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    New phone, who dis? - My migration away from iOS and Fairphone 6 with /e/os review

    Originally written .

    Table of contents

    1. Preamble
    2. The actual review
      1. The hardware
      2. The software migration
      3. Weirdness
      4. Final impressions

    Preamble

    An iPhone SE 2 and a Fairphone 6 next to each other.

    As I've previously mentioned, phones have gotten too big for me, and all the available options that were at what I would consider to be a reasonable size, have other deal-breaking problems, even just before we get into nitpicks I may or may not be able to make. As such, I went 'fuck it' and threw out the size requirement, and sought out to at least try Android, with whatever's the least worst option once the size requirement's of the table. If Apple's not going to provide for me with a phone that can fit my hand, I might as well not bother with them to begin with. I'm largely a fan of their hardware and software; not so much of their lack of interoperability, but that's not a problem if you're mostly all in on Apple to begin with. And hey, maybe I'll get used to using a phablet after some time?

    I was using an iPhone SE second gen (the one that came out in 2020), and before that I had the previous, original SE. That phone was the perfect size for me, while the second SE was just barely too big for me, with me having to really go out of my way to reach the top left corner when holding my phone in my right hand. The main reason I wanted to switch phones was that the more recent updates had really started to slow the phone down to a crawl. This is not something I've experienced on other Apple hardware, among which are my original SE, a 5s, an iPod Touch 3rd gen, a mid-2012 Macbook Pro (at least until the battery swelled and I took it out, but that's that and not a software problem), as well as a M1 Pro 14-inch (which isn't old enough to have this problem yet). I've heard about this happening to Apple hardware before; Batterygate is a thing after all, but only with devices I didn't use. I guess I was lucky, but not this time. Maybe a battery swap would fix my SE, but I have a feeling the software is at fault, and not the hardware, and the software I can't do much about. So, new phone it is then.

    With all that in mind, here are some of the features I was seeking out in my new phone:

    Note the lack of any requirement pertaining to the camera or processor. I don't take many pictures with my phone, so as long as it's not completely bum-wipe worthy, it'll do. I also don't need speed. I browse the web five tabs or less at a time, using an adblocker, reading mostly text based sites. I don't play games on my phone unless I've got no internet at all. It needs to do simple things speedily. I don't need to run 16 apps at once. I'd prefer to not go down in performance compared to my current device, but as far as phones are concerned, I've reached a hardware plateau. All the performance problems with phones out there are either software or battery related as far as I can tell (barring defective hardware and such), unless you're playing serious mobile games, multitasking to the point where you probably want a tablet or a laptop, or you use your phone as a pocket DSLR.

    The de-googleable requirement leaves me with few options. Eylenburg maintains a very good comparison table of Android-based OSes, see Comparison of Android-based Operating Systems, with GrapheneOS being the obvious winner. Unfortunately, it's only available on Google Pixels, due to GrapheneOS's quite strict, although reasonable, security requirements. If only they could get in bed with some OEM to make a non-Google device which fulfils their needs, but as it stands, I can't support Google financially by buying one of their phones, and used Pixels aren't cheap enough to make that idea worth pursuing where I live (they're the same price as a new Google phone is on sale). GrapheneOS are apparently getting in bed with some OEM to make a supported, non-Pixel phone, but the last OEM they were working with went bankrupt, and they've only been working with the one they're with now since , so it's not like I can just wait another six months to a year until they release something suitable: see strcat (Daniel Micay, the founder of GrapheneOS)'s comment on Hacker News. I really hope this will happen one day, if only so that I can disable the stupid presidential alerts that are sent out once or twice a year, since GrapheneOS actually lets you disable those, allowing your phone to actually be yours: see Features overview on GrapheneOS's website.

    The list of supported phones outside of the Pixels also start to get very small if I want an SD card slot, and collapses to zero if I want a headphone jack. Some Sonys seem like a decent bet, but none of the most recent ones, and I can't really bet on them getting support for any alternative Android OS any time soon. If I'm going to buy a non-Apple phone, it needs to be one that I can get de-googled Android on today; I have no intention of piddling about on a vendor's Android image for any length of time, since I'll never settle in there. I'll buy the product based on what it can do today, and not on it's potential tomorrow, which may never actually be realised.

    It was at this point I said 'fuck it' yet again, concluding with the fact that the Fairphone is probably the phone that ticked most of my boxes with the fewest potential dealbreakers. Fairphone is probably the closest to the paragon of my phone ideal I am going to get in this flawed world we live in, and there's nothing I can do to change that in any significant way, so I might as well buy in on that. I really hate the fact that they removed the headphone jack for bad reasons: see The fairphone reduces ewaste - by removing the headphone jack...., but they don't have any other black marks on their reputation that I can't deal with, and it's not like most other phone manufacturers that are in this running are much better on that front. I'll give them a chance, and if I'm left disappointed, I'll act accordingly and exclude them from any potential future phone purchase, unless they renege on the headphone jack or are able to get into bed with GrapheneOS, or otherwise make a much better value proposition. It's not like the Fairphone is all that expensive to begin with, so which ever way things go, I won't really feel like I've lost all that much. If I figure out it's not for me, or that Android as a whole is not for me, then at least now I know that and can proceed with that information in the future, without having spent all that much money to find out. And if I do happen to figure out that I end up liking it, or Android as a whole, then that's just a very nice bonus.

