That doesn't surprise me. The crowd of people who are aware of the fairphone are most likely techies. And I would wager techies are much more likely to replace a Phone then the Generic Apple user.
No one I’d call a techie bought it, it was the artsy environmental types. The reasons for replacing it ranges from the OS not being updated to run modern Apps to the phone breaking.
We’re pretty digitised in Denmark, so if you can’t download apps from the iOS or play stores you’ll have a harder time transferring payments to friends, using public transportation, ordering food online, interacting with the public sector, accessing your citizen mail box and stuff like that, and Android isn’t very good at longevity.
> he reasons for replacing it ranges from the OS not being updated
They just released a beta of the upgrade to Android 9 for their five-year-old phone. Yes, that's just Android 9, but still way better than other phones that old, and they had to overcome major hurdles for it [2]. But yes, iPhones are much better than Androids at longevity.
Android is fine. It's the sub-par hardware that isn't, poor flash memory gets unbearably slow at some point and that bogs down pretty much everything.
Second and related problem is developers that abuse storage, no, you don't need to fsync your logs or DB to the storage after each row. It really fucks with devices that have lost a bit of IOPS.
I’m not really into it, but the problem they seemed to have with the fairphone was that it wasn’t getting new android versions for some reason. I guess you could argue wether or not developers should support old android versions but the reality is that they don’t.
We’re pretty digitised in Denmark, so if you can’t download apps from the iOS or play stores you’ll have a harder time transferring payments to friends, using public transportation, ordering food online, interacting with the public sector, accessing your citizen mail box and stuff like that, and Android isn’t very good at longevity.