Nearly impossible? How Fairphone built the ethical, repairable Fairphone Gen 6+. - Ars Technica

Overview

Nearly impossible? How Fairphone built the ethical, repairable Fairphone Gen 6+.

Fairphone’s CTO explains how and why the Dutch company builds a different kind of smartphone.

Details

Smartphone longevity didn’t used to matter. In the past, before you could wear out or break a phone, there was always some shiny new thing to buy. Today, we expect our smartphones to go the distance, but they’ve also become less repairable and, in many cases, more fragile. Fairphone, a Dutch smartphone maker that has just entered the US market, thinks about phones differently.

The new $650 Fairphone Gen 6+ is designed both for longevity and easy repairability. There are trade-offs to this approach if you’re used to the standard glass and aluminum sandwiches filled with glue, gaskets, and teeny-tiny screws. But the drawbacks could be worth it for the right buyer. Fairphone CTO Chandler Hatton told Ars that Fairphone’s goal is to provide a compelling mobile experience while also enabling the user to “fully own” their device. At the end of the day, this is what a lot of people say they want in a smartphone.

These days, Google, Samsung, and Apple support phones with software updates for the better part of a decade, but will the hardware last that long? And what happens when it needs a repair? You may be out of luck or out a lot of money, but Fairphone prioritizes the self-repair experience.

“We’re doing something that was long thought to be nearly impossible,” said Hatton. “Which is delivering high-performing modular smartphones that can last for a very long time.”

The Fairphone Gen 6+ has a 6.31-inch OLED screen, which is, of course, fully replaceable.

Fairphone designs devices to be sustainable, focusing on avoiding conflict minerals, using recycled materials, and paying workers a living wage. Fairphone says it doesn’t want to sell you a bunch of phones, just one that you can keep using even if something breaks.

“Our goal is that every single person that purchases a Fairphone uses it for at least five years, and we track that as a KPI [Key Performance Indicator],” said Hatton.

The standard way to design a modern smartphone is to cram as much as you can into an aluminum and glass sandwich, with the expectation that it will be assembled once in a factory and never opened by the buyer. Devices rely on glue and awkwardly placed screws to accomplish this, making the internals a little like metal spaghetti.

The Gen 6+ is designed so that anyone can replace parts, reducing e-waste and potentially saving consumers a lot of money. If you’ve had, say, a Samsung Galaxy phone for a couple of years and need to replace the screen or USB port, the cost might be higher than just buying a new phone.

“There is an incentive in terms of planned obsolescence to replace your device,” said Hatton. “On the one hand, it’s a good way to keep selling devices, but that’s simply not the proposition that we have.”

That means designing the phone differently—it’s not just a matter of skipping the glue. Inside, the Fairphone Gen 6+ is clean and orderly. It starts with a pair of T5 Torx screws exposed on the back of the phone. After removing those, the back cover slides off. With the same driver, you can extract the battery, camera modules, USB-C port, display, and more. In all, the phone supports user replacement of 12 different parts with just that one (included) screwdriver. One drawback is that the modular approach makes the phone a millimeter or two thicker than most glued-together phones.

The phone comes with a tiny screwdriver, but any T5 torx will work.

The battery stares you in the face once the back panel is opened. You’ll have to remove a few more screws to get it out, but quick swapping isn’t the goal here—this is about longevity.

“We know that after about three years, it will be wise to replace your battery with a new one,” said Hatton. “Batteries aren’t meant to last forever, but your phone on the whole can last a lot longer than a battery.”

While the Fairphone is designed to be disassembled, what about the long haul? The Fairphone 6+ is mostly plastic rather than metal like a Pixel or i Phone. The phone still manages to feel solid, though, thanks to its internal metal frame, and the company has worked to ensure the device doesn’t become progressively less sturdy as you tinker with it.

“When we’re in our product development cycle, we introduce tests that are specifically dedicated to disassembly and reassembly,” said Hatton. “So we’re looking in part at the robustness.”

Robots work the assembly line, but humans are less predictable. Hatton pointed to tests that examine, for example, what happens when someone over-tightens screws while servicing their device. Does it warp the casing? Damage any nearby components?

