[berkes]

I've been exclusively on Fairphones since Fairphone 1.

Recently switched from FairphoneOS (the stripped, bloatfree, google-free Android) back to stock Android¹

Its updates are fast, steady and consistently good (and improving). The FP1 is ten years old, and still works (though android there is EOL and old, and spare parts no longer available), my FP2 and an FP3 work fine, I can still get parts and Android isn't too old. The hardware is slow, and old, though (e.g. no 5G, power hungry BT, puny camera by current standards). The FP4 is top notch. Spare parts are cheap (e.g. Replaceable battery only €29, new screen only €80), android 12 good enough. But it does have stuff like Google Meet or TV that I would like to remove but cannot.

¹I'm diabetic. Monitoring and Pump control is moving from dedicated electronics to native apps. And they often require Google Android, cannot or will not run on degoogled android. Same for banking and payment apps.

[jagaerglad]

Did you ever try /e/OS? All my banking apps surprisingly worked on FP4 with /e/OS

[_rdvw]

/e/OS is currently 7 months behind security updates for the browser/webview for the second time in a row and has a PDF viewer not updated since 2016 yet considers itself the "state of the art" in security. See my full list of issues with it here: https://divestos.org/misc/e.txt

[jagaerglad]

Ok thanks for sharing, this was all new to me. Honestly it was just such a good user experience for me with their app store and just installing all apps seamlessly. It all just worked. Not sure if other custom ROMs have similar experiences since that's the only one I tried

The only reason I sold my FP4 and went back to samsung and their android experience was that everybod kept complaininh about mic quality during calls and I couldn't seem to fix it. Seemed like others also had similar issues

[hinata08]

iodéOS workd fine as well.

It's based on a LineageOS, but they already have added all the apps and services to use it seamlessly.

[_rdvw]

iodeOS just recently had a 3 month long gap where they didn't publish their source code. See my full list of issues here: https://divestos.org/misc/i.txt

[berkes]

I did. I didn't like it. Many apps lacking or couldn't run. Non of my diabetes monitoring apps would run. Many other apps lacked features or crashen on using these features, like push notifications.

I'm pragmatic though, I think Googles services (some, certainly not all) are just so good that I think paying with my data is OK. Like Google Maps. Even though I contribute to OSM, I think all the OSM apps range from "completely suck" to "fancy, but not on par".

[lopis]

> The FP4 is top notch.

I think find the camera poor though. It takes passable pictures in good conditions. Do you have a better camera app that does a better job?

[berkes]

I probably don't have a reference?

I use both android stock photo app and openphoto (more to tweak).

I think the pictures are good. I'm also old-school in that I think composition, focus, cutout, subject matters far more than pixel quality.

My wife, also FP4 user, sold her canon DSLR 800 (I think?), used for product images in her webshops, because the FP4 made pictures that were just as good or better, without all the hassle.