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?
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.
Where?
This is true for the entire smartphone industry excepct Fairphone and maybe a handful others.
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.