I am thinking about buying a fairphone. Is it less of a privacy nightmare than your typical Android phone?
The FairPhone comes with stock Android, but you can easily unlock the bootloader and install a different ROM. Some that I know are available for the FairPhone 4 are LineageOS, CalyxOS, iodéOS and /e/OS. With all of these you can achieve a certain level of degoogling and privacy.
Many people will recommend you GrapheneOS, which is unfortunately only available on Google Pixel devices.
If you wanna stick to Fairphone, they maintain a de-googled version of the OS, the Fairphone Open (only open source code): https://code.fairphone.com/projects/fairphone-2/fairphone-open.html
Best of both sustainability and privacy is a used pixel with grapheneos installed
Buying a used phone does save resources and stops potential e-waste though.
Plus with an older phone there’s more likelihood that an alternative OS is available.
I guess it depends on what operating system you decide to use…
(There’s also Shift who make a similar product : https://www.shiftphones.com/en/)
Those phones looks suspiciously a lot like those Chinese dropshipped phones
67% of phones are made in China.* Many for Western companies. Using parts and materials sourced from around the world.
With shift flashing and rooting does not void warranty. With fairphone at least rooting does, don`t know about flashing tho. There is a community for degoogleing for sure tho.
Written from my fairphone after the Wifi chip on my shift died after 2.5 Years and it was to expensive to fix.
With fairphone at least rooting does, don`t know about flashing tho.
Source for that?
You must gain root privileges in order to flash anything; that’s what the oem unlock is for.
Whatever you flash has full access anyways.
https://forum.fairphone.com/t/does-rooting-void-warranty-for-fairphone-4/82441/16
I had this thread in mind however seems like I was partially wrong. But there does not seem to be a definitive answer.
Should have read the thread further the first time :D Sorry about that
Cannot see modules for sale in the shop which is rather strange for a modular phone. There is no details of their sourcing concerning rare earth parts . They push the recycling part real high when their documentation shows 450 Kg/year of effective recycling, where does the rest of their current devices come from? Finally They push consumerism quite far in their shop with their bundle buy our current phone and you get a free upgrade towards the next one we launch.
And what about the bikes they also make and sell? Making one type of good product in such a niche market should be focusing enough not to be distracted in making other household products with vastly different supply chains, especially when you aren’t a multi-billion conglomerate.
Fairphones can be bought already with Murena on it. Dunno how good they’re with privacy though
You can also but a FairPhone with iodéOS already installed in it, not from the FairPhone store, though, but from the iodé one.
