Fairphone 6 and PostmarketOS working main camera | Hacker News Reader

Fairphone 6 and PostmarketOS working main camera

catcrafts.net

282 pointspizzaiolo75 comments

The part about getting authorized to test the emergency calling capabilities is cool! I should've expected that would be a thing but I didn't ever consider it.

Found the pixel modem engineer.

Ouch.

I feel the votes and excitement in this thread aren't from people with a Fairphone 6 or PMOS.

From the PMOS wiki: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Fairphone_(Gen._6)_(fairp...:

> No internal speakers or microphones are currently working. Media sound (not calls) is working if connecting a Bluetooth or USB audio device.

I got a Fairphone 6 last year, after having a OnePlus 7 Pro which I bought in 2019 and still worked flawlessly, apart from not having received an update in several years.

The Fairphone 6 works. It's slower and more buggy than a 7 year old flagship though. I'll probably use it until it dies in however many years time, but my overall experience with Fairphone has been that I've paid a huge amount for a below standard, poorly supported, but apparently fair phone. The Fairphone forums are a trainwreck too.

I really, really wish Fairphone was better, but the entire company experience is so janky for how expensive the products are.

A prime example: I thought I lost a few eclipse pictures because they weren't showing in the gallery after I took them. I'm pretty certain it's this same bug from over a year ago: https://forum.fairphone.com/t/fairphone-6-camera-pictures-mi...

Me and my partner both got our oneplus 7 pros at the same time, and hers also lasted. She upgraded at same time and just wanted/needed a phone that works for work, so she opted for the Pixel 9a instead. It's cheaper, faster, more reliable and better supported.

Sorry to rant - it distresses me a lot when good intentions take a lot of money and deliver a relatively subpar product and service. I guess this is the price of principled tech. It's really not great, unfortunately.

> No internal speakers or microphones are currently working. Media sound (not calls) is working if connecting a Bluetooth or USB audio device.

See the other blog posts by the same author in the story posted.[1] He's added support for these and other hardware parts for the FP6, currently being upstreamed directly to the Linux kernel.

[1] https://catcrafts.net/posts

Thanks for this. My main hope is that as PMOS become daily-driverable, the nature and number of irritated Fairphone users will quickly make PMOS a better alternative to any of the Androids available on FP6.

If that happens, the resultant hardware/software/freedom combo could be well worth the cost. I hope Fairphone make some big donations to PMOS if this happens - it would not be very fair for the people responsible for a buggy phone get all the money whilst the PMOS people who make it great, fair and open get nothing.

There are definitely trade offs with Fairphone but it's unfair (no pun intended) to compare them with a company like Google without mentioning their strong points.

Fairphone does focus on having a better social and environmental impact, this comes as part of the price. It does also focus on repairability which also comes as part of the price. If those are things you do not specifically value (which is fine), that definitely makes their products too expensive in comparison with other manufacturers. The support side could definitely be better but as a small company, I personally thinks it's okay.

I have a Fairphone 4 and I'm happy with it, it's fast, takes good pictures, and just works. It has great support in communities as well. I was able to easily change a part of a Fairphone 3 (dead usb c port) and the experience there was just great, they really made repairs super easy.

They're fair points. I do respect their ethos and what they're trying to do, that's why I hope they have more success than they're having at the moment. I do want to give equal weight and time to that. But at the end of the day, I'm buying a modern phone, it needs to behave like a modern phone.

FWIW, my understanding is the FP6 seems to be notably less successful and "just works" compared to earlier models.

It isn't really slow. It takes average pictures, and sometimes loses them. It regularly does annoying little freezes and bugs.

The FP6 has average spec, average performance, more bugs than average, worse/slower support than average (at least on their own forums) and a higher price than average.

I believe fair stuff done right should be at least as good as average, and I'm fine to pay more than average for that. When I pay more than average and get less than average, and looking like they're ignoring/avoiding problems in their own forums, that feels as though someone isn't being very fair towards their customers.

I share the same experience with My FP6. I want to love it. But the edges of experience are so rough it pains me damn near every day.

I'm flipping it as soon as Motorola releases their GrapheneOS compatible phone. I hate that I have no other decent options, and that phones are getting bigger and bigger, but I don't really have a choice.

