- cross-posted to:
- gadgets@lemmit.online
- cross-posted to:
- gadgets@lemmit.online
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I’ve been using my FP6 with e/os for a week now and I’m very happy with it.
My phone before it was a S10.
Canada please!
Article is paywalled for me
They decided to paywall the verge for me too
But it’s perfectly visible with noscript
The fun part is that I used to whitelist the verge on my ad blocker because I liked it. Ok, you get nothing, then
Best I could come across. Can’t access the other archive sites atm for some reason.
I love that they finally listened and added back the jack!
Is this ironic or did they actually? I kind find any source saying they did.
They did not. Source: I looked all over the one I’m holding.
I’m very tempted to get one, at least once there’s a lineage build for it, since it will let me finally degoogle completely. Currently on an S24 and even with ADB it’s still a nightmare with the phone constantly telling me there’s an “issue” with my google account (which doesn’t exist anymore) and google services like gemini reinstalling after updates.
/e/OS is a pretty good de-Googled alternative, fully supported. :)
And based on lineage!
I might try it out then. I’ve heard mixed things on e, something about security patches coming months later than other ROMs, but I see murena claim that they are in line with most android manufacturers, just not as quick as hardened ROMs like graphene. Maybe I’ll see this week about swapping over.
A little rant about that, sorry in advance:
The Graphene team seems very busy trash talking /e/OS and Fairphone on social media (at least Mastodon) for not being secure enough.
Their criticism boils down to how nothing except GrapheneOS on a Pixel phone can ever be “secure enough”, but they are weirdly aggressive and insistant about it targetting /e/ specifically.
I used to care when I saw their posts as of course I want my phone to be reasonably safe, but the more I looked at it the more it boled down to bullshit.
Furthermore:
- They insist one should buy a Pixel phone produced by Google - avoiding Google is my #1 priority from the start. Clearly my values don’t overlap with theirs
- They pretend like /e/ is super dangerous because non-0-day exploits can get patched later. Yet /e/ provides software updates for much longer, while in the past all my phones that didn’t break right away have immediately stopped receiving updates. Longer software support = more security.
- Contained apps is not so important if you don’t install random bullshit on your phone. I get as much as possible from f-droid, which is very well screened.
- The communication of the GrapheneOS team around this has been pathetic to the point where I have frankly lost trust in the project. I struggle to trust a team I don’t respect. /e/OS was started by the founder of Mandrake Linux, and as far as I’ve seen he seems to have values that align with mine.
- I like /e/OS. It lets me avoid companies like Google, block trackers, and just use my phone free of things I hate and cannot control or underdtand. For me, that is security.
Thanks, a good rant is nice to read sometimes. Completely agree on Pixels – even if I got second hand, they seem so unreliable based on having one in the past and knowing a few that have had one. There seems to be so much toxicity coming from that project.
From my understanding, /e/ is indeed less secure than AOSP due to patches being slower. Being somewhat de-Googled might make it more private, but that isn’t the same thing as more secure.
I think the main thing here is that Graphene thinks it’s irresponsible when people describe other ROMs as “secure” or “hardened” when they realistically aren’t, especially when they’re running on hardware that doesn’t really support high levels of security from 3rd party ROMs (this is a large part of why GrapheneOS only supports Pixels). Many phones don’t support locking the bootloader with 3rd party OS, and many don’t even have a secure element. Many also don’t have great track records with keeping kernels and firmware up to date. In all of these cases, you can’t really make strong guarantees about the security of the device with any 3rd party OS, including /e/.
Being somewhat de-Googled might make it more private, but that isn’t the same thing as more secure.
I would say this depends on how you perceive threats. For me the one risk I am worried about is surveillance capitalism, and I want to be safe from that above all else. I don’t care about locking the bootloader because local threats is not a concern for me. I just don’t want any data on my phone usage to end up with capitalists. For me that is safety, as nobody else has any interest in or capacity to spy on me.
If I was a target of Russian or American intelligence officers I might see it differently of course, but in that case I would probably be reluctant to use a phone much at all.
