Ownership
Fairphone also pays attention to the software side of the phone. For the FP1 the company is committed to long-term software support. “Updates contribute to the security and lifespan of the device”, Schmidt explains. “Especially in the Android ecosystem, manufacturers sometimes stop providing security updates 18 months after a device has come to market, opening up the user to security risks. Hardware that is in good condition is being discarded because there is no up-to-date software available anymore. That is why we are still offering software updates for the FP1.”

Fairphone's commitment took quite some doing. In September 2015, the company announced the FP1's chipset was nearing its end-of-life, which meant the manufacturer would not support it anymore with software updates. Fairphone then acquired a license that gave them access to the source code so they could maintain it themselves. It managed to get similar licenses from all their major partners. “It is rather unusual for a small company like Fairphone to get such a license”, the company wrote in its announcement. “Without our critical community, we would have never achieved this and we would like to thank you. With this step we took more control over the software that runs on our products. People make change happen.”

For the FP2, the Dutch company is working on making the operating system (OS) more open for its users. The FP2 ships standard with Android 5.1. But Fairphone is making an effort to open up its phone to third party mobile operating system (OS) developers. The most tangible outcome so far is a collaboration with the Finnish company Jolla, developer of the Sailfish OS that is partly open source and focuses on user privacy. The Sailfish community is working on having Sailfish ported to the FP2. Schmidt: “Just like we want to give people ownership of their hardware, we want to do the same for the software. For some people being able to install an app satisfies their needs but others want to have more control over their device.”

Course of action
The Fairphone is not an perfectly ethically responsible smartphone, but the process of trying to make it more so is shining a light on the injustices in the electronics value chain. The company documents its efforts extensively, which serves as a starting point for discussions. “But”, says Schmidt, “having a discussion is not enough. If you want people to take responsibility for the world around them, you need to offer them a course of action. It starts with knowledge about what is going on but you also need to be able to do something. Fairphone wants to show you can make a difference by offering an alternative.”

Image: Modular architecture of the Fairphone. Courtesy Fairphone, CC BY-NC-SA licence.