    With Fairphone being the most viable option, the Fairphone 6 being launched right around the time I intended to get a new phone, and forward-slash-the-letter-e-forward-slash-os (stupid name) being officially supported by Fairphone, I might as well go all in on what they think a good Android experience will be. Things seem to have gone one step forward, one step back compared to the older Fairphone 5, and given that the headphone jack is now gone on Fairphones, I imagine that's not the first or only time that's happened. I'm also annoyed by its lack of USB 3.0, especially given the old Fairphone 5 had it, as well as its lack of AV1 decoding (I got an Intel A770 when it came out just to be able to play around with AV1!), but I'm willing to put my trust in them that their most recent device shows them putting their best foot forward. It's still got an SD card slot, so they've not completely gone mad quite yet. There's no wireless charging, but that's at least a more recent feature that just never got implemented, as compared to the headphone jack, which was there and then got taken away, but it's probably about time it too shows up. It's not really a new feature any more.

    I'll miss my AirTags, since it seems that there's no real way to track those from an Android phone, even ignoring the Android device itself; I just want to track them in my luggage and backpack and such, as well as keep track of the other Apple devices in my family (I've still got a Mac, ya know). If you do know of a way to get that to work, please send me an email. And it's not like I can just switch to the Google ecosystem on that front, since it's garbage compared to the Apple one from what I can tell.

    I'll also miss being able to use iTunes, believe it or not. It's one of very few programs I keep a Windows VM around for. I like to have copies of my music for myself, and not rely on Spotify and such, so all my music comes in the form of normal audio files, but I've kept track of it all with iTunes, and I've got way too much to just put everything on an SD card (unless maybe there's a 2 TB one out now, but I can't be arsed to pay the price one of those will cost), so syncing between my phone and my computer has been a decent workflow for me, allowing me to put all the music I care about on my phone easily, without putting all of it on there, as well as easy creation of playlists without file duplication. It's also kept track of how many times I've played certain songs, and quite a few have been played several thousand times by now. It's a piece of my personal history which will won't be carried along, at least not until I go back to Apple again. I'll also miss all the song lyrics I added to various songs on iTunes. Quite a few of my favourite songs are obscure ones that are a pain to find the lyrics to, and quite a few more will have mistakes in the lyrics you'll typically find online, or they're just horribly formatted. Having the lyrics tied to a song and having them with me on my phone is really nice and has helped me memorise the lyrics to quite a few songs I truly cherish. Maybe there's a way to get the same thing going on Android, but I'll cross that bridge when I get there.

    The actual review

    The hardware

    First impressions were a mixed bag. First of all, my unit came with the stock Android install, which is understandable, but since I was going the de-googled way, I needed to install /e/os, but the web installer Murena has, had apparently not been set up to work with the Fairphone 6 by the time I got mine, so I had to do it the very manual way, by unlocking the bootloader and manually flashing the install on the phone, and then relocking the bootloader. Not very fun having to dick about in the command prompt, and the Fairphone 6 install guide is, frankly, not very good, and leaves out steps that are assumed you can figure out yourself, while at the same time being obtusely dense at the same time. It does work, but this is not something I'd want to throw a beginner into. The water's a bit too deep for that.

    Once that was done, it was mostly just a case of downloading app after app, logging in one place at a time, with my Fairphone in one hand and my iPhone in my other hand, comparing and making sure I'd gotten everything. Nothing here was hard or problematic. It's just that it's a hassle, but I was prepared for that, given I was changing eco-systems and couldn't just transfer from one similar device to another, as had been my experience going between various iPhones.

    As far as the phone itself, it really is too big for me. My pinky gets tired after not too long. With my old iPhone 5S, which was probably at my ideal size, I didn't even need to use my pinky; just gripping it on both sides with one hand worked fine. With my SE, that became impractical over time, but the pinky could work as support, and the phone wasn't heavy enough for this to become a problem. Now through, with the Fairphone being quite a bit heavier, I'm really feeling it. This is not a one-handed phone for anything beyond the trivial. I'm not a fan, and I'm going to keep grumbling about it until someone releases a phone at a decent size that's not hopeless on every other front.