@cabbage
Hi cabbage! Can’t see what you are replying to from my instance, so don’t know what “about that” in your first sentence refers to. But anyway, your post contains more falsehoods than correct things. I’ll quote every part of your post below and give corrections and accurate information:> The Graphene team seems very busy trash talking /e/OS and Fairphone on social media (at least Mastodon) for not being secure enough.
You are maybe unwillingly, maybe willingly, heavily misportraying what GrapheneOS does across social media. /e/OS and Murena have heavily attacked and harassed the GrapheneOS team and its founder over the last few years. You also have to look at the personal accounts of the /e/OS and Murena founder, Gaël Duval, to get an overview of that. GrapheneOS responds to shis harassment, which is not really “trash talking” but defending their own project. GrapheneOS most often does this in replies to other people that mention GrapheneOS and /e/OS in the same post/thead and unfairly compare to the operating systems. Sometimes they also make standalone posts, which is in response to harassment and misinformation that has been going on for long. This is a good example of a long-form post explaining using objective facts why this OS is not recommended: https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/24134-devices-lacking-standard-privacysecurity-patches-and-protections-arent-private
Note that /e/OS started this by sharing misinformation about GrapheneOS on their forum in response to /e/OS users questioning certain security practices by the developers.
> Their criticism boils down to how nothing except GrapheneOS on a Pixel phone can ever be “secure enough”, but they are weirdly aggressive and insistant about it targetting /e/ specifically.
Not at all the case, GrapheneOS sometimes even praises other operating systems and devices. They have said many positive things about iPhones and iOS. They also regard the stock Pixel OS on Pixel phonse as relatively secure. If you can’t run GrapheneOS, iOS or PixelOS, they recommend sticking to the stock OS of your manufacturer, that is because most other OSes regress privacy and security compared to the factory OSes that ship with them. Regarding targetting /e/OS that has to do with their own behavior (see earlier in my reply).
> They insist one should buy a Pixel phone produced by Google - avoiding Google is my #1 priority from the start. Clearly my values don’t overlap with theirs
They are not uniquely against Google. Avoiding Google is not the goal of GrapheneOS. Achieving privacy and security while retaining usability compared to mainstream OSes is the goal. They are not uniquely wanting to protect users against Google. Many companies have privacy-invasive practices and it wouldn’t make sense to overfocus on Google. There are even companies that handle privacy and especially security much worse than Google. Because GrapheneOS doesn’t want to overfocus on Google specifically, they have nothing against users deciding to install and use Google apps. They only want Google to be treated as others if users decide to use it. This is evidenced in how they handle sandboxed Google Play, they just want those Google apps, if users decide to install them, to be treated the same as any other user-installed app. This is different from other Android OSes that treated Google Play as priviliged instead of regularly sandboxed.
They also don’t insist on you buying one. Other phones just happen to not meet the hardware requirements which are listed on the FAQ on their website: https://grapheneos.org/faq#device-support
> They pretend like /e/ is super dangerous because non-0-day exploits can get patched later. Yet /e/ provides software updates for much longer, while in the past all my phones that didn’t break right away have immediately stopped receiving updates. Longer software support = more security.
They don’t give longer software support. /e/OS is constantly lagging behind Android releases. They also lag behind on the (incomplete/partial) backports of security patches to older Android releases and on browser engine patches. Note that many of these patches despite being called “security” patches are also privacy patches.
Also, if devices are EOL, you can’t properly support the device, even if you are giving software updates to it (which /e/ would give out way too late). Device support by a manufacturer delivering firmware and driver patches are needed for proper security. And, even if a device is still supported in that way /e/OS has historically failed to deliver those firmware and driver patches.
The founder of divestOS has made multiple publications about these update problems in the past. They were harassed heavily by /e/OS in response which is one of the main reasons why they stopped their divestOS project. Luckily, some of this stuff is archived or still available:
- https://codeberg.org/divested-mobile/divestos-website/raw/commit/c7447de50bc8fadd20a30d4cbf1dcd8cf14805a0/static/misc/e.txt
- https://web.archive.org/web/20241231003546/https://divestos.org/pages/patch/_history
- https://web.archive.org/web/20250119212018/https://divestos.org/misc/ch-dates.txt
- https://infosec.exchange/@divested/112815308307602739GrapheneOS has also offered some extended support to devices after they’ve gone EOL because of the drop of support by Google, but has always been honest about the fact that this isn’t complete support and is less secure. They’ve always pointed out to users that this is a “stopgap” to give users time to move towards a fully supported device. This extended support is also completely going away because Pixels have much longer support time since 6 series (5 years) and 8 series (7 years).
