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Fairphone is now officially available in the United States

fairphone.com

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Re: Fairphone is now officially available in the United States

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>how do people copy edit this and not notice? I would assume they don’t, and they assume many people aren’t reading it either. Which includes me, even before LLMs came out. I would always skip the marketing and jump to tech specs and pictures/video.

Why have the marketing blurbs at all then? it's just throwing away tokens if most people don't read it.

Conformity. Demands for it are everywhere if you choose to see it.

Re: Fairphone is now officially available in the United States

#202

I got excited about this until i realized still no graphene. It seems like both sides have a huge incentive to support the other, I wish they would make it happen.

Fairphones have awful updates, privacy and security. They don't provide crucial hardware-based security features needed to have working encryption for the vast majority of users not using a strong passphrase. They don't provide what's required to have decent protection from remote attacks either. Their devices don't provide important driver and firmware updates we need to have for each supported device. Fairphones end up with an end-of-life Linux kernel branch after a couple years and have never migrated to a new one.

Fairphone has a very close partnership with Murena and replaced their own open source OS with /e/. /e/ and Murena have repeatedly falsely claimed GrapheneOS is mainly used by criminals and isn't useful to regular people. They've heavily propagated false claims about the usability, compatibility, privacy and security provided by GrapheneOS. These years of inaccurate claims have resulted in many people being misled about GrapheneOS and have done immense harm to it.

/e/ and Murena have even repeatedly claimed private and secure devices in general primarily benefit criminals and pedophiles:

https://www.clubic.com/actualite-604786-murena-e-os-intervie...

https://nitter.net/GrapheneOS/status/2040887784253141142

Murena is explicitly not on the side of people wanting protection from authoritarian surveillance by governments. Fairphone supported Murena's inaccurate claims when contacted by the media and their employees regularly participate in it. This is what they choose to market as private and secure:

https://nitter.net/GrapheneOS/status/2081837057433915603

Re: Fairphone is now officially available in the United States

#203

I got excited about this until i realized still no graphene. It seems like both sides have a huge incentive to support the other, I wish they would make it happen.

This always comes up, it will probably never happen, makes me sad as well.

See our response at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49355122.

Re: Fairphone is now officially available in the United States

#204
post #94

No standard audio jack? That's a dealbreaker for me, especially for something touting modularity, repairability, and user control.

Exactly. Hard pass on a phone without a 3.5mm headphone jack.

People who say, “You can use a dongle” or “Just buy Bluetooth earphones” are missing the point. It’s never about what compromises we, as consumers, can make; it’s about users’ choices and preferences.

I’m fine with manufacturers wanting to make more money by selling dongles or Bluetooth earphones, but I’ll never accept them doing so by removing features to force us to buy them.

Re: Fairphone is now officially available in the United States

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure their concerns are valid but just because GrapheneOS don't consider the Fairphone to meet their standards for security doesn't mean it is not worth considering for other people who may have different priorities. Fairphones have certain advantages over Pixels such as better repairability and more ethically sourced labour/components. IMO it's good to see the Fairphone do well (and I hope GrapheneOS's partnersh…

The Graphene devs can be a bit obsessive about security, but with a starting price above $600, I think the average user is probably better off with a Pixel 10a bought on sale closer to $300. The stock Fairphone OS seems to include Google services, which is kind of surprising and at odds with the focus on user control and all that.

Fairphones don't provide bare minimum privacy and security. Expecting that is not being obsessive. The flaws are increasingly glaring and easier than ever to exploit thanks to advances in AI models. People should care about this and should get a device with reasonable privacy and security such as an iPhone instead.

Fairphone 5 and earlier having an end-of-life Linux kernel with the Fairphone 6 coming up next is a disaster. Many months of delays for standard Android userspace patches from when they can first be shipped and years of delays for the full patches is also a major problem. An increasingly small portion of the patches is backported to older releases and they have months of delays for those.

Fairphones are also missing crucial industry standard hardware security features. People have come to expect their device will provide strong encryption with a random 6 digit PIN rather than a very strong passphrase but that's not the case with a Fairphone.

More information:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49354623

Re: Fairphone is now officially available in the United States

#206
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing in the story is that the SPU - the secure enclave on Qualcomm chips that is separate from just running on TrustZone on the main processor - is only available on Snapdragon 8 and X tier products. It's market segmented away from 7 series and below.

