for me the dealbreaker is the lack of a second physical sim slot. I really like the concept of Fairphone and would absolutely buy one, but I have a work sim and a personal one, both physical (not eSim) so Samsung it is for now
“<good thing> is no longer a compromise (except in the US)”
Yeah that’s about what I expect 🥹
I find it interesting how every post I see on Lemmy about Fairphone always has half of the comments complaining about the lack of a head home jack, but in real life I don’t know a single person that really laments it’s removal. All the people I personally know are fine with Bluetooth headphones. This is just such a loud minority, it’s impressive. I know that there is overlap between people that want a headphone jack and people that want a repairable phone, but still, I feel it’s way over-represented in the comments.
I absolutely hate wired headphones. It always get tangled, breaks or otherwise gets fucked up. I now have an Audeze Maxwell headphone and as a backup to their dongle, The LDAC bluetoooth codec combined with Qobuz Hifi sound is perfect for me.
Never missed the 3,5mm port.
The only thing in not loving is the planned obsolecense of most battery Bluetooth headsets.
(I do recognise and respect others for wanting the 3,5mm port, of course. To each their own preferred way of strangling themselves when listening to audio I guess)
Not sure why, but BT experiences interference when in my pocket. The signal gets choppy when sections of my torso get in the way. Which is always when my phone is in my pocket. So I got USBC headphones/dongle.
On a bike ride, I noticed the audio was starting to disconnect. This happens often on rides and runs since the USBC plug sticks out a lot from the port and slowly wiggles loose. Except this time it wasn’t loose. The leverage of the long plug on the short connector damaged the port. This never would have happened with a headphone jack. It has a strong connection that can rotate freely. Now I have a phone that can’t charge or play music.
My next phone will be a sony xperia some they still have the jack and still allow the bootloader to be unlocked.
This never would have happened with a headphone jack.
I call shenanigans on this statement. This exact scenario with a 3.5 mm would have seen the copper inside the connector break from stress. As someone who went through the evolution of Walkman, discman and mp5 players, I can’t count the amount of wires I destroyed just having them in my pocket when walking or riding. Even high end woven wires and shit, end up failing due to mechanical stress. It is just entropy. I’ve had more headphones in my life than I can recall, but somehow BT headphones have lasted me 3 years, more than any of the cheap wired headphones of the past. Only my expensive sannheisers have lived longer and that’s partially due to the fact they have detachable wires. So I can change them when they start to wear.
Okay, “never would have happened” is an exaggerated statement. But you’re talking about the headphone wires breaking. I’m talking about the USBC port on the phone itself breaking. I’ve never had a headphone jack PORT break. But Ive had 2 phones USBC ports fail from pressure on the plug.
I would much rather have the wire on headphones fail instead of the port on the device itself.
If only there was some sort of technology we could use to completely avoid any risk of mechanical wear and tear from either the port or the wires! Alas, we are doomed as there no such wire absent tech! Doomed we are I say, for black magic it would be to go in life without copper, and a curse upon us from the wretched absent jack port!
/ s
Are you sure it’s not a problem specific to your headphones or your phone? Unless you’ve got some sort of prosthetics/pacemaker or something like that your torso should definitely not be causing interferences.
I’ve had this issue for years across at least 3 different phones, and probably 4 different sets of headphones. Mix of buds and over ears. Different brands.
I don’t experience it much anymore, so I suspect its been fixed in more recent versions of Bluetooth.
No pace maker, no prosthetics, and I’m average weight. The Bluetooth tech was just half baked when it came out. Better now but I can still replicate the issue with older headphones.
I also experienced it a lot when walking around busy areas. Might be exacerbated by other nearby devices. No idea, but the point I’m trying to make is that removing the headphone jack from devices meant many people had to deal with this shit with no good alternative for years while the tech caught up
Do you wish people would stop requesting the headphone jack? Why?
The comment doesn’t wish for anything, it simply makes an observation
I still use a wired headphone.
You can’t beat the battery life of Infinity. Go non stop for a complete day and even or you forgot to charge, keep using the next day without any downtime.
For me, this is just one less thing to worry about.
Plus, I can use mine on flights instead of their sorry excuse of electronic waste.
My wireless headphone batteries last weeks and I can use them on planes?.. Unless I’m misunderstanding what you mean.
I don’t know any who offer weeks or continuous usage. I do know there’s a few with battery life of 30-100 hours (that’s a wide range yes) but that’s just a few days to a week and half in terms of endurance.
If you aren’t a heavy user, 3-4 hours a day, it can definitely last you for more than a couple of weeks
On god if you wear large beats over your head in any capital city you’ll get ur head kicked in for them, but nobody will mug you for for ten dollar buds
That absolutely doesn’t happen in my city, maybe you should move 😬
Eeh I don’t know where you live, but that doesnt happen for headphones anywhere I know, unless they’re made of gold and incrusted with diamonds
I just want the option. Sure I use bluetooth 98% of the time, but when I’m in a car I’d rather hook in through the jack than the tooth. And when I’m out hiking I also like the jack option so I don’t have to worry about my blutooth battery dying, bluetooth draining my phone faster, loosing an earbud in the leaves and so on.
bluetooth draining my phone faster
Bluetooth was specifically designed to be very low power. With a bluetooth headphone there is a battery in the headphone to power the amplifier and provide the energy to move the speaker diaphragm. With passive (wired) headphones, this has to be powered by your phone.