    The feel beyond that though, I'd say it's pretty good. It's plastic, but it's a solid matte plastic, and doesn't really feel cheap in my hands. It's quite the finger-grease magnet thought. Like, I know that my hands have oil on them just from existing, but this phone makes that super apparent, and doesn't get any better if you reach out to check something on your phone after you've had a slice of pepperoni pizza. The screw holes don't bother me aesthetically, on the contrary, but I do feel them every now and then when fondling it, and that doesn't always feel great. The volume buttons both feel great, and the yellow slider does too, even though it's really annoying that its functionality hasn't been fully implemented in /e/os yet. The power button doesn't feel great. It's really mushy and I'm often unsure if I've actually pressed it, and the use of quick launching stuff with a quick double press or single long press of that button isn't great. This isn't a problem for regular unlocking though, since the fingerprint part of it works just fine, and the phone unlocks automatically once it's happy with your fingerprint. Pretty great I'd say, so long that you don't accidentally put your thumb on that button while you've got your hand in your pocket along with your phone. The fingerprint reader is just in a bad spot for me ergonomically; under the screen on the bottom (or heck, just on the bottom with a button; I don't need an all-screen device), or on the back would probably have been better fits. The placement of the volume buttons also aren't great in conjunction with the power button, since I very often end up accidentally hitting the lower volume button at the same time as when I intend to just hit press the power button, which then proceeds to take a screenshot. If the power button had been moved, this wouldn't have been a problem, but it's probably in the ideal spot for your thumb on your right hand and your ring finger on your left hand, if we're going with a power button on the side. Ideally then, the volume button should probably have been placed a bit higher. This is probably going to get annoying on the long run, but I hope that the problem will go away by itself as a matter of me getting more used to holding the phone 'correctly'.

    I really appreciate the option for 3-button navigation. That helps alleviate the lack of a physical home button by a lot. The fact that it completely disables gesture navigation is a big shame though, since dragging from the left to go back has been ingrained in my soul for a long while now. The back button being there does help this, but I wish I could just have both, by being able to disable and enable whatever specific gesture. Bonus points if I can remap gestures to something more useful. Dragging from the top to get to the quick menu and the notifications panel is really annoying when the phone is way too big for my hands, so if I could drag from the middle instead, that could become a lot easier to manage. No such luck though.

    The screen's great. Both bright enough and dim enough in all conditions thus far, and the 120 hz is really nice. The auto-brightness was garbage for me, but I had that turned of in iOS already, so at the first sign of dickery on that front, I opted to turn it of and deal with it manually, as I had already since time immemorial. I'm used to dealing with it, so this isn't really a problem. The pinhole camera is annoying. I'm not one to be bothered by non-all-screen phones, so I don't get why this is the current design trend, but whatever. I'll probably get used to it.

    A ripe raspberry taken with the Fairphone 6.

    I don't really care much about the camera, but I though that I should mention that I find it to be completely competent, except for one small detail: the zoom is non-existent as far as I can tell. Now I know that the zoom on my SE was just digital, but if I just needed to have one specific thing in frame and preferably nothing else, and I don't care about the quality beyond that thing being visible, I could just pinch to zoom in and narrow in on what I cared about. Now, the only option for doing that is doing it in post, where you might not even know how it will look in the end, or getting physically closer to your subject. Neither of these are great. The only place so far this has been a problem has been when using Snapchat, which I'd guess is also an app which doesn't make use of any phone specific optimisations, unlike the bundled camera app. I'm not a big Snapchat user though, and the stuff on there is just throwaway stuff anyway, so it's of little consequence either way. I'm not the only one who noticed this problem though, and apparently I'm also not the only one to want digital zoom, so hopefully this will be fixed in an update eventually. See Fairphone Gen 6 (FP6) camera zoom broken.

    The lack of wireless charging is a pretty big bummer, since I've already bought a wireless charging stand and thus I have an obvious place to put my phone when I'm not using it. At first I thought that I could solve this relatively easily with a USB-C charging dock, but from what I can tell, those basically aren't sold any more. Don't get me wrong, they do exist, but the only options readily on sale for me were Aliexpress sludge, from random web stores I've never shopped at, other than Aliexpress itself, or Amazon. No actual real products are on offer from any place I'd be willing to give my money to unless I really have to, or the product is known to be good. Things are probably better on that front elsewhere in the world. Annoyingly, I already have a lightning charge dock which I bought a good while back, and I know that that exact dock also had a USB-C version. The only reason I didn't buy that back then, was that Apple still hadn't swapped over to USB-C. If I had known I'd be in this situation today, I would have bought one of those, just to have on hand.

    The software migration

    Unfortunately, the transition from iOS was not completely without hitches. Apparently, it's literally impossible to transfer your Whatsapp chats from an iOS device to an Android one without doing it during the setup process. There's a button for it in iOS, but that only works during the device setup on the Android side. If you've already set it up and don't want to factory reset your device, tough shit. There's forum post after forum post and reddit post after reddit post out there saying they can't make this happen. There are even scammy Chinese apps out there charging you for the privilege, as well as scripts requiring a rooted Android device, just to make this seemingly easy thing happen. I don't use Whatsapp much; it's only in use for me as the easiest place for some of my friends in other countries to get in touch with me, so I don't have a giant catalogue of chat logs there, so I could probably Just™ leave them and not worry about it, but that feels wrong on some level. One more reason to not use Whatsapp I guess.

