a killswitch for the microphone and cameras, not a killswitch for connectivity like the original comment.
If I get a call while the killswitch is active, I can stop the sensitive conversation, turn on the microphone, and answer the call.
Wireless-only, data-harvesting slabs are good enough for ME, so they oughta be good enough FOR EVERYONE!
What a lot of people talk about is a headphone jack. But even that niche has been filled by USB-C adapters for people that really want them and not only talk nostalgic about it.
The demand for a headphone jack is fueled by functionality and sustainability concerns, not nostalgia - can't, too recent a change and current devices do have the port.
The one upside is convenience of not having a separate dongle, which is pretty well offset by the significant increase in phone size needed to accommodate the jack.
For the external DAC, you have to balance the "you could buy that once" against all the consumers that are pushed by the omission of the headphone jack to buy throwaway head- and earphones with glued in batteries. There is no chance in hell that the waste produced of both paths is in favour of the jackless phones.
Would you want less battery?
I doubt they'd even get the RND cost for that change back, this is a feature no one cares about except a very very small minority within a small minority. I'm a hardcare FOSS only user and only use grapheneos/fedora linux on my devices for privacy and security reasons and even I am not remotely concerned about hardware switches when i can just powerdown the wifi/Gps/wwan connection.
At the moment iPhones seem to drain power even when they are "off" which makes me suspect that they aren't, in fact, actually fully powered off. There have been a few occasions when I have been without a charger for one reason or another, and would like to be able to fully power off my phone in order to save battery.
I think you overestimate the appeal of such a feature
They probably don't want to position themselves against security-focused phones as they would likely be compared unfavorably with them. That is unless they also do whatever it takes to enter that market, for example by supporting a security-focused OS like GrapheneOS.
They could have kept the headphone jack though, but I guess they wanted to sell their earbuds (with replaceable batteries! which is at least a good point).
Kind of defeats the purpose, no?
put at least 12 GBs or just don't even bother, EU already has rules for software updates and repairability, so there're not that many selling points left