> Contained apps is not so important if you don’t install random bullshit on your phone. I get as much as possible from f-droid, which is very well screened.
Sandboxing is a standard Android feature. It’s not unique to GrapheneOS. GrapheneOS does harden the Androiid sandbox though and has a compatability layer to learn Google Play apps to also run within the sandbox, instead of running priviliged. Containing apps in a sandbox is important, it’s the basis of making sure malware doesn’t escape to more priiviliged levels within your phone.
F-Droid isn’t a good app source for having security. They don’t screen their apps properly at all. They just build and sign the apps themselves on outdated and poorly secured infrastructure, often lagging behind on the upstream app updates.
> The communication of the GrapheneOS team around this has been pathetic to the point where I have frankly lost trust in the project. I struggle to trust a team I don’t respect. /e/OS was started by the founder of Mandrake Linux, and as far as I’ve seen he seems to have values that align with mine.
Sad you lost trust when people communicate accurate information in a honest way. The founder of /e/OS acts as an immature bully on social media and heavily mismarkets his OS and uses this mismarketing in order to obtain funding from several institutions trying to support software projects. If those are you values, okay.
> I like /e/OS. It lets me avoid companies like Google, block trackers, and just use my phone free of things I hate and cannot control or understand. For me, that is security.
You don’t avoid Google with /e/OS. It uses MicroG and microG connects to Google services and runs as a priviliged app. Also, AOSP is largely written by Google employees and /e/OS is based on AOSP… Mike Kuketz, a privacy and security researcher, has covered this usage of Google services. In addition to that, he also covered how /e/OS tracks users via their update client and has also talked about the patch delays I mentioned earlier: https://kuketz-blog.de/e-datenschutzfreundlich-bedeutet-nicht-zwangslaeufig-sicher-custom-roms-teil6/
Note that /e/OS also adds many things on top of AOSP which signficantly hurt privacy and which probably don’t align with your values at all. For Speech-to-Text, /e/OS sends user data to OpenAI without consent: https://community.e.foundation/t/voice-to-text-feature-using-open-ai/70509
Google offers to do this locally and Apple does it locally by default. GrapheneOS is currently working on the development of its own STT which will also be private.
Exactly.
Since /e/OS is not a security-hardened mobile OS, it is targeting standard industry practices. Therefore, for a given release on month N, our current work-flow is to integrate Android security patches from month N-1. As a result, in the worst case, it will take up to 9 weeks to roll out the latest available security updates.In most cases, it will be much sooner.
An exception is made for 0-day exploits: in this case our policy is to build and roll out a patched version of /e/OS as soon as possible.
/e/OS is good, I also use Calyx with MicroG and all of my bank apps work.
$600 I’d go for it… $900 in the US… :-( can’t justify it. I’ll keep watching closely though. I so want one of these. As well as a Framework laptop, in the future.
900 as a flagship price, for mid tier phone, not worth it.
Lol tariffs singing their magic tune for Trumpistan?,
We are required to sing doot doot doot here, by law.
Not looking for a new phone for a few more years from now. But when I do I really hope that this phone will be available with a better camera and that Linux mobile options will be mature as well.
The fairphone 5 actually did extremely well if you look at MKBHD’s camera competition in 2024. If you don’t care about having very over-saturated, over-sharpened, images that pop on social media, then it is actually very competitive (except for with the pixel beating everyone). Miles better than a HMD global or Samsung A-series camera. It looks better than the Samsung S series and daylight iPhone in many shots.
I think the 6 has a similar camera. It’s never going to beat a DSLR, but it isn’t meant to.
As a Fairphone 5 owner, 6 seams like a downgrade to me, with it’s USB 2. I don’t care about whatever refresh rate they have, USB alt mode is way more important to me, also dropping audio jack was bad enough already.