    iTunes turned out to be relatively easy to migrate away from, although in a more annoying way then I had expected. Musicbee has an option on first launch to import your library from iTunes. It took forever, and it wasn't completely without flaws, but it kept all my playlists, song lyrics and playcounts and seems to be a very functional piece of software, and it can sync to any random Android device. One problem though: it's Windows-only, so I still need that Windows VM around. Being Windows-only, I have to pass my phone through to my VM as a USB device. This worked fine with my iPhone, so it synced with iTunes running in a VM just fine, but my Fairphone, while seemingly being passed through just fine, it's functionally a dead device inside that VM. Linux works just fine with it. It just mounts it without complaining and allows me to browse through the files as needed. I did get it to pass through to the VM properly once, through sheer luck and random chance, and it did manage to sync most of my music just fine, but then I unplugged it without intending to, and I am unable to make it happen again. I can work around this somewhat by taking out the SD card from my phone and syncing with that, as random old storage devices seem to be passed through without major issues, but ideally what I'd like to happen, is to be able to sync over USB, and if not that, then maybe wirelessly.

    Musicbee even has a wireless sync app, which supposedly can also sync your play counts, assuming your music player app of choice is compatible. Small hitch though: I need to sync over a wire at least once before I can use that. The plan was to do that once I did get it to connect, but given that I didn't get to complete that, that's out of the picture until I can get that working. I haven't gotten around to doing that, but in an ideal world, this is probably close to as good as it can get for me.

    Strawberry would seem to be the go-to option on Linux for this kind of thing, but I can only import my music library raw with that as far as I can tell, and there's no easy way to import the extra metadata iTunes had, nor any way to import that from Musicbee now that it's all there. There's this github repo with some python files to extract the relevant data from iTunes and paste it directly into your Strawberry database, but that's really janky. iTunes seems to have stored the lyrics with the files themselves, so that migrates without problems, and I figured out how to export playlists from Musicbee, which I could then import into Strawberry later on. But without some way to export my songs' playcounts, I'm going to stick to Musicbee for now. I'll cross the bridge of getting a Linux piece of software which can easily import my songs' play counts at some later date. It's not a great experience as is, but it's not an obvious downgrade; more of a sidegrade if anything.

    As for my choice of Music app on the Android side of things, I ended up picking Poweramp, simply because it's really good. It does cost money though, and I ended up buying it after trial expired. I could buy it straight from the developer without even going through Google Play. Great stuff. A Russian guy develops it, but he moved out of Russia due to the war, and even pulled along all of his assets as far as the app is concerned. He's no fan of the war, so I'm comfortable assuming giving him my money, since that money is clearly not giving money to fund the wrong side of the war in Ukraine. See Google Play: Restore purchase / Full Version Unlocker could be unavailable temporarily.

    None of my banking apps or anything else like that had any problems, at least not with the apps themselves. They installed fine, I logged in just fine, after having trouble getting used to pasting text in Android, since the gesture for that is apparently different compared to iOS. But once I was logged in, it worked fine, just fine. Same goes for pretty much every single other app. Some of the default apps were useless for me, and I needed to find decent replacements for them, as I had also used the defaults on Apple for things like the reminders app and the music app, and neither of the defaults were any good. Thankfully, good alternatives were forthcoming, and I'm mostly happy as far as apps are concerned. The majority aren't much different compared to their iOS alternative, at least not beyond the fact that I have a much bigger screen now. VLC failed to install for unknown reasons the first few times I tried it though. Then one day I tried again, and it just worked. Weird, but I can deal with it. As long as it doesn't happen with some app I really need in the moment one day.

    Automatic phone number lookup was something I could never get to work on iOS, and was something I would have been pretty happy getting. As things are right now, I don't respond phone numbers outside of my contact list, just because spam is so common. I'll look up the number afterwards just in case it's someone I know or someone who might actually be looking to get in touch with me specifically, but that's rarely the case nowadays. I imported my old contacts, so it's not like I even have to worry about anyone I actually know who's called me in the past 10 or so years. They're all on that list. But with an automated phone number lookup, as people are calling in, maybe I'll discover that one of those calls aren't spam, maybe a survey or something, something non-malicious at least, that I might actually want to respond to and not just ignore. Well, as it turns out, the two major providers of this type of service for Norwegian phone numbers, are both paid subscription services. Fuck that, I ain't having that. This would just have been nice bonus to have, but I sure as fuck ain't paying for it. Anyone I actually care about's already on my list of contacts, so this would only be for the benefit of the non-malicious, but unknown to me. If it's any degree of actually important, they'll text me and explain.

    Speaking of phone numbers, the grouping of phone numbers displayed in the default app was wrong. Norwegian phone numbers are weird, in that landline numbers are grouped in groups of two: 69 69 69 69. I still remember our old home phone number by this pattern, even though we cut that wire a long time ago, and this is the pattern the default phone app groups phone number digits by. However, mobile phone numbers are grouped as 3-2-3, that is, 420 69 420. The vast majority of phone numbers I've got stored are mobile phone numbers, and should thus be grouped by this pattern, and when they're grouped by the wrong pattern, my brain scratches to a halt and questions what is real. I fixed this by replacing the default phone app with Fossify Phone, which has an option to not group phone numbers. This still isn't correct, but a phone number listed with no spaces at all is easier to read than one that is grouped wrongly. See Phone app groups phone number digits incorrectly.

