I have a Fairphone 4 but it is my backup phone now. I got it over a year ago. Stock software sucked and it took forever to get Android 12, which came six months after everybody else had Android 13, and when it finally arrived it had broken bluetooth audio. So instead I ran with CalyxOS and that was fine and pretty much bleeding edge. The haptics suck and there are always ghost touches, which resulted in weird pocket dials of people on Signal and having to explain it away. The camera is not good at all, and no gCam mod makes it decent. The phone is repairable but only to a point; you can’t buy a new frame which sucks because mine bent and scratched the aluminum because there are no good cases for it. The plastic back cover tore where I took it off exactly four times in its life.

The screen is very good and the fingerprint reader works well every time.

For what I paid, it’s just not good hardware. The saving grace is that it’s a decent software experience because you have the option to install another OS and re-lock the bootloader.

Mine was daily used and abused for over a year and didn’t quite hold up to what I had previously gotten from iPhones in an Otterbox, and the selling point that I could repair it wasn’t really realistic because I can’t get the actual part that I need.

Fairphone really needs to partner with somebody to get a ruggedized case made.

My daily driver now is a OnePlus phone that I got for free, and OxygenOS is a better Android than stock, it has a good camera and meets my needs better. It also takes SD cards and has a 3.5mm jack and has a rugged case from Poetic.