Well, the audio problem is not going to be worse with 2.0. USB 2.0 can deliver 480Mbps. Audio data rates are in Kbps. Even at 192kHz, 24 bui studio recordings it is only 4.6Mbps. Stereo audio is easy from a digital perspective. Also, USB 2.0 is MUCH less susceptible to bad hardware design, bad cables and dongles, and bad shielding. A single twisted pair at low speeds and minimal negotiation is much simpler and almost never drops. In a joystick design I did, I had a 20cm long untwisted pair in testing and it never dropped at all.
USB 3.0+ (and especially external display capabilities) is an order of magnitude more noise sensitive, impedance variation limited, and susceptible to bad design. If you use a non-twisted cable, it won’t even negotiate USB 3.0 and will only work with 2.0.
That being said, USB 3.0+ for large file transfers and an external monitor desktop mode would be so much better, but I guess not many people use those.
Usb needs power. That means electricity that means more ftighin climate change.
Headphone jacks are smarter, clearer, and better for the environment
Usb head phones are trick. But hey. Who cates. Its the apocalypse
Do you think headphone jacks don’t use electricity?
I have accubattery on my phone. During the past 3.5 years with it, I have charged 2 143 031 mAh. That is at 3.7V average, 7.93kWh over 3 years.
An dongle jack usually had a chip that uses ~1mW. A headphone alone still has to power the headphones, which is between 0.25mW and 1mW.
That would take 1 000 000 hours in order to have a difference between 1kWh and 0.25kWh ( approximately 0.23€ difference), that is over 114 years of straight listening. That is the same difference of running your oven for about 5 minutes, once.
That is a very weird hill to die on for the environment. That is about 0.001s of energy consumption of a billionaire.
You’re over analyzing. Wasn’t comparing it to s anything cept blur-tooth and wireless wich do use more.
Point was the needlesness of wireless over wired. Guess I didn’t articulate it well
Dude, comparing USB headphone consumption to 3.5mm jack headphone power consumption is laughable. The power consumption is so negligible it’s insane. It’s on the order of magnitude if you were to forget to turn off the light in a room for 1 minute each year. Phones themselves consume extremely little power, I forget the exact number but I think it’s in the realm of a few kW/h per year, and USB headphones are going to be a fraction of a percent of that
Still no 3.5 mm jack.
Is this a real complain or I’m too obtuse to understand this as a running joke?
I mean there have been usb c to 3.5 for quite a while now.
This is a real complaint, and for me personally, it’s a complete dealbreaker.
There have been converters, but I don’t want to choose whether I want to charge my phone or listen to music (¿por qué no los dos?, i.e. “why not both?”). I also don’t want to add up lines of dongles for something as primitive and actively used as a headphone jack.
3,5mm jack doesn’t take much space and is used by many people, so why remove it?
For regular companies, the answer is clear: to sell you wireless devices often produced by the same companies, costing more.
But for Fairphone, a “fair” company that always shipped their phones with it, this seems like a betrayal. Failing to mention this giant point of concern is not great for a review article, either.
yeah so? If you need to regularly use one of those then that is a good argument for having it in the device itself
I bought 4 of these before I’ve found one that does not add background noise that hurts ears.
Real complaint.
I really do want it because I hate being forced to buy superfluous shit that didn’t need to exist to get the same functionality I had previously. I’m also not getting a new car every friggin’ year so I still drive something without bluetooth (I also can’t just get a new radio for it) and would rather listen to my own playlists than ads on the radio.
The acceptable compromise would be packaging a 3.5mm to USBC jack with the goddamn phone. If the real reason it’s not there was because of space in the device, this practice would be standard.
Packaging the USB-C-to-3.5 doesn’t solve the problem for me. I could plug in a headphone or line out AND a charger at the same time. And yes I frequently used that. There’s are adapters that do both, but they are fiddly.
Also I will need to have that stupid adapter with me. I have many many headphones. There’s a headphone in every jacket I own (you never know when your need one). Every backpack. I then forget to bring the fucking adapter, and what use is all the depositing of headphones so I’ll always have one? I’m not adding adapters to my headphone stashes, that’s for sure.