    Getting a proper Firefox, a proper uBlock Origin (hallowed be its name), a damn USB-C port, Thunderbird, the ability to sideload, YouTube ReVanced, and more open-source alternatives for apps has been a big boon. I try to lean towards open-source applications wherever I can, and this is a lot easier on Android than it is on iOS. The only real shame is that it's unviable for certain applications. I'm not one to play games on the move unless it's on an actual game console, but just the option to install RetroArch and throw whatever game on my SD card is very nice to have. That'll be a suitable replacement for the 3 or so games I had bought on iOS, since I can't be arsed to rebuy those, at least for now. KDE Connect has proven to be useful too. I'm sure there are other little niceties like this waiting to be found that I've just ignored in the past since they weren't possible on iOS. Now I just have to rediscover them.

    That said, Firefox on Android is a fucking dumpster fire compared to the desktop version, and that was something I really wasn't prepared for. Now, it's not like Safari on iOS is all that great, but it's simple and functional, and that's probably all you need from a browser on a phone, in the same way that Macbooks are very functional for the average Joe, but not something most power users would feel is ideal. As for Firefox, sure, you've got uBlock Origin, probably one of the primary reasons to use Firefox, but holy crap there are many paper cuts here. No complete support for extensions, the worst tab control in existence (why is there a home page that's not a new tab and not just an about:home? My dudes, way to go on over-complicating something simple, and thus making it that much harder to fix! See: Make Home screen with an actual tab #20012), a cluttered menu bar, to the point that I sometimes can't even see more than about 5 characters of my menu bar. This wasn't helped by Android's lack of a 'tap the status bar to get to the top of the page' gesture iOS had. I assumed, wrongly, that this was a universal feature on phones. Guess I haven't gone out enough. It's only really a problem when browsing, since pages don't get very long in random apps and whatnot, so a single scroll is probably enough to get you to the top of the page in most cases. But this really stops being true when browsing the internet, at least for me. And it's not like I've got a Home button to press like I'd have on my desktop. I had to install an add-on to bring back a shitty version of this feature. None of the gesture-based ones worked for me, so I got Android scroll top, which adds a button in the extension sub-menu. It's far from ideal, but it works, and this is an edge-case that show up every now and then for me, and not around every corner, so this is hopefully a workable fix in the long-term, although the actual fix would be to CTRL+C and CTRL+V the 'tap the status bar to get to the top of the page' feature into Android, but I assume that ain't happening any time soon. Firefox really is a sub-optimal choice in the browser space in general, and the Android version really highlights this. Mozilla's been fucking around for too long, and it's really starting to show.

    Weirdness

    Mobile data didn't work with the out of box settings, because the APN settings weren't set correctly. Thankfully, my provider had these settings publicly available, and were thus just a search away, and I had a guess at the fact that this was the problem. But this is not a great experience to have when setting up a new phone. Mobile data should Just Work™, just as wifi on Linux should Just Work™, since it's a massive pain when it doesn't, especially for the normies. Otherwise, this kind of thing becomes a barrier to adoption, and a potential 'fuck it' moment when the opportunity to get a refund and a different phone becomes mighty tempting.

    Speaking of mobile data, this phone gave me my first opportunity to experience 5G, and I got to say, I'm not impressed. The only problem I ever had with 4G was coverage. Heck, even 3G under decent conditions for me was good for what I'd usually use it for. I could watch a Youtube video on 3G just fine. It would struggle if I started sharing that bandwidth with other people, and bad 3G could be damn near useless. 4G on the other hand damn-near always gives you some bandwidth to work with, unless there legitimately is no way you're getting a connection to the outside world, and when it's good 4G, it's good enough for pretty much anything other than latency-dependent tasks. In the middle of a city or at home, I'd easily get 100+ mbps with 4G. Thus I never had any problems as far as speed was concerned if I needed to set up a wireless hotspot because there just doesn't happen to be decent internet access wherever I am, or the internet is just down at home. Even out in the boonies, other than right at the start of the 4G rollout, I'd tend to still get somewhere in the range of 1-10 mbps, which while far from ideal, is still very much functional. I can work within those constrains and restrict myself to text-only websites. It's not great, but it's reliably at that level, and when it does get worse, it's because you straight up don't have a signal. The only problem that needed to be fixed from my perspective, was to fill in the remaining gaps so that nowhere had no coverage, and the places that did get sub-10 mbps speeds, would get pushed up to more tolerable speeds. 5G now gives me 250+ mbps, giving me a speed improvement I don't really need, while the coverage is non-existent outside of any decently populated area, putting me back on 4G, and the only reason I notice is because the icon on my screen changes. And it's not like my data cap's gone up any. Unlimited data plans still aren't a real thing over here, despite what the deceptive advertising would lead you to believe (I'm still shocked that shit ain't illegal). It's not like I can use more data. I can just use what limited data I have more quickly. If the internet does go down at home, my plan's still going to get throttled after a day or two if I don't specifically go out of my way to limit data usage. It's still not good enough to play online games unless they're turn-based or the like. The latency's still there compared to fibre, or copper for that matter, physics being physics and all. Without true unlimited data plans, 5G is mostly just a nothingburger from my perspective as a consumer. I'm sure there are good reasons to build up 5G infrastructure beyond the individual user experience, but that's not really a discussion I'm well-informed enough to have.