Do you really think that a phone that has to directly drive the speakers in a headphone uses less power than a phone that only has to power the bluetooth transmitter?
I love wired headphones, but I wouldn’t ever drive them directly from my phone. Especially higher end headphones are more difficult to drive anyway, so I use a (wired) external DAC/amp with it’s own internal battery for using my wired headphones.
When your phone is old yes blutooth can drain the battey faster then headphones.
I mean, I get that. It’s just that I’m triggered by the amount of people that constantly comment on every thread raging about how dare they not include a headphone jack. It’s insane how loud this minority is when in real life very few people actually care about it.
I hated the loss of the jack until I got lightning/usbc headphones. The microphone and sound controls are so good I honestly widh my steam deck had a second USB c slot rather than a headphone jack
You can get a splitter and/or dock to get there, but obviously it’s not as nice as built in
Since you asked, the lack of the headphone jack is the exact reason I have not upgraded my phone. I use my phone for music in my two cars and my home gym. None of those currently have Bluetooth.
Upgrading all 3 is just a matter of money of course - throw everything I have away & buy new. I see no reason to do that.
For the car, I use a tunai firefly ldac, it’s an incredibly simple and reliable device.
They’re fairly cheap at ~35$, and can be reused if you change cars. I ended up using mine to make my home stereo system wireless after my last car was replaced.
Up until I got an amazing pair of bluetooth headphones I would also fall under the loud minority. I still want the option on any device I own, but I haven’t been using wired ones much outside of things like my Sega Genesis.
Definitely agree the loud minority feels overrepresented, but I’m personally siding with them.
I haven’t been using wired ones much outside of things like my Sega Genesis
At first, I was like, “…How did I never know it has one of those?” until I realized I have a model 2.
You have been visited by the USB-C port. This post is now protected against headphone jack jihadists
Give me a phone with two USB-C ports so I don’t need a dongle when I wire up to my USB-C headphones and battery bank
I was skeptical about this splitter but it bought and tried it and it actually works. Tried on Sony Xperia (which doesn’t need one 😅) and Galaxy Tab. Maybe not as comfortable as having two dedicated built-in ports but still.
I would actually spend money in this. :)
That wouldn’t be bad, for extra couple of bucks headphone manufacturers could give us C jacks and a pass-through as well.
How about a bigger battery, so you just don’t need the battery bank, and the form factor is sufficiently large enough to handle without needing a large case?
I’m all for making a phone thicker if I can still use it with one hand. Just not wider or taller.
The last several phones I’ve purchased have been so thin they were unusable without a case, and battery life about a day. They could double the thickness, still be less than a half inch thick, and add a battery 3 times the size of the internal one. That would get 2+ days of charge. With half the number of charge cycles, the battery lifetime would probably double.
So twice as long between new phones, what sort of monster are you! Expecting the poor multinationals to build a phone for you and not have its effective lifespan artificially limited by the compromised battery solutions is basically communism, or socialism or woke.
{Insert phone company} loves you and only wants what’s best for you, it’s super distressing to {insert phone company} that they put so much into the relationship and you are so cold and dismissive of them. You should go and buy a {insert new full retail price product} to make it up to them.
Wonder if this problem will be “solved” with Qi2 (magnetic charging) in the future. Pixel 10 is supposed to have it if we’re talking Android. Otherwise with 2 USB-C ports you have Lenovo Legion 2 Pro and Lenovo Legion Y90 but that’s not mainstream
I had high hopes for wireless charging. But in the end it’s just heat and battery stress for no good reason. Just bring back some Pogo pens or maybe a couple of pads on the back of the phone or something.
USB-C FTW!
They largely brought that on themselves. I mean obviously they did by removing the jack, but I think moreso by claiming to be better than the rest of the industry - and charging a premium for that difference.
When Samsung removed the jack it was annoying, and also very hypocritical as they had made fun of Apple for that just a year before, but it was to be expected from a corporation like that. These guys promised they weren’t like that, and then did the same thing.
You can imagine it like this: if you see an ad by a pop star trying to sell you some bullshit product that doesn’t work you’d think “that’s shitty” and move on. But if you saw the same ad, but instead of the plain old pop star it was the members of Rage Against the Machine, you’d notice that a lot more. Everything they had done before would ring hollow, and every time someone would bring them up you’d remember that they’re just posers looking to make a buck off of a demographic.
And that’s how I feel about this phone. Just posing as something better.
I can see that, that’s a fair point, but I don’t think it’s malicious from their standpoint. I just think that when you look at their sales, they really are trying to cut down costs as much as possible while retaining their main goals of being a repairable phone with ethical materials, because in the end, if they’re not profitable, they won’t be making phones anymore, and then you won’t have a company making repairable or ethical phones at all. Headphone jacks are a relatively easy thing to remove because realistically, very few people use them nowadays. There is a vocal minority that wants them but they really are just a minority, and catering to every single niche for a company as small as them isn’t realistic.
cause you live in a part of the world, that has already gave up. including yourself.
