6 Months with the Fairphone 5

Somewhere in December of 2023 I got my Fairphone 5 delivered. I was using an iPhone 12 mini at the time that was suffering from a pretty degraded battery and was in need of something else. That iPhone was my first one and also my last, the lack of customization on iOS was also getting a bit of an annoyance so the choice for Android was not a difficult one.

I did spend quite some time looking at various devices and wanted something that would last longer than the crappy iPhone battery which led to the Fairphone with its user-serviceable parts.

The hardware (while a little exotic with its “industrial” system-on-chip for the longevity), and some mediocre reviews about the camera performance which I don’t really care about, all seemed good enough for what I need.

A quick note on the price, yes, this is an expensive device for what it is. The flip-side is that this is a niche company with a niche product, so no economy of scale. Add in the quest to source parts and materials responsibly and you got the higher price tag.

I’ve got some gripes with this phone after the first half year but I will stand by my personal claim that it is a good device overall (… for me). The hardware has been solid so far, battery life is good (I usually end up with around 40% remaining at the end of a regular day). Fingerprint scanner is also very responsive and the phone is fast enough (for me at least) in general. The camera is just OK, which I’m fine with.

But… sadly it is not without a few bugs and little annoyances.

NFC “holding it wrong”

This one is probably more hardware related but after enabling Google Pay for the ability to pay for things with my phone I could not get it to work in stores AT ALL. Only after quite a bit of trial and error I found that the NFC chip does not appear to be at the top of the phone, but in the middle of the back! So when you hold your phone normally, you are covering the NFC chip with your hand and you’ll get all sorts of fun failures on the payment terminals like “Please present only 1 card”. On the phone side you can get some errors as well in the form of a very helpful “That didn’t work”.

After a while I figured out that I need to hold my phone on the bottom quarter so that the chip is not covered up and also not to close, or to far way from the terminal to make payments succeed. I’ve gotten used to it now but the iPhone was far more consistent and didn’t really require anything specific other than being near (ha ha) the terminal once you initiated the payment.

Quickstep troubles

Over on the Android side, things are not looking so great, at least for now. My hope is that things will improve over time with updates and I know that this might take some time. Here goes…

Quickstep (the default launcher application that ships with stock Android - your homescreen) has some really weird issues. Let’s start with the most glaring one, it breaks other (3rd-party) launcher applications! After installing Nova Launcher on my phone after I got it, things when pretty sour very quickly. The app-switcher (the thing that allows you to change between open apps), freaks out by scrolling all the way to the left on its own when using anything other than the default (Quickstep) launcher. It can even get stuck on the oldest open app, making it impossible to switch apps completely!

It’s been reported by others as well, but not everyone seems to run into this problem. There’s a work-around for it (clear the cache for- and force stop Quickstep) that temporarily solves the issue but it’s guaranteed to return. I’ve reported this issue to their support team but haven’t got any real response from them yet (other than “we’ll look into it”).

So this is pretty bad but actually it’s worse. Quickstep comes with a Google search bar on the homescreen by default. I have absolutely no need for that search bar (even when configured to a different search engine) but YOU CANNOT REMOVE IT FROM THE HOMESCREEN!. After some digging around I found that you can at least get rid of the search thing and have the current day/date sitting in its place (by force closing the Google app haha), but the fact remains that two rows on my precious homescreen real estate are held hostage by this anti-feature!

I can live with having to use the default launcher. But not getting full control of my homescreen is a really nasty smelly stain on an otherwise pretty good experience. The inability to use an alternative is only making things worse.

Software will make or break the Fairphone promise

The whole reason I picked this device is longevity, maybe not 10 years (we’ll have to see about that), but I’m aiming for a lot longer than the iPhone I had before. The only way to make this work is by having spare parts, which appears to be properly covered and (more important!) software support that can stand the test of time. It’s not looking so great right now and the homescreen thing is already (though very slowly) grinding away at my patience.

I’m not going to get rid of the phone over just this, but if this issue is not fixed in the future, longevity becomes moot. My tolerance for this will reach zero at some point and I’m going to buy something else while knowing I could make the Fairphone last longer.

If the software is buggy or otherwise anti-user/hostile than it might as well be a cheap throw-away phone because no one is going to want to keep a device for very long when the software experience is crap.

All negativity aside, like I wrote earlier, I like the Fairphone 5 and I believe in the case Fairphone is presenting. We need a lot more repairable tech. Specifically self-serviceable tech. Make it easy to extend the life a device. But good hardware alone it won’t work, gotta have the whole package, software included.