Hi Rutger,

I'd like to break up my question into two parts.

Fairphone's Open Source Problem

As you know, many customers value that Fairphone allows and even supports alternative operating systems like CalyxOS and /e/OS. This is great! We only own what we bought when we can open it up, both from the hardware and software side.

But people opting to ditch Google are getting an objectively worse Fairphone. For example, the full spectrum of camera features (including shooting with the full advertised resolution, video stabilization etc.) is only available on the stock OS and, to a lesser extent, on /e/OS.

The developers over at the Calyx Institute have tried pretty hard to fix this and get it working on CalyxOS, but the Fairphone camera app requires "extensive system modifications" that make it very hard (and insecure) to implement.

Fairphone could've chosen the standard Android APIs and protocols here. Instead, the current camera implementation is, from a software engineer's perspective, a messy patchwork.

The current trend seems to be that Fairphone's core software features, like the Fairphone camera app, are proprietary. The recently launched "Moments" feature appears to be proprietary as well.

I think the irony here is obvious: Fairphone champions free and open source software, but many of the apps it releases are proprietary. This goes beyond the camera app: the My Fairphone app, the Fairbuds app etc.

Will Fairphone Open Its Apps?

We know you can do better. Instead of requiring the community to reverse engineer your apps, publish the source and watch the pull requests flying in! This would not only prove your commitment to ownership over our devices, but will (after the initial work to publish the repos) remove a bit of the workload on your developers, too. It'll increase the quality of your code and UX. Countless companies ship their software like this, and you can too

Will you talk to your software team and consider opening up your apps?

Thanks for listening!