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microtonalyesterday at 3:26 PM1 replyview on HN

To be fair, Apple has nearly the same design.

Yeah, I should criticize them for it too. Though the issue rarely occurs for me on iPhones I think the reason is that the volume buttons are much higher up on the iPhone. So when you do the movement one-handed where the left side rests on your palm and you use a finger to press the power button, the palm doesn't hit volume-down, which does happen on FP6 since the volume buttons are much lower on the side.

It still happened all the time on the FP6 for me after 2 months or so.

Same here. This is why we need to be buying them now, while they are working out the bugs. Small sacrifice in my mind.

Fairphone has been around since 2013 and all of their models have been plagued by really bad software and hardware issues. I think part of the problem is that the actual hardware and software development is not done by them, but a Chinese ODM (T2Mobile). For clarity, this is not a "everybody produces phones in China". If you look at their Git trees, most commits are from this Chinese ODM. I guess this introduces a delay in fixing issues plus Fairphone is probably just one of their customers.

Also, for anyone worried about security, yes it uses opaque binary blobs of Chinese origin (camera processing stuff by TCL). Well, that aside from usually being months to years behind on Qualcomm firmware blob versions (who do monthly security bulletins) and Linux kernel sources. So Fairphones typically have many known high/critical CVEs.


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Fnoordyesterday at 4:47 PM

Not all of the development. For example, Luca 'z3ntu' Weiss works at Fairphone [1].

As an owner of Fairphone 4 and 5 I disagree with you that all their soft- and hardware had really bad design flaws. Fairphone 3 was an improvement over Fairphone 2 (which had quite severe flaws), but 4 and 5 have been good. They innovated long-term support and repairable smartphones, which contributed to legislation in EU.

Fairphone 6 WiFi IPv6 has known workarounds. But it takes too long till the known fix is backported.

I also have no issue using my Fairphone with one hand, while it is in a car kit. For using it with one hand solely, device is too large (and heavy) for me.

There's enough I don't like about Fairphone. For example, software switch on side, silly change to green, renaming Gen 6 (nobody calls it that), too much marketing BS, long support queue (for like, ages), no SFOS (should've partnered with Jolla; I was excited for such announcement today). I wish they spend some more money on support instead of marketing.

And the charging issue with Fairphone 6 seems severe, but there's only like 50 people on forum who reported. It isn't a common issue, but FP 6 sold more than 4 or 5. Ie. yes it is an issue, but the WiFi issue is way more common, as were the many issues with the 2.

[1] FOSDEM 2026 - Luca Weiss https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/speaker/luca_weiss/

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