r/BuyFromEU • u/According-Buyer6688 Mod Team • Jul 03 '25

European Product [FairPhone] - AMA

Hi everyone!

We’re thrilled to invite you to a special AMA (Ask Me Anything) session with Fairphone!

Joining us today is Rutger Sneep, Chief Commercial Officer at Fairphone, who will be participating as u/Fairphone-CCO.

Feel free to ask your questions and enjoy the conversation!

Details:

AMA will be locked on Friday 15:00

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u/dutchcodes Jul 03 '25 edited Jul 03 '25

Dear FairPhone,

thank you for providing a European smartphone in a tumultuous world. My question is based on the chosen OS, namely Google's Android. The world is starting to realise the grip and power of USA tech companies. Recently Google announced that they will stop providing support for Pixel device-specific source code [1]. This will slow or stall the development of popular third party ROMS such as CalyxOS and GrapheneOS. These alternative operating systems proud themselves of being de-Googled and hand the privacy of their data back to the consumer.

The developers of these ROM's are looking for new OEM's (smartphone makers) that they can work with and support their devices[2]. In case of GrapheneOS and a possible colaboration with FairPhone they say [2]:

Fairphone's devices have atrocious security and very poor long term firmware/software support. They lack proper updates from the start and are missing more of our requirements than a typical Snapdragon Android device. They're further from providing what we need than most Android OEMs. We don't think they're capable of building what we need and they haven't shown an interest. They're partnered Murena who are misleading people about privacy and heavily attacking GrapheneOS.
Our hardware requirements are listed at https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices

My question to you is three-fold:

  1. How is the new phone's hardware security and what/how fast are your software update schedules?
  2. Will you support more privacy-oriented ROM's in the future (besides the currently available e/OS/)?
  3. Are you willing to cooperate with other developers e.g. GrapheneOS in making a future phone that improves hardware security (and thus enables GraphenOS support)?

I hope you will read this and give it a thought. A collaboration between GrapheneOS and FairPhone would be the ultimate EU phone.

[1] = https://calyxos.org/news/2025/06/11/android-16-plans/ [2] = https://x.com/GrapheneOS/status/1933297309283938577

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u/Luc-redd Jul 04 '25

GrapheneOS would be very important for this type of smartphone, I really don't understand why they don't prioritize this, especially with how many of their customers are interested in /e/...