Exclusive: You Can Finally Buy a Fairphone—a Sustainable, Repairable Smartphone—in the US | WIRED

Overview

You Can Finally Buy a Fairphone—a Sustainable, Repairable Smartphone—in the US

Your i Phone, Samsung Galaxy, and Google Pixel have a 1-year warranty. Unless you cough up extra dough for an extended service plan, you'll pay a hefty fee if you damage the screen and need a replacement (around $329 for an i Phone 17 done directly from Apple).

Details

But it doesn't have to be this way. What if you could order the part from the manufacturer and do the repair yourself? That dream is finally being realized for American consumers, thanks to Fairphone. The Dutch company is bringing its repairable and sustainably built Android smartphone—the Fairphone (Gen 6+)—to the US. Each one comes with a screwdriver.

A replacement screen from Fairphone costs just

The new Fairphone (Gen 6+) is a small upgrade over the Gen 6 the company launched last year. It has a newer Qualcomm Snapdragon 7s Gen 4 processor and double the RAM at 12 GB, but is otherwise largely the same device (hence the “plus” in the name). It now comes in Cobalt Blue, a nod to the miners who extract the cobalt used to make phone batteries, and the company's efforts to improve working conditions in mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The new Fairphone is available on Amazon and at Fairphone.com for $650, and it’s officially certified to work on T-Mobile and AT&T's networks.

While this is the first time the company has brought its flagship mobile product into the US, its expansion to the States began last year with its repairable earbuds and headphones. (The company is also teasing its next-generation Fairbuds 2 wireless earbuds, launching later this year, which it says set “a new bar for repairability and performance.”)

Fairphone has been selling its ethically built smartphones in Europe for more than a decade. Its devices are easy to repair, and many of the components that make up the product are sourced sustainably. The Gen 6+, for example, is made with more than 50 percent fair-trade or recycled materials. The company supports living wages for factory workers in its supply chain, and its devices are assembled with renewable energy and are 100 percent e-waste neutral. The company is also a Certified B Corp with a platinum Eco Vadis rating—two independent certifications that back up its environmental and labor claims.

Fairphone CEO Raymond van Eck tells WIRED that he sees his company’s products as a good alternative for consumers who are feeling the pinch of the current economy. “If you look to the US market, it's heavily duopolistic with very little real consumer choice,” van Eck says. “Americans are exhausted by planned obsolescence, closed-box ecosystems, and expensive yearly upgrades.”

The US is a tough market to crack, with a duopoly held by Apple and Samsung. It's worse for phone brands not sold through US carriers, which is how most Americans acquire new phones; carriers drive as much as 66 percent of smartphone sales according to a 2025 report from the International Data Corporation. This situation has forced many companies to pull out: One Plus recently announced its decision to exit the North American market, following several other phone makers over the last few years, including HMD Mobile, Sony, and LG Mobile. To counter that narrative, van Eck says Fairphone is already in discussions with major carriers and mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) to sell its device through their stores.

While Google's Android powers the company's mobile hardware, it has a few features of its own. For example, you can flip a physical switch on the Fairphone (Gen 6+) to enable Fairphone Moments, a minimal interface designed to reduce digital distractions. Van Eck hopes the minor performance boost in the Gen 6+ will help it support more advanced software features—such as AI-powered capabilities that often require more RAM. Speaking of, he says Fairphone isn't immune to the challenges of the global memory crisis, but its “deep relationships” with suppliers have tremendously helped the company secure components.

“We do not view our codependence on US technology as a compromise or a downside, but as a powerful synergy,” van Eck says. “You could say we take the best of US innovation, which drives the industry performance, and we wrap it with European care for planet and people. This creates, I would say, a stronger product than either side could build in isolation.”

The company is finally growing, too, thanks to a newfound marketing strategy of focusing on the quality of the product, rather than the company's ethical mission. It's seeing growth year-over-year for the fourth quarter in a row, with phone shipments jumping 74 percent in the first half of 2026 compared to the prior year. Van Eck says 80 percent of people who bought the Fairphone Gen 6 are also new to the brand.

“We are really now expanding toward a more mainstream crowd,” he says. “That is helping us tremendously and also giving a lot of confidence that we are really on the right path.”

The Gen 6+ arrives only a year after the Gen 6, but van Eck says the company still plans to stick to its cadence of launching new phone generations every 2 years, and is not moving to a yearly device launch like many of its big tech counterparts.

Nathan Proctor, who leads the US Public Interest Research Group's Right to Repair campaign, is excited for Fairphone's US entry and whether it will incentivize Big Tech to improve the repairability of their own hardware. He says there's a market for people who want modular, fixable phones.

“It's proof that it can be done—if companies wanted to make eminently fixable modular products, they could,” Proctor says. "There's no technological reason why they can't do it; it really is what they've decided to produce. It does raise the question: Why isn't more of our technology easy to fix? … People are going to start thinking about smartphones as longer-term investments, especially as prices have gone up for these phones.”

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Key Takeaways

• You Can Finally Buy a Fairphone—a Sustainable, Repairable Smartphone—in the US

• Your i Phone, Samsung Galaxy, and Google Pixel have a 1-year warranty

• But it doesn't have to be this way

• A replacement screen from Fairphone costs just $90

• The new Fairphone (Gen 6+) is a small upgrade over the Gen 6 the company launched last year