    A screenshot of an /e/os homescreen, with the bottom row splitting the wallpaper in two.

    The way the wallpaper is displayed on the home screen with the default launcher is really dumb, with a very visible split separating the bottom permanent row. I'm probably going to end up switching to a different wallpaper just so it looks less dumb, since there apparently isn't any setting to fix this, but I haven't really found anything that I'm happy with. The actual fix for this, along with some other stuff like not being able to arbitrarily place apps and widgets, is to download and use a different launcher, but I haven't gotten around to diving down that rabbit hole. It's a shame that /e/os isn't delivered with a launcher that's as functional as it probably should be. iOS is way more functional here, and that's weird, given that Android is known for its functionality and customisability, but in this case, much of that is locked behind getting a completely different launcher.

    App-specific language settings didn't seem to take for a while, and it wasn't even fixed by any specific update. All the local apps I use, like for my bank or for public transport, have options to set the app to the local language. This is done through the system settings, which I find to be a bit weird, but the same has been true on iOS for a while now, but whatever. I can set the setting in there, and for some apps it worked right away, but some were stuck in English for no apparent reason, until they weren't. I'd send in a bug report if I could, but given they don't want my feedback, they shan't have it.

    Annoyingly, the default apps can't be removed. Some can be disabled, but not all. On some level, I get this; you don't want to have grandma accidentally delete her phone app and then be stuck, but so long that you can get that app back from the app store (and that it's the first result that show up for any reasonable search), this should be a non-issue. Or at the very least, hide it behind an advanced menu or something. Just give the decently in the know user the option. Not allowing the user to delete or at the very least hide the default apps is something that people mocked Apple for ages, and eventually, even they caved. So /e/os is somehow doing worse than Apple on this front.

    Contactless payment over NFC seems to not work. Google Pay obviously doesn't, but other implementations should work as far as I can tell. Vipps, the local money-transfery-dealio in Norway, did seem to work just fine as an app, and I was able to activate NFC payment, but when I try to actually use it, both the payment terminal and app get confused, and no actual transaction is made. Then, a after a few hours, Vipps refuses to open, complaining about security, and a reinstall is required to get it back to a working condition. Annoyingly, the same thing happens when I try to transfer a larger amount of money. I did successfully use the app to transfer smaller amounts to my friends, as well as non-insignificant amounts via purchases on the web, but a large transfer to a random person who I was buying a 6900 XT from apparently triggers a second check that trips over the same problem that activating contactless and just having the app installed for a while does. Good thing I can fall back to cash in a pinch, but still really annoying in the moment. I don't think this is a problem on the payment or payment terminal side of things, as Vipps's implementation should work on darn near everything, just as a normal debit card would, so this is probably some issue on /e/os's or whatever upstream component's end, but given that contactless payment is supposed to work on /e/os, I have no idea what the actual problem is. Even better, it seems that Vipps somewhat recently broke some more, since after just being installed for a little while, the app breaks by itself, complaining about security in the same way as when you try to activate contactless. A reinstall does fix it, but it's fiddly. See VIPPS mobile payment app stopped working (Norway).

    Android Auto is, apparently, completely non-functional on /e/os on the Fairphone 6. This page: How to setup Android Auto with /e/os?, straight from the horse's mouth, lead me to believe otherwise. It saying it's only compatible with Android 13 should have tipped me off, but it didn't. I get 'Communication error 22' after following that guide, which leads me to Android auto not working (communication error 22) on /e/os's Gitlab, a 3 year old ticket which is closed, but not solved. Further digging reveals this is a MicroG problem, and only really fixable on their end, and that it's not an easy problem to solve. A big shame, and probably one that would have made me reconsider buying the phone had I known beforehand with certainty. But without any other large issues forthcoming, this one might be worth overlooking. Someone did do the needful and posted about it on the /e/os forum, since they also couldn't get it to work on their Fairphone 6; see Android auto “communication 22”, so if there's a simple solution to that problem that I've just missed, or one does eventually materialise, someone will hopefully point it out eventually.

