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Comment by moksly | Hacker News Reader

This is anecdotal, but everyone in my circle of friends who bought a fairphone2 (2015) has replaced it. Meanwhile my mom is still using my old iPhone 5s (2013). And my wife uses her iPhone SE(2016).

Hell the fact that they have released one in 2013, 2015 and 2019, kind of goes against their message doesn’t it?

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That doesn't surprise me. The crowd of people who are aware of the fairphone are most likely techies. And I would wager techies are much more likely to replace a Phone then the Generic Apple user.

No one I’d call a techie bought it, it was the artsy environmental types. The reasons for replacing it ranges from the OS not being updated to run modern Apps to the phone breaking.

We’re pretty digitised in Denmark, so if you can’t download apps from the iOS or play stores you’ll have a harder time transferring payments to friends, using public transportation, ordering food online, interacting with the public sector, accessing your citizen mail box and stuff like that, and Android isn’t very good at longevity.

> he reasons for replacing it ranges from the OS not being updated

They just released a beta of the upgrade to Android 9 for their five-year-old phone. Yes, that's just Android 9, but still way better than other phones that old, and they had to overcome major hurdles for it [2]. But yes, iPhones are much better than Androids at longevity.

[1] https://www.androidauthority.com/fairphone-2-android-9-11295...

[2] https://www.fairphone.com/en/2020/06/18/fairphone-2-gets-and...

Android is fine. It's the sub-par hardware that isn't, poor flash memory gets unbearably slow at some point and that bogs down pretty much everything.

Second and related problem is developers that abuse storage, no, you don't need to fsync your logs or DB to the storage after each row. It really fucks with devices that have lost a bit of IOPS.

I’m not really into it, but the problem they seemed to have with the fairphone was that it wasn’t getting new android versions for some reason. I guess you could argue wether or not developers should support old android versions but the reality is that they don’t.

I know a lot of consumers who upgrade their phone whenever their cell phone financing plan lets them do so.

I'm still using my iPhone SE (2016). I've changed the battery once, and the screen twice (I should probably stop dropping it).

Changing the screen takes ~20 minutes, and a new screen costs ~16$.

I will probably upgrade to the iPhone SE2 at some point, but given that my phone works perfectly for what I use it for, paying 550$ for an upgrade just does not make sense.

Well, I'm using an HTC phone from 2014. I haven't had to change or repair any parts and it costs about half an iPhone, I think. To clarify, everything seems to be working just fine.

Unfortunately, Google. But that's the only problem with it. I was actually going to stick with a flip-top but then I started working as a dev and figured that getting a smartphone would give me some extra cred.

Nowadays it's probably the other way around, I should probably dig out my old fliptop and use that, to show how 1337 I am.

> I haven't had to change or repair any parts and it costs about half an iPhone, I think.

I've dropped the iphone dozens of times. I should stop doing that. I guess that if I had been more careful, i wouldn't have had to change anything, except for the battery (the old battery was "fine", ~65-70% capacity, but given that changing it takes 15 min and 20$, and makes the phone feel like brand new, it is a change that I happily do). Can you comment on the battery life of your 2014 HTC phone after 6 years of use? What kind of battery does it have ?

Hence the part I wrote in parentheses. They're still learning, so I'd expect the FP3 to be much better than the FP2, just like the FP2 was an improvement over the FP1. I think it's unrealistic to expect a new company to immediately hit a home run, but I think their main contribution is that they're paving the way for other companies: they're making mistakes, but also openly documenting what they're doing and what challenges they're running into.

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