Reading Herman’s experience over Fairphone,
I don’t want to crap on Fairphone, I want them to do better. Repairability, sustainability and longevity still matter.
I’ve got the following thought.
I would crap on Fairphone, and wouldn’t think twice. The thing is, Fairphone ≠ repairability, sustainability, and longevity. They may state that’s their goals, but these goals aren’t what they are, as a brand.
- It’s like when Apple states they’re the top-notch of design, and then they push a half-assed mediocrity (iOS 7, iOS 26), and we’re like ‘I don’t want to crap on Apple, the design matters, and they’re top of the world in design’ (according to them and their fans).
- Or Google once being the company with outstanding software, becoming a… erm, are they now?
- Or Facebook being …whatever they claim they are, but aren’t.
My point is, why would we even try to equalise a private company with the goals they state? Their doing clearly demonstrates they’re unable to fulfill that promise.
Why try your best at excusing them? To me, they just look like a pathetic company, it’s just obvious, even from their highly unprofessional website1.
Deliver a professional (at least professional looking) website is almost free these days. All you might need to hire one person, one person. That must be peanuts to a company, of any size. We cannot excuse a company having a shitty website in 2025. It’s too easy to make one. And when they cannot deliver that, how would you expect them to deliver things other players — much bigger and more powerful ones — cannot? Yes, the point is they do not want to deliver that. But there’s the reason they don’t do that. Not that I’m not for repairability, sustainability, and longevity. I’m in. I just don’t believe Fair Phone, that’s it. Their website looks like a cheap rip-off, and so their products. This experience of Herman, very annoying experience I’d expect from a super cheap shit I might buy off Aliexpress, it’s intolerable. No way they are unable to react within a month. How many tickets do they have, millions? How many people do they have at support, one? Do they have a CEO? Probably that person must do the job themselves, if they aren’t able to do their CEO job. Actually, that’s what happens at smaller startups. That’s what I’ve been doing all my life. If a person I hired is unable to deliver what I promised on behalf of my company, sorry thing that I’d not sleep well.
The whole experience smells like ‘oh fuck him already, he must give up at some point’ level of dark patterns, I’d expect from shitheads’ companies, like Uber et al. If the company isn’t like that, and they actually do their best to deliver the promise they make, well, I have so many questions then.
I searched them, and they are a Dutch company. Funny. I expected them to appear either Chinese or Hong-Kongian or Singaporean at best.
I think there might be a bigger conspiracy involved. What if some big player is involved? What if they created this pseudo company, to fail to deliver that promise? So folks like me would say something like ‘em, why would I buy a shitty phone from them, and change it in a couple of years, when I can buy it from Apple and change it in ten years?’
Or at least from five to seven, if we’ll take iPhone Xs/XR released in 2018, and they are still good phones. Today, they’re cheaper than €200 or even €150 on a second hand market (at least here in Ukraine).
Because that’s precisely what I think about this company’s products. Since I’m not equating them to repairability, sustainability, and longevity, that doesn’t mean ‘hence repairability, sustainability, and longevity is super hard to achieve, look at that company, that failed miserably.’
But what if they failed miserably only because there are not too competent in what they’re doing? Or, what if they are competent, but what if their real goal is just different? What if it’s to grab the land, but never deliver their promise. It’s just for other companies to not be there.
To me, they always looked like liars.
I’d love to be mistaken.
Well, I was very wrong. Their website is much better than I remember it being the last time I visited them some years ago. That indicates they do improve indeed, and possibly they will be able to deliver their promise one day in the future.
Or I might misremember and mistake them for some other Chinese indeed company. If they’re not the type who outsources all their production to China, which I won’t be surprised to learn, then I wish them luck, and hope I’m being all wrong about their real mission. We need repairability, sustainability, and longevity, after all. To me, it’s not the matter of principle which company would succeed in that mission. I’d rather have all companies to have repairability, sustainability, and longevity.
Maybe that company was Murena. ↩︎