If Apple would be so kind as to release an SE-sized phone again, I'd jump right back. iOS 26 is horrible, but they at least seem to be on the right track to improve things again.

> but they at least seem to be on the right track to improve things again

Where did you get this impression? It seems to be the opposite:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243075

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46322556

It's a bleak situation. I don't have a Fairphone (after much agonising, I went instead with a used Pixel when I finally decided to retire my previous phone). I love Fairphone's mission and hope they succeed but indeed it is very difficult to justify spending that much on a phone with those specs, particularly when the company is young and so its promises of replacement parts, extended updates, etc, are difficult to assess.

I have played around a bit with pmOS, originally on an early Pinephone (the "Braveheart" model, which was plagued with hardware issues) and more recently on an ASUS MeMO Pad 7 (which at the time was in the "Community" support category but appears to have since been archived by pmOS). Even on devices where it "works", it tends to be slow, buggy, very heavy on battery and some peripherals like GPS and camera very rarely work.

This is absolutely not intended as criticism of the Fairphone, Pinephone or pmOS teams - on the contrary they are doing fantastic and important work. I think the problem is just really hard when you're working against the interests of some of the wealthiest corporations on earth (and governments seem to have zero interest in helping solve it).

> I really, really wish Fairphone was better, but the entire company experience is so janky for how expensive the products are.

Fellow Fairphone user here & I don't really understand this comment. Why did you buy a Fairphone?

As far as I can understand, the main reason anyone would buy a Fairphone is because they want a fair(er) phone. That "fairness" involves reducing profit-driven exploitation - there's an implicit understanding there that that massively increases supply chain cost, right?

It just feels like you're trying to have your cake & eat it too here. Nobody should be comparing Fairphones to a flagship of any era.

Sorry, I strongly disagree with what you're saying here, and I think you're part of the problem. I bought a fair phone because I believe treating people and things fairly genuinely leads to a better output over time - it should, and it hasn't with Fairphone.

I'm not trying to have my cake and eat it, to extend your analogy, we both had the cake, we've both eaten it - it's the same cake. I'm saying I appreciate the cake was fair, I appreciate the staff were paid well, I appreciate good fair ingredients were used, I'm glad I bought the cake, I know why I did, because it aligns with my ethos.

All the necessary things that went into an average cake - and more - have been put into this cake. My point here is I don't understand why it tastes worse than the average cake. Based on my view of the world, it should taste at least as good as a regular cake, because it has more money, at least similar quality materials, and should have higher quality, more passionate labour involved.

I feel like you don't understand my comment because you've taken personal offence to me providing critical feedback about the taste of your favourite cake. I like your cake vendor, and the cake vendor cause. This is why I want them to succeed, which is why I provide the honest feedback.

If you say you can do something well, it just needs money and fairness, and people give you money and fairness, and you don't do the thing well... that's not really fair.

This is awesome stuff. Fully mainstream Linux with a normal userland running on a modern handset with all features will unlock a tremendous amount of change once it's there.

Things like running a distributed database for a community on top of the devices they own, hopefully also running true mesh networking.

It's already unlocked on other more open phones. Why do you think this time it will be different?

I didn't know about the FLX1S+, which looks about as close as to what I want as there is right now.

What I'm looking for is an 8GB phone that I can run Docker on, to host apps like DHIS2 & OpenMRS3 (so a JVM). I have the impression that this isn't easily possible with Halium-based kernels, but I'm not an expert.

Edit: oh and full access to the radio chips, so I can set up mesh networks (and a cherry on top :-))

Awesome! There are so many cool things we could be doing with our phones if they weren't locked to a single OS

Genuinely curious, like what cool things?

Calling our friends, maybe? No idea; I've tried desktop Linux on phones years prior and besides maybe being a potential portable cyber security rig it was only a cool oddity.

Apologies for self-linking here, but it's not just cool things, in my opinion it could transform humanitarian aid work. I wrote a use-case/short-story about it here:

https://ianso.blogspot.com/2025/11/what-we-dont-have.html

I love this. I see this vision, in many forms, yet have trouble articulating in a way that motivates and inspires others, including myself.

I don't think a lack of hardware and software technology is what is lacking, but rather a vision, a dream, a call to action and corresponding courage to act while facing down an invisible enemy that can only been seen by its effects on the world.

