As you may well know, Fairphone is a company that originally arose from a kickstarter campaign and makes phones that are as easily repairable, as sustainable and as fairly sourced as possible. They do have their issues, but compared to other big phone companies they’ve done a great job with this.
Now it appears that Fairphone is due to announce the so called ‘Fairphone Keep Club’ on the 14th of September - a bonus program as we all know it. You buy stuff, you get points for what you buy, and when you’ve got enough points you can redeem them to buy more stuff.
The keep club website claims that it’s the only rewards program that gives back to those who keep their Fairphones as long as possible, but judging by the listed ‘challenges’ it appears that the most efficient way to gain points is to simply buy new stuff.
Personally I’m a bit torn on this, due to the idealistic viewpoints I tend to judge Fairphone under in accordance with their stated sustainability goals. I do realize that is a much higher standard than the big-players in the phone industry achieve. I also get that Fairphone wants to build its brand identity and create incentives to keep customers and sell their products. But at the same time I can’t help but think that in the end that program is an incentive to be less sustainable, as it ultimately provides you with those fancy points as a psychological incentive to buy the newest and latest Fairphone product.
So I wanted to bring this topic into a wider community that may not currently be as deep in the Fairphone bubble: Do you think such bonus programs will rather help spread the idea of a more repairable, sustainable approach to phones, or will it rather serve as an incentive to artificially shorten a phone’s lifecycle by prematurely buying a new one? And more generally speking: Do you think advertising strategies rooted in consumerism and classic capitalistic company goals are compatible with sustainable product lifecycles somehow, despite not exactly having aligned interests?
Remember that to stay in business, they must sell something. Since they are selling something designed to last a very long time, they need to expand their customers and sell other products, or both.
Some consumers want to get new product regularly. There is reason to stop them. As long as they continue to make their products to last, the rest of us get what we want, and the company is more profitable, sounds like a win-win.
This appears to be an effort to convince people to try their products - good for them! My answer to your last question is yes. Capitalism is not bad - amoral or unregulated capitalism is bad.
PostmarketOS and other custom ROMs is the true “Keep Club”. When you can keep a phone for an extra decade because people keep porting security updates and Android versions long after the company that sold it give up, that’s reducing e-waste. Not buying more shit with “points”.
I guess that’s also one positive aspect of Fairphone: They do officially cooperate with certain custom ROMs such as /e/os and IodeOS, and also make it significantly easier for not-officially-supported custom ROMs to exist.
I don’t think anyone would spend money just to get a few points in their rewards program, and they don’t have that much stuff to sell in their shop anyway. If anything I think it will reward those who buy replacement parts the most.
Yeah that’s the idea to me. Reward people for actually buying the replacements and repairing the phone.
As long as they sell spare parts and make schematics available, they can sell as much stuff as possible.
I guess there is a small incentive to buy more phones for friends and family, that’s not a bad thing.
But they should stop with the ewaste earbuds and rather think of something else people might use. I hear home automation is a big market, and lots of space for open, sustainable products.
Yeah, I largely agree with that. With regards to the schematics it unfortunatrly appears they are unable to release everything due to legal reasons though.
I think you’re overthinking this.
Right now, Fairphone’s major challenge is increasing market share.
I don’t know if this will help, but I don’t have a better idea. I do think it’s useful to look at cars to see how it can work.
The major auto companies only started taking EV’s seriously because consumers and governments created an opportunity that Tesla took. Once consumers were choosing Tesla instead of Audi or Lexus, it forced Volkswagen and Toyota to start taking the competition seriously.
I think the same should happen with consumer electronics. Standardization, repairability and long life need to be incentivized in a much stronger way than they are now.
Once those incentives are there, Fairphone will be able to take advantage and then Samsung, Google and Apple will be forced to follow.
Let me point out a more positive view of this program: fairphone may want to bind customers to them. They now sell more than just phones, including headphones and earbuds. Customers can choose freely which brand they want for each of these. But if there is an advantage in buying them all from fairphone and not from some less sustainable brand, that creates a positive impact on society.
But your points stand. I believe that as a startup, it is simple to keep up noble goals. As an established company, that gets harder over time. So far, I have my trust in this brand to provide fairer electronics than the rest. And not every company must necessarily lose their ideals during growth. But they are a company after all, and are subject to the same forces as all other companies.
The word “sustainability” is a joke when it comes to the Fairphone. In fact, they don’t even deserve to be called "Fair"phone, the moment they declared that removing the headphone jack actually reduces e-waste, all whilst conveniently starting to sell wireless earbuds at the same time. Fairphone are basically a sham company now. They may have started with good intentions, but like most companies, they’ve now gone down the enshittification path.
Two years later, surprisingly the company has not changed their logo for an actual HYDRA logo despite what people said would happen, and yet there’s still people spouting this in every single piece of news about them.
Yeah we get it. And I don’t even disagree. Removal of the 3,5mm jack is bad. And they did it. Sure. So? That’s such a tiny problem, and also importantly has nothing to do with how sustainable their phones are, it only makes you look ridiculous to complain about it after such a long time.
Now, complaining about those earbuds, that’s a different thing. But that’s also the thing: People rightfully called them out for the unrepairable wireless earbuds. So they released repairable full-size headphones. I got to give them that one, they did react to the criticism, and also produced something that I wish were ubiquituous outside of high-end professional equipment.
To add to that, Fairphone is also regularly criticized that they’re struggling to keep up full support for devices that are just a few years old. But unfortunately most of their issues are not their but their suppliers fault. Once the manufacturer of a specific component stops Firmware support for that component, it gets really hard to provide fixes and support once firmware-related issues arise. So that’s more of a general smartphone-industry-problem, in that the life cycles of the ‘big players’ are much to short, giving hardware-manufacturers an incentive to stop firmware support for older components quite quickly.
I guess we have to differentiate between issues that Fairphone has control over, and issues that Fairphone is simply not big enough to solve on it’s own.
Fairphone is also regularly criticized that they’re struggling to keep up full support for devices that are just a few years old.
Where?
This is true for the entire smartphone industry excepct Fairphone and maybe a handful others.
Where?
For the most recent example check out this Forum thread regarding the Fingerpringt sensor issues of the Fairphone 3(+) with Android 13, due to the sensor’s manufacturer having ceased support for the sensor and Google having updated its security policy.
It sounds to me like they’re only holding it back temporarily to have users notified in advance; giving them a chance to cope before breaking their apps.
The company makes one bad decision amid a sea of great decisions and all people online can do is complain about it like it’s the end of the world.
It’s unfortunate. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good.
I will never understand headphone jack shills…
Honestly… I can understand being disappointed with the decision to remove it. But it blows my mind just how worked up people get over it.
Thats how I feel
Fr. Just buy a different phone. There’s so much diversity
Not really a lot of choice in the matter at this point. It’s mostly super-expensive phones (Xperia and ROG) or low end (OnePlus Nord, some Chinese brands). And then there’s Nokia, whose software support policy is basically “trust us, it’s gonna be fine”.
They could have definitely done more to actually reward sustainability. The only reward for it (so far) is that every year since you bought your phone, they give you 2€ off of your next purchase. Also, they give you a guaranteed 2€ trade in credit for your old Fairphone (not usable on the phone you are trading in for). Those incentives seem to be about increasing your spending rather than actually doing any sustainability.
I would give them the benefit of the doubt and hope that the program is well intentioned, but it is very badly executed if it is.
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