I really do want it because I hate being forced to buy superfluous shit that didn’t need to exist to get the same functionality I had previously
This is the same enegry as complaining about a new car not being able to play your old tapes.
When CDs started taking place of cassettes, most vehicles had BOTH tapedecks and CD players. They didn’t immediately ditch the old shit. They actually compromised.
And how long have phones and cars had bluetooth and aux?
IDK; I havent had a car with bluetooth yet.
So get a 20 year old phone to match your car?
That’s a bad comparison tbh. Bluetooth audio isn’t a superior technology over wired audio (in many ways it’s inferior). The two have always been included together with no issue until one company decided to drop one of them in order to more easily sell more expensive and less durable stuff. Other companies followed like sheep.
With aptx codec, its nearly the same as cd quality without the hassle of cds.
Hardly. The quality is worse than the mp3s I downloaded from the pirate bay back in the day. Aptx hd is better but fairly uncommon. Sbc in high bitrate wounds fairly good but I’ve only come across it on linux with pipewire.
A data rate of 352kbps for aptX and 576kbps for aptX HD is hardly cd quality. It’s plenty for Spotify of course.
I’m not against BT headphones, but you don’t need to remove the headphone jack for it.
A data rate of 352kbps for aptX and 576kbps for aptX HD is hardly cd quality.
Those are compressed bitrates of the full 1.4mbps of a cd. Aptx hd is near lossless. You’d have to be a serious audiophile to notice the difference. Which case, are you going to be listening from your phone with its shitty DAC?
It’s a real complaint to an extent; The real issue is that the jack itself isn’t enough, to be worth anything it needs a good DAC behind it and there have only been a handful of phones ever that have had that. So the jack complaint itself is mostly a meme as yeah, the USBC splitter option would sound just as good as most jacks built in.
The value of the fp is the refurbished market. All the component can be replaced, and the system will be maintained for years by the os.
I’m happy to see a new one in the market, because it means I will be able to upgrade my fp4 for cheaper now! 😁
these phones seem pretty intriguing to me with their focus on repairability but i genuinely don’t see the point of they don’t come with an audio jack
Agreed. Freedom from pricy expendable headphones is a thing. And converter-dongles are a ghetto stop-gap created to check boxes on a brochure.
I’m still on my Galaxy Note 20 Ultra. People getting new phones every year or two do it because they want to, they don’t keep their phone in a case, or it got ran over or lost at sea or stolen.
My phone is five years old. Five years from now there will be very few Faiphone six’s left in use. Why do you think they’re already on their sixth iteration of phone? Can you upgrade the Fairphone two and make it just as good as the six?
How is company releasing newer better product stopping buyers from holding their phone until it breaks?
This is a weird hot take.
Fairphone advertised itself as a long term upgradeable option, but the reality of it is that no one really keeps them longer than many other phones. They dropped pretty much any modular upgrade features they originally were shooting for.
I don’t hate it or anything, but having 8 years of security updates in a phone that’s 2 years behind on an apu and only has 8GB of ram is a mixed bag of usefulness. It’s good, but you’re left paying $900 for a $400 phone, hardware wise.
have had my 5 for 2-3 years now.
I’ve had some issues with buggy UI. that’s mostly because I’m using a different homeapp than what it came with because the stock one is garbage.
a mostly enjoyable experience and hope to have at least another 6-8 years on it.
designed my own protective case that hides the wireless charger. it’s probably the best case on any phone I’ve ever had. the 10 or so times I have dropped it, more damage was done to the ground than to the phone or case.
it’s put dents in my hardwood and even chipped off the blacktop of a parking lot. my wife thought she broke her toe once when she dropped it and tried to stop it from falling with her foot.
the phone is a fuckin tank and reminds me of the old Nokia bar phones.
I have a FP 4 that is just starting to get screen burn. I will probably just replace the screen soon to be honest and keep using it.
Nokia bar phones didn’t need a case on em.
hey phone twin how’s life with your atrophied pinkie finger?
Please release an FP6 mini. Model its size on iphone 13 mini or better yet, the 2018 SE. It would be worth more to me than the current gigantic model so I would pay more for it.