Thank you for articulating it clearly. It inspires me to take a step back from building, and consider what I'm building and why.

like running K8s on your old phones?

Like using your phone as a desktop computer, when it's connected to a screen and keyboard and runs a full desktop OS. Having a full access to all desktop apps, development environments. Also this, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49201496.

Also, choosing the OS means freedom to choose the interface you like or develop your own (or to pay somebody to do that for you). Freedom to not be in walled gardens.

We don't need multiple OSs for that. One unlocked and FOSS OS is enough.

I suppose it would be relatively slow and how too little memory to be usable for programming, for example.

You know, we used to develop on computers with less than a Gig of RAM. A phone with 6/8/12 GB should be plenty enough to to do some development on. Or even less if you don't need to compile.

Seriously, you can run the windows version of GTA V on a phone. It runs pretty ok as well.

I have no troubles compiling most stuff on a phone with 3GB RAM. I even worked on Mesa on it once when I was too lazy to set up cross-compilation. I only struggled with OOMs on some Rust apps so far (and I haven't even had zram set up sensibly back when I tried them, so maybe these would work now).

Just of the top of my head:

Running Firefox with uBlock.

Installing any app I want, not just the ones Apple allows.

Faking GPS data to hide my location from spyware that "requires" location permissions

(To be fair, you can do these on Android "for now", but Google is actively working hards towards the more locked-down Apple "experience")

I was recently working on porting PMOS to Xiaomi Poco X3 Pro, though switched to NixOS due to much faster update cycle. I got much further than I thought I would (though this was mostly possible due to LLMs without them it would waaaay longer), fixed everything including cameras except mic working in calls. Still bummered about that because I really wanted to try daily driving linux phone but alas not lucky.

I wish alternatives like Fairphone or other linux phones step up a game. They have too high a price and too low specs.

> I wish alternatives like Fairphone or other linux phones step up a game. They have too high a price and too low specs.

Check out the FuriPhone FLX1S, Jolla C2 and the Volla Phone Quintus - they all have decent specs for the price (relatively; the reality is that Linux phones will never be cheaper than mainstream Android phones due to the way the market forces work).

> working on porting PMOS to Xiaomi Poco X3 Pro, though switched to NixOS due to much faster update cycle

As in, Mobile NixOS? How was that?

I see AF algo has some trouble with defocussing a perfectly sharp scene for no reason. :)

Does this HW have access to PDAF pixel data?

Does ubuntu touch or postmarket os work reliably on the fairphone 6 now, or is this still just components working? Is it possible to use it as a daily driver?

What is that bit about Bedrijfsaansprakelijkheidsverzekering at the end? I've never heard of business liability insurance before. Does Germany not have an equivalent of an LLC?

He didn't create an LLC he's a 'stichting' which is basically a non profit with a specific goal to achieve.

He doesn't want to create an LLC because he doesn't want anyone to question his motives.

Also this is the Netherlands not Germany :)

A stichting isn't nonprofit without ANBI status. They can do whatever they want with the money afaik (technically: anything in accordance with the bylaws, but they wrote the bylaws)

That‘s Dutch, and the same sentence mentions Netherlands. Equivalent of LLC exists everywhere, but business insurance still makes sense if you want to stay in business after paying damages.

Business liability insurance is standard practice for those operating a foundation (the post calls it nonprofit but afaik that's not the same thing unless they intend to apply for ANBI status, after which you can donate tax-deductably, at least per my understanding)

I don't know if it's standard for other business types as well, like in a BV (afaik that's what you call LLC). If you're not the only shareholder, it might help prevent legal issues when you make some mistake and it just gets paid from insurance. That's the purpose of it in a stichting anyway (negligence claims; getting into debts where you could allegedly have foreseen that the foundation can't afford it)

I’ve recently been demonstrated NixOS running on a Fairphone (in large part due to the PostmarketOS efforts) and was just blown away by how responsive everything was (legitimately the same as any Android phone, comparable to a low-end Android in Waydroid!). What a far cry from the old Pinephone demos!

Awesome

wow amazing

This aged well

Great job.

My advice would be to not take the frustrating and useless road of a non-profit structure for some things that you do for pleasure.