Also, I think Qualcomm has only started supporting MTE on Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. Older and cheaper SoCs do not support it yet. Outside that, I think only Google Tensor, recent Exynos generations, and Apple A-series support MTE (though IIRC Apple has an improved extension of it).

Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 has at support for MTE. It doesn't yet support running the whole kernel and userspace with it in practice as GrapheneOS requires but we're going to be working on it with Motorola and Qualcomm.

Re: Fairphone is now officially available in the United States

#207
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet GrapheneOS is better at everything that /e/ claims.

Not at running on sustainably produced, repairable hardware ;) (Wish it was though.)

Fairphones have atrocious updates which means they aren't sustainable devices. They use a multiple generation old SoC from the beginning with an artificially shortened lifespan. Fairphones are currently designed and assembled by T2Mobile. T2Mobile even signs the firmware on the devices. Prior to the Fairphone 4, they had 2 previous ODM partnerships. They're limited to what their ODM offers which was likely the reason they dropped the 3.5mm audio jack when they moved to T2Mobile for the Fairphone 4. The working conditions and supply chain management are largely up to T2Mobile rather than Fairphone.

There's a severe lack of actual evidence for Fairphones having a more ethical or sustainable assembly and supply chain than Apple. It's likely each one takes more resources to produce and they definitely don't provide comparable updates.

Re: Fairphone is now officially available in the United States

#208
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure their concerns are valid but just because GrapheneOS don't consider the Fairphone to meet their standards for security doesn't mean it is not worth considering for other people who may have different priorities. Fairphones have certain advantages over Pixels such as better repairability and more ethically sourced labour/components. IMO it's good to see the Fairphone do well (and I hope GrapheneOS's partnersh…

Unfortunately it looks like it's not just a issue of missing hardware security features: > Their partnership with Murena along with promoting it themselves with misleading marketing means no possibility of working with us. I want to like GrapheneOS, but the pettiness of its leadership is a real problem for the long term prospect of the project.

Refusing to work with organizations or individuals that are detrimental to privacy and security is not petty.

Murena does not provide private or secure products and has positioned itself to be against what GrapheneOS provides. A partnership with a company opposed to GrapheneOS and spreading misinformation about it would not be beneficial, and it is not petty to make the smart choice for the benefit of privacy and security.

Re: Fairphone is now officially available in the United States

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it pettiness or just sticking to their morals? Murena, as they mentioned, forwards data to OpenAI which is against pretty much everything Graphene stands for.

Only for one voice to text feature which is completely optional to use and can be replaced with something else. As another commenter mentioned, this voice to text feature is now an offline feature and no longer sends data outside the device. As another note, this Fairphone can be purchased without /e/OS at all. It’s now being sold in the US without Murena being involved at all.

/e/ has other privacy invasive services which are enabled by default. It gives highly privileged access to Google services which are always active and has user tracking in their update client.

/e/ and Murena repeatedly claiming privacy/security hardened devices mainly benefit criminals and falsely claiming they're mainly used by criminals shows what they believe:

https://www.clubic.com/actualite-604786-murena-e-os-intervie...

https://nitter.net/GrapheneOS/status/2040887784253141142

/e/ lacks many crucial standard privacy/security patches and protections:

https://nitter.net/GrapheneOS/status/2081837057433915603

Fairphones don't provide a reasonable level of privacy and security without /e/ either:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49354807

Re: Fairphone is now officially available in the United States

#210
post #64
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://community.e.foundation/t/voice-to-text-feature-using...

June 2025 Someone else shared the up to date info about this feature: https://doc.e.foundation/os/apps/voice-to-text > The earlier Voice to Text was a Premium-only, online feature: it streamed your speech to a third-party AI transcription service through an anonymising proxy, so it required a Murena Workspace Premium subscription and an internet connection. > The new Voice to Text is free, offline and on-device

/e/ has other privacy invasive services which are enabled by default. It gives highly privileged access to Google services which are always active and has user tracking in their update client.

/e/ and Murena repeatedly claiming privacy/security hardened devices mainly benefit criminals and falsely claiming they're mainly used by criminals shows what they believe:

https://www.clubic.com/actualite-604786-murena-e-os-intervie...

https://nitter.net/GrapheneOS/status/2040887784253141142

/e/ lacks many crucial standard privacy/security patches and protections:

https://nitter.net/GrapheneOS/status/2081837057433915603

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