mystic-macaroni
Pastafarian
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I have a fairphone 4 with /e/OS. It’s been everything I’ve needed without being spectacular.
A big complaint is the way you get apps. I don’t add apps often, and often I use adb, but the App Lounge is slow af. I predominately use obtanium to get the apk’s directly. It has F-Droid built in, but if that doesn’t work I use F-Droid proper. This splits my apps into 4 separate bins which I absolutely hate.
The camera also sucks. Stabilization, quality of images, low light, images with motion. They are all bad. Luckily for me, I don’t take pictures of people often. This applies to most camera apps. The default camera app has been patched to eliminate some of these problems, but I haven’t applied it. I’ve heard past the fairphone 4, these problems have largely been fixed.
What could be a dealbreaker for some is something I haven’t verified nor use. (If this is important look into it. I don’t want to spread rumors) The voice typing on the default keyboard now has/will have telemetry. Potentially to Google? I understand Murena needs to make money, and it isn’t personally a dealbreaker, but it is opening a door to other privacy violations. Many people in the community see this as unacceptable and once you’ve violated trust, you never get it back. For me, I’ll hang in there until I see a more substantial reason to switch (same as Proton, but leave me alone about that)
Those are all the negatives of the Fairphone 4 and /e/OS I can think of, but there are many other positives that imho outweigh the negatives. And depending on where you are coming from (e.g. google/samsung android or ios), you have to realize that with phones like the fairphone and roms like /e/OS there are large pros, but there are often large cons. Here, I’ll gladly accept those for what I’m getting in return.
LMK if you have other specific concerns. I might have just left them out. There are also ways I better secure my privacy, but you didn’t ask about that 🙃
I’ve been rocking it on a fairphone 4 for 3-4 years. I pretty heavily modified it to get it where I wanted, but I enjoy doing that kind of thing. App lounge is slow, but I don’t use any proprietary aps so F Droid and Obtainium gets me everything I need.
I’ve had Shelter in the background for proprietary apps. Traveling in particular.
My aunt did this along with posting a bunch of family photos and falling for those quizzes that ask your pet’s name or your childhood address. If you have one person like that the privacy of your entire family is compromised.
We told her back around 2010 not to do this kind of stuff, but she’s somewhere between “If I have nothing to hide” and “what’s the harm?”. I hope she gets it now, but we don’t talk to her often
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Fairphone4 user here. Fairphone is the kind of environment you go into knowing there are tradeoffs (e.g. the camera sucks) but for me, what you gain in terms of privacy and the downright respect they have for you as a customer are worth those tradeoffs.