    The Coop Key app is broken. This is probably an app problem, given that a lot of other people are complaining about it on the reviews section on the app's Play Store listing, but it is very annoying. The app was even updated not that long ago, . I vaguely remember reading a post on the /e/os forum saying that it was because the app was stupid enough to call out to Chrome when it wanted to go through its authentication process, rather than just calling out to whatever's the default browser, and given that /e/os doesn't even have Chrome installed, that seemed about right. I can't really test that theory though, since I can't get Chrome to install (not that I'd really want to in the first place, but if I can install it just for this and then uninstall it, I would). I also can't find that post again no matter how much I try, so I must have imagined it. I did send them an email about this, since they do have an open email address for feedback, so we'll see what comes about from that. Had I known about this problem from the get-go, along with the Android Auto issue and no contactless payment, as well as all the more nitpicky things, I probably wouldn't have switched, since this makes for three rather large omissions in the fulfilment of my phone needs, all of which were fully functional on iOS. A lot of the other stuff are nitpicks I can get used to or just deal with as background noise, but these stick out like sore thumbs for me, and I'm not really seeing any grand return on investment from abandoning Apple. Sure, there's decent list of nice stuff, but nothing groundbreaking, and certainly nothing non-obvious that I didn't already know about before getting into this or that I couldn't have read up on.

    Call recording is seemingly not a thing, even though there's an option to set the audio format for it in the phone settings. I myself did the needful and posted on the forum: see Call recording on FP6. I would have posted on the /e/os Gitlab, if it weren't for the fact they block people from registering if you're using an email address with a custom domain. Guess they don't want feedback after all, the fucking cunts. So much for the open-source ethos. Someone else did bother though. See Call record disabled after a while. Along the same lines, call screening seems to be a Pixel (and maybe Samsung?) exclusive feature. There doesn't seem to be any open source alternative that you can just download and then screens your calls, and getting the Pixel experience involves either getting a Pixel, or rooting your phone to get the relevant app to think it's on a Pixel. To be fair, I wasn't exactly expecting it to work all that well, given that the people who call me don't tend to go straight to English, and I doubt the call screening feature has support for many languages outside English. But I had at least wanted to try it out. It's also funny how I migrated away from Apple the moment this was to become a feature on iOS, since it's now in the iOS 26 beta. Oh well.

    Sidenote: the /e/os forum and gitlab are fucking awful. The search on the forum is awful, and it hijacks CTRL+F, and has one of the least compact web designs I've seen in a while. I quit reddit after they turned evil, but it's still a useful resource for troubleshooting and such, and I still need a plugin to redirect me to old.reddit to actually read what's on the page without needless scrolling and bloat. The /e/os forum doesn't even have the decency to look like an old-school forum if that's what they were going for, although they often have some of the same problems. The forum also auto-closes threads after a while, regardless of whether or not the problem the thread addresses has been solved, so lots of threads are closed with problems that still very much exist. Their gitlab isn't indexed in search engines, since they block indexing via their robots.txt, see gitlab.e.foundation's robot.txt. So even if your problem is known about, you're not going to know they know without manually checking their gitlab, using its awful search, in which case, you might not even figure it out that way, and just be left in the dark to post on the forum to tell people about it there, only to be ignored by the developers, since they don't give a shit about that forum.

    And it was while browsing that forum that I discovered that /e/os does have a black mark on its reputation: Voice to Text feature using Open AI. What the actual fuck? What's the point of going with a degoogled version of Android if its just going to trojan in the other Big Tech™ garbage, without so much as an opt-in prompt? This is in fantastically poor taste, and even worse, the /e/os employees see absolutely no problem with this, as if proxying the data they're sending along remedies this in any way. 'Your data is your data' my fucking arse. The quote by Gaël Duval that's front and centre on Murenas website, 'We make smartphones that don't share any of your personal and professional data to Google, Apple or other third parties', is proven false by naught more than this update. I'm actually stunned at this, and a bit surprised I didn't know about it before I got my phone, but I guess /e/os isn't quite big enough yet for this kind of news to trickle down to being common knowledge among the relevant people. There is no valid excuse for this; none what so ever. Voice-to-speech is a solved problem as far as I can tell, at least for English, and multiple people in that forum post have suggested very capable local-compute alternatives to sending your voice data over to OpenAi. And even if there was no actual solution to that particular problem, one does not just make a deal with the devil to solve it, thus compromising the ideals which the people using your platform are there for. /e/os seems to be coasting on the goodwill given to them from being the European and privacy centric alternative in the phone OS space, and from this, it's pretty clear that that view has no basis in reality. The other options in this space, like GrapheneOS and CalyxOS, may not have a European company behind them, but they sure do give a shit about privacy and security, or at least give you the option to care rather than just throwing you to the wolves like stock Android will. sturgk on that forum post put it better than I probably could: 'I expected a de-Googled system to be also de-Metad, de-Microsfted, de-Amazoned and de-openAIed.'.

    Final impressions

    Overall, it's pretty clear that /e/os is not ready for consumption by average Joes. Too many features are either missing or iffy, and you can't bet on them being implemented soon enough. You can't take any single feature for granted and just assume it'll work without confirming it before you actually buy your phone or flash it. GrapheneOS has fixed some of these features from what I understand, but given I prefer to not give Google money, and GrapheneOS requires that I use a Pixel, a phone made by Google, I can't really comment on whether or not that's true. Even still, all the viable alternatives are Android-based, while the next option on the list are the true Linux phones like the Librem 5 or the Pinephone, but those aren't viable for anyone other than developers and hardcore enthusiasts. Other than that, you're back to using a dumbphone, something not even many people on /r/dumbphones actually do; even they will keep an actual smartphone in their backpack as a backup, or maybe a tablet with support for the relevant apps, since not having some form of smart device on your person is apparently that unviable.

