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points by grapheneos 2 days ago | 0 comments
Fairphones are designed and made for Fairphone by T2Mobile which is a Chinese ODM. Fairphones have very poor updates and security. Those devices are incredibly far from meeting the requirements for GrapheneOS and cannot be supported. Fairphones aren't European phones but rather Chinese designed and made devices sold by a European brand. T2Mobile not only designs the hardware but also builds and signs the firmware. Fairphone does very limited engineering and mainly combines AOSP, Google Mobile Services and the firmware/drivers from T2Mobile to make the stock OS. They're not in a position to meet our requirements. T2Mobile doesn't provide good security in practice and would need to greatly improve. Trying to get an ODM to improve security is only realistic with a security-focused organization as their direct customer and Fairphone definitely isn't.
[–] lucb1e 2 days ago
And there couldn't be reasons to buy a phone that includes hardware made in China which thus runs firmware components made in China. So long as you don't have to work in a cobalt mine yourself, who cares about non-security benefits right?
[–] grapheneos 2 days ago
Fairphone has a transparency report on their website about the manufacturing and supply chain which nearly entirely only provides a list of the companies, the location of their HQ and a link to their website for a subset of the companies. There's no information provided on the working conditions, pay or environmental impact of the supply chain. Past posts with vague details about this were mainly about their original ODM and they switched to 2 different ODMs since then. T2Mobile is their ODM since the Fairphone 4 and there's nearly no information available about it. Why did they switch ODMs twice and how do they compare? Is the supply chain for the T2Mobile-made devices more sustainable? Are they still prioritizing the ethics of the supply chain? None of that is clear.

Fairphone is marketed as being a sustainable device with good long term updates and an ethical supply chain. However, the updates are very poor from the beginning and get much worse over time. It isn't clear that the marketing about the supply chain is much more accurate. Pixels and iPhones get much better updates and hold up better over the long term. It isn't clear whether a Fairphone has better working conditions than an iPhone and it's quite possible an iPhone has lower overall environmental impact per device mainly due to the efficiency of scale.