The problem is a lot of people see they want small phones, but in practice almost nobody actually buys small phones. The reason companies don’t make them, and many have tried, is they just don’t sell. Fairphone is a pretty small company. They do not sell that many phones, so having multiple SKUs of the same phone would just tank their profitability.
I agree. FP needs to walk a fine line between ethics and being profitable. In FP threads people keep making demands instead of being able to compromise
You worked to create a phone made with ethical factory conditions which no one else does? How nice! Wait, what do you mean it doesn’t have a headphone jack/ is too big?! I don’t care about the people anymore
Same with people saying “the price is not worth it for a mid tier phone” yes of course it’s not, you’re partly paying for how it’s manufactured, which has no direct benefit to you as a user. This is an ethical purchase. Recycled cotton t-shirts made in Germany cost 40 euro, I wonder why?
More iPhone Minis sold in 2 years than SteamDecks in its whole life, and only one of those devices is considered a failure. It’s not that nobody wants them it’s that no company wants to make a phone that can’t run all the services they are trying to get you to subscribe to. Why else wouldn’t Apple chuck the innards from one of their watches into a small phone case and call it the iPhone Nano? It would literally cost them nothing more than they are already spending on R&D.
It’s not that nobody wants them it’s that no company wants to make a phone that can’t run all the services they are trying to get you to subscribe to
That doesn’t really make that much sense. A toaster can run most apps people use nowadays. Apple would sell you a brick if it had their App Store on it. There is an argument that they want to upsell you to bigger phones so that you pay more for the device itself, but if it was really worth it for them to offer smaller versions, I’m sure they would. Their biggest profits by far are from the App Store. And if they really were ignoring that market in the hopes of upselling people, then other companies would offer mini phones and people that want them would switch. But they’re basically nonexistent.
Case and point, mini version accounted for barely 5% of sales in 2021: https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/apples-iphone-13-mini-is-over-ending-this-small-screen-fan-favorite/
Do you really think that Fairphone, a company with sales in the thousands, should cater to five percent of the market? And comparing this to the SteamDeck is also not really fair, because Valve owns Steam and they subsidize SteamDecks via purchases from Steam. Fairphone doesn’t earn anything from purchases made on the Play Store. And in addition the SteamDeck is considered a success because it captured like 50% of the market when it released. The market is in general really small for these devices, but the SteamDeck was a notable success because it managed to become the go-to device. Were the market for handheld consoles as big as the phone market, the SteamDeck very much would not be considered a success.
Toasters don’t run on batteries. There is a physical limit to how small they can make something and still have it not overheat while running AI bullshit both from the voltage and the frequency.
I didn’t mention fairphone I mentioned Apple. Who currently sell the Vision Pro which has sold about as well as the Virtualboy. Even by your own argument if the Mini has more than %50 of the small phone market it should have been considered a success. They make an iPad mini that is well known to be the worst seller of all the iPads too and doesn’t have all the features of the other iPads… but it can run their AI.
I didn’t realize you weren’t the original commenter. But still, AI is a fairly new focus and small phones have been on the way out for a long while. I don’t know the reason why they discontinued the iPhone minis and didn’t discontinue the iPad mini, but ultimately, the conversation was about Fairphone and my point was that the actual demand for small form factor phones isn’t as large as some people make it out to be, and as such, it would not make sense for Fairphone to make one.
And as a side another note, the Apple Vision Pro is a strategic investment into future technologies. The product isn’t meant to be successful in and of itself, it’s meant to be a first step, so Apple could get a foothold into the market. And when hopefully VR becomes big in the future, they can capitalize on it. Small form factor phones aren’t a new technology, so this isn’t really comparable.
They technically already did this. There’s an apple watch that you can put a sim card in that works like a phone. Maybe that’s what you were referring to?
I’m not referring to 5G enabled smartwatches, just using the watch hardware to make a smaller, lesser powered phone. AFAIK you still need an iPhone to activate an Apple Watch even if it’s the cellular version.
“<good thing> is no longer a compromise (except in the US)”
Yeah that’s about what I expect 🥹