The for-profit will be simpler and give you more liberties, and if, in the end, you have the good mindset that you want your creations to be shared freely, you can do it anyway. It is a state of mind.

Terrible advice

Why? Nonprofits involve a specific governance structure that may not be optimal, especially for small operations.

That is very region specific, in the Netherlands it's quite easy to operate a non-profit

I m quite sure that even in the Netherlands, you will have a lot of obligation and reporting that will be imposed on you because of that. To ensure that the non profit is not used as a for profit.

Even in the day to day, like for him to pay himself a salary or do expenses, things could be tricky as administration could easily consider as personal abuse of funds of a non profit.

GrapheneOS is a non-profit and they make the most usable, private AOSP operating system.

PostmarketOS can't partner with any OEM/ODM and volunteers have to use hacks to unofficially implement basic Android 1.0 functionality years after a device was released? That's sad to see. This is just lame, drivers should be implemented by those who work on them..

We had Librem 5 which had real OS support that didn't have to rely on third-party volunteers, I wish they released something more modern..

> PostmarketOS can't partner with any OEM/ODM

Is there any precedent to believe that such a thing is in fact possible?

> and volunteers have to use hacks

I have terrible news for you about how the official firmware works.

> to unofficially implement basic Android 1.0 functionality years after a device was released?

Conversely, in other places it's far better than Android 1.0. But yes, if you can only start developing against the device after it's released, then your software will be released after the hardware ships plus development time.

> That's sad to see. This is just lame, drivers should be implemented by those who work on them..

My general understanding of the Android ecosystem is that they do write drivers, and you don't want those drivers. I like to imagine that somewhere that out there somebody must be making phones with high quality software, but I've never heard of them.

Murena could, Jolla could, GrapheneOS could do that too (possibly Nexphone also did but we'll find out; only GrapheneOS will give us flagship experience though). Of course these (except Jolla?) are still based on the Android model, but this itself doesn't preclude creating a non-user-hostile OS (of course Google would never certify it), proprietary black-box OEM code only assumes some Android elements, not the end user experience..

> I have terrible news for you about how the official firmware works.

I've seen some e-waste ODM (Tinno) code and their freestyle philosophy on modifying the kernel code.. however they at least have to fix this so that basic functionality works as there's QA and serious bugs will affect certification and they'd not get paid. But here if you report a bug to PostmarketOS (but well, even LineageOS), nothing will happen unless you fix it (and if you submit a patch, it will sit there forever, welcome to FOSS).

> My general understanding of the Android ecosystem is that they do write drivers, and you don't want those drivers

What's wrong with pixel drivers for instance? I'm of course not talking about those written by e-waste ODMs like Tinno who can't even release GPL kernel sources properly.

> What's wrong with pixel drivers for instance? I'm of course not talking about those written by e-waste ODMs like Tinno who can't even release GPL kernel sources properly

A couple of issues , back from my sailfish os porting days (haven't touched it in half a decade so things might have changed):

1. You would still need to run a lot of Android user space to make use of these drivers. We had a separate second init system that runs a stripped down version of Android init, starting enough services to make use of these drivers.

2. These binary drivers are tied to the kernel and Android versions that were released with the phone. So if you wanted some of the newer kernel features (back then it was like better container support), you're out of luck.

Usually, all this means you rely on a lot of hacks to fix some bugs... And porting takes a lot of time and effort.

One thing that has changed in around that time (maybe) is that GKIs[1] are now standard across (Google-branded) Android devices. Board/SoC support is handled via kernel modules now. The builds are directly from the Android Common Kernel, and an explicit goal is to be able to upgrade kernels on-device. (This has actually been demonstrated on Pixel devices, though I'm not sure how widespread it's been across others.) The Common Kernel also doesn't take contributions, and specifically encourages vendors to just upstream their drivers instead. Not that this fully solves the problems you're describing, but Android as a platform has become more intentional about dealing with kernel fragmentation and making itself more structurally friendly toward mainlining.

For the Pixel specifically, Google actually is working to upstream its hardware drivers and enable devices to boot off mainline. [2]

[1] https://source.android.com/docs/core/architecture/kernel/gen...

[2] https://lpc.events/event/17/contributions/1445/

> PostmarketOS can't partner with any OEM/ODM

Where did you get this idea from?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com