Fairphone 3+

I have been wondering and I first got a Fairphone 3+ because I thought, among others, it was "greener". Then I realised that: - Fairphone 3 was already "slow" when it was released in 2019 - Fairphone 3+ was pretty much exactly the same hardware, but I bought it 2.5 years later - My Fairphone 3+ was annoyingly slow from the moment I bought it (I was using it less than a normal phone because of that, and I just completely gave up on using the camera and asked other people to take photos instead). - My Fairphone 3+ became painfully after 1.5 - 2 years. I did not change phone because the hardware was not running anymore. I changed because I just couldn't use the few apps I needed because they were unusable (lagging and crashing). I don't mean games: banking apps, weather forecasts, public transports. Pretty much only Signal/WhatsApp were fine (slow, but fine). So I painfully kept my Fairphone 3+ for a little more than 4 years. Then I realised that people who buy an iPhone routinely keep it 6-8 years, without it being painful at all. Is it "greener" if I buy one iPhone/Pixel, or 2 Fairphones? I'm not so sure anymore. What I know is that the iPhone/Pixel are not painful to use.

I will repeat again what I'm saying since they announced the Fairphone 4: being able to repair the phone is good, but what I really would like to see is for them to go the framework route and design a phone with a standardized form factor. It doesn't need to be crazy modular, I'd just like to be able to upgrade mainboard/camera/display/storage/battery independently, and I'd like to push product development around these components instead of coming up with yet another iteration of an ethical-but-full-of-compromises device every two years. Promising 8 years of upgrades is only useful if your hardware is not sub-par. The Fairphone 3+ I bought was already "meh" when I bought it, after 3 years it felt sluggish. I wanted to upgrade parts of it, not a whole new device.

I guess it may be different now, but I was pretty disappointed with the Fairphone 3+. Maybe I was naive, but from the marketing I thought that they wouldn't make a Fairphone 4 before years, and actually they released it 6 months later. So I just ended up with a 2.5 years-old phone, knowing that the Fairphone 3 was already pretty slow when it was released years before. I didn't have to change it because the hardware didn't work, I had to change it because my apps (nothing crazy, just the weather and the maps app) were so laggy that they were unusable. Not mentioning the fact that it was therefore running an old version of Android, with the security implications coming with that. Going to Fairphone, I thought it was an "alternative" phone and that it would get support from alternative OSes (and I was running /e/OS), but what I had not realised at the time is that those will not magically compensate for the software updates. The Stock Android updates were years ahead of the /e/OS ones for my phone, for instance. I moved to GrapheneOS after that, because I get the security and updates I want.