I mean, I didn’t give up anything? What do I have to give up? The user experience is objectively way better with wireless earbuds. You don’t have to care about a cable being tugged around, battery life is a non-issue for me. I’ve never ran out of battery on my headphones and modern connectivity is pretty good, I’ve never had them fail to connect or anything like that. The only people that have any sort of benefit from wired headphones are audiophiles, that I can assure you 95% of people are not. They will not notice a difference between the headphone jack and wireless earbuds. Even if you gave me a headphone jack, I wouldn’t use it. I just do not have a reason to use one. I’ve been using wireless Wi-Fi headsets for my PC for a long while now, I don’t even use a headphone jack on my PC. It’s just way more convenient having wireless headsets.
The user experience is objectively way better with wireless earbuds
Not objectively. There are plenty of problems with Bluetooth headphones. If you don’t do anything “serious” with audio it’s not a problem.
But:
- Audio quality is worse (mathematical fact)
- Latency is high
- So high it’s impossible to make music / play beats via Bluetooth
- Packets drop due to external interference
All of this can be solved with USBC audio but that’s not wireless of course.
I was more so focusing on the overall user experience, so including the ease of use and the convenience of not having to fight with a cable. I definitely agree that Bluetooth earbuds aren’t perfect. They have their issues. But I feel like for the general user, they objectively offer an improved experience. 90 or 95% of people can’t hear the difference between wired and wireless earbuds. If you don’t care about audio quality then I feel like it has objectively more upsides than it has downsides. As people mentioned about cars and the like, there are instances where having a headphone jack is necessary, but I feel like the number of cases where this issue is unavoidable and is a real problem for people is so minuscule that it’s not worth it for the companies to bother.
I mean, in the end, I personally don’t care if a phone has a headphone jack. It’s not like I wouldn’t buy it because it has one. I was more so triggered by the people constantly screaming at every phone for not having a headphone jack, when in reality it’s not important for most people.
- Audio quality is worse (mathematical fact)
I cannot tell the difference
- Latency is high
I cannot tell, even when gaming
Packets drop due to external interference
Only had an issue once in a busy airport, otherwise not an issue for me.
I’m not saying my case is universal and there’s no reason anyone would ever want a 3.5mm jack, but there’s plenty of people like me who would really never use it.
Yeah like I said in my original comment, if you don’t do anything serious with audio then it doesn’t matter. However if you do, then it matters and BT just simply isn’t good enough.
Apple themselves even admit this. If you open up Logic on iPad (a digital audio workstation made by apple) it warns you that using Bluetooth is going to suck.
Edit: Also worth pointing out my original comment isn’t about analog headphones jacks Vs Bluetooth it’s about wired vs Bluetooth. USB C is fine in terms of the complaints I’m making about BT.
My main question is why you think you’ll need low latency for audio production on a phone.
This is a confusing question.
You need low latency to produce music on any device.
You don’t really know the meaning of objective do you?
Look at the thread for “objective” reasons people want the jack.
Canada please!
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?
hey phone twin how’s life with your atrophied pinkie finger?
Yep, I have an old iPhone SE and it’s still working. This Fairphone has perked my interest as a possible replacement.
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.
Yeah but what does have to do with idiots buying new phones every other year
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 say 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.
That, plus making a compact phone with similar capabilities while sticking to their repairability standards is highly likely to be a challenge.
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.
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.
Oof, that sucks
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?
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.
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 wish!
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.
So it still supports audio out via USB alt mode?
I’m not talking about only audio, video over USB-C is also nice to have.
To be fair I don’t use it that often, but considering that I could never use wifi display streaming on e/os, I’m really happy I have it.
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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
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
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
That’s a miniscule amount of energy and when compared to the internal DAC and loss in analog cable with 32 Ω impedance, it might be the same, give or take a few microwatts – negligible compared to other appliances and HVAC. The durability and frequency of buying a new pair is more important if you’re into the environment.
The audio quality for either is more correlated with physical build quality than whether the length of wire is susceptible to noise and own losses (where the USB has an edge). Some headphones have terrible impedance matching and awful drivers no matter the interface they use.
And the “smarter” point: Depends. Support for multiple buttons is hit-and-miss either way. As for audio from non-phones, you might have driver issues for digital or need a line level amplifier for analog.
I prefer the jack because of compatibility with all other hardware and more physical resilience: I don’t want to wear out or dislodge my phone’s charging and data port whille running with headphones.
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! 😁
$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.
Article is paywalled for me
Best I could come across. Can’t access the other archive sites atm for some reason.
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
Also works to just stop loading the page when the text and images appear, lol.
Lol tariffs singing their magic tune for Trumpistan?,
We are required to sing doot doot doot here, by law.
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 good, I also use Calyx with MicroG and all of my bank apps work.
/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 understand. For me, that is security.
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.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.
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.