    In fact, I'm of the opinion that /e/os is even less ready for consumption than desktop Linux is compared to Windows, which seems wild, at least at first glance, but after having experiences both, that's my honest opinion. My wild speculation is that desktop Linux has had a lot more time catching up with a corporation going evil than phones have. So in the case of desktop computers, that would be Microsoft, and Microsoft has been iffy since at least the 2000s, probably more like the 90s. Not to mention that desktop OSes have stagnated quite a lot over the past 10 years, and the trend is pointing downwards. How many features of desktop Windows or macOS are you using that weren't there 10 years ago, and are actually an improvement over the old way? That list probably does have some things on it, like DX12, Windows Hello, WSL (ha!), APFS, and probably more, but once you exclude bug fixes and things that are just barely above that in terms of feature implementations, as well as all the stuff you simply don't use, I might not even need more than both of my hands to count. Heck, I'd still be happy with my 2012 Macbook Pro as far as both hardware and user-facing software are concerned, other than the battery being dead, security updates no longer being pushed: see Hardware can last a long time. Talk about strides in the desktop OS user experience if I'm not missing anything significant going back to a 13 year old machine and a 5 year old OS, which is only distinguishable from the one it shipped with when you go looking for stuff, and actually indistinguishable once you're in a web browser or any other maximised program.

    Meanwhile, Android is still nominally open-source, and Google didn't even start to go full evil until at least the mid-2010s. Google Reader shut down in 2013, while their 'Don't be evil' motto didn't get cut until 2018. So Android's been a darling in open-source for a fairly long time, and it's only in the last 5-10 years that people have really started to want to get the fuck away from Google, and thus we've only had about 5-10 years to develop sensible alternatives to Google's Android that also aren't iOS, and in that time we've only had a gradual ramp-up of development of de-googled Android and other viable alternatives, given that it takes time to shift gears away from Google, and their evilness has been fairly gradual. And it's only in that time that features like Android Auto and contactless payments became common and desired features, so it's not that weird they aren't functional yet on Android by default and need some babysitting by a developer to actually get going, but it's a real shame. Add in that while Android itself is open-source, other things like drivers as well as Google's more Android-directed developments that aren't a part of core Android, very much aren't, so you get a lot less 'for free' than you'd think if you were to try and create a de-Googled version of Android. You get 80% for free just by using the AOSP as a template, so a user can pick it up and have a look around for 10 minutes and not find any obvious problems, but the final 20%, which is where all the polish is, is really tough to catch up on, and thus a lot of work. The instant a user downloads some random non-FOSS app, the chances of it wanting to talk to Google is really fucking high, since Google Play Services is used in damn near everything outside of the pure open-source stuff. MicroG alleviates this somewhat, but outside of the trivial cases, things are non-functional; hence no Google Pay, Android Auto, no spoofing strong integrity checks, et cetera, and some of these aren't fixable without Google doing things they really don't want to do.

    I have no qualms with the hardware itself though, outside of the size and other problems which derive from that. It'll be interesting to see how well it holds up, given that the hardware isn't as powerful as it could be, but given that I have the option to replace the battery myself if I need to, and the same goes for things like the USB-C port, there's a solid potential here. As long as Fairphone can back that up with their software updates, which I'm sure they will, if not as promptly as they probably should. I can't really comment on the software side of things as far as the stock Android install is concerned, but from what I can tell, it's a pretty stock Android experience, so if you're in on Google already and don't have any problems with that, that's probably a very viable way to go, given that it won't have the obvious features that are absent from /e/os. I'll be sticking to /e/os because I'm not fine with Google and the other options like CalyxOS either aren't compatible or seem to be even less functional. Murena seem to be the lesser of these evils, but I'll still have to deal with several compromises, and I will certainly not pick them willingly next time unless they've cleaned up their act and regained my trust, and I won't be recommending /e/os to anyone else, as I myself don't really trust them more than I did Apple.

    I'll be praying to various higher beings that whatever OEM GrapheneOS has gotten into bed with will release their phone fairly soon, and when that happens, assuming there aren't any major hardware features missing compared to my FP6, I'll be buying whatever they have on offer and flashing GrapheneOS on it on day one, and pass my Fairphone along to someone else. There's nothing substantive keeping me on the FP6 beyond the obvious like 'new phone costs money'; it's a sidegrade compared to my old iPhone SE if it hadn't been for the battery and software going down the drain on that thing. GrapheneOS has the potential to provide a much better and well-rounded experience compared to /e/os, while simultaneously being better at their primary stated goal of bettering security and privacy. Daniel Micay might be a knobhead, but at least he's (mostly) directing his energy into a product that's actually really good.

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