Hatton said it takes her 15 minutes to fully disassemble a Fairphone Gen 6+, but she did have a hand in designing it. That said, it shouldn’t take a novice much longer. After a couple of minutes perusing Fairphone’s documentation, I was able to take the phone apart and remove all of the user-serviceable components in about 20 minutes. Everything went back together without issue and still works perfectly, with no new gaps or wobble.

The process is pretty intuitive, with most of the parts held in with flat board-to-board cable connectors. Just pop them off with a spudger or your fingernail, and the component lifts right out. There are a good number of screws to remove to get all the way down to the metal frame and screen, but again, they all use the same T5 Torx bit.

6.31-inch 1116×2484 LTPO OLED, 10–120 Hz, 1400 nits

50 MP f/1.88 primary, 13 MP f/2.2 ultrawide, 32 MP f/2.0 selfie

Glass backs are common on smartphones because they’re good for radio performance, and they add significant rigidity to the design. But they’re also easy to crack and difficult to remove (they’re almost always glued in place). Naturally, the only glass on the Fairphone 6+ is covering the 6.31-inch 1116 x 2484 OLED display, which is fully replaceable. This is probably the most challenging component to swap, but even this isn’t too bad. The screen is held in place by a handful of screws and has a generously long ribbon cable attachment, making a swap much less frustrating than your typical smartphone.

The OLED is about what you would expect for this price range—the resolution is more than sufficient, and the colors are great. The brightness is good enough to be legible outdoors, but at a mere 1,300 nits peak brightness, it’s harder to see than the displays you get on phones like the Pixel or Galaxy S26 that are a few hundred more expensive. Good luck replacing those displays on your own if you get a crack, though.

Smartphones have become more powerful over the years, but their designs have also been streamlined. Headphone jacks and micro SD card slots are now rare, and even the SIM card slot is quickly fading away. OEMs often cite the space constraints when dropping these features.

“There’s a reason that most phone manufacturers prefer slightly larger footprints—because you can fit more stuff in there,” Hatton said. “So yes, it is legitimate if phone manufacturers are saying, ‘Hey, we dropped this feature to save space inside the device.’”

The Fairphone retains some of these elements, but not because there’s a surplus of space, Hatton said. The Fairphone 6+ still has a micro SD slot and physical SIM card because people want them. These features don’t come free, though. In addition to the space constraints, adding more components adds to the price and complicates supply chains. That’s another reason some OEMs have removed features.

Being modular means the Fairphone is a little thicker than most smartphones.

The Fairphone Gen 6+ plays to picky smartphone and DIY enthusiasts, but there’s still no headphone jack. Hatton notes that the team hears from a small but vocal cadre about headphone jacks every time it starts planning a new device, but it hasn’t made sense to include one in recent phones.

“In terms of how to actually get [a headphone jack] into the device, it is quite difficult,” Hatton said. “It’s a relatively large hardware component, but it’s not just the component itself. It’s also where it needs to be. You know, you’re not going to put the headphone jack in the middle of the back of the phone. You also need to make sure it attaches to the right things on the inside, and because we’re Fairphone, you need to make sure it’s repairable. So when we look at that total picture, we assess the needs of our customers to fulfill some other wishes at the expense of the headphone jack.”

Looking at spec sheets side-by-side, the Fairphone also lacks something that many of today’s phones have: IP6X water resistance. An upshot of making non-repairable phones that are chock-full of glue is that they’re relatively easy to seal against water intrusion. With an IP6X rating, a phone can be fully submerged in water for up to 30 minutes, at least in theory.

The Fairphone Gen 6+ is only rated as IP55, which will protect it from splashes. That could be enough, though. “Our phones are designed for what people need on a day-to-day basis,” said Hatton. “How often is it that people would like to take their hardware underwater? I think the answer there is less often than some manufacturers would have you think.”

While it might be comforting to think you could drop your phone in a pool, that’s still risky. OEMs don’t warranty the water-resistance of their phones, and if you’ve made any repairs, it’s possible the sealing of that difficult-to-open device was compromised. Hatton notes that it wouldn’t be impossible to make a repairable phone that’s also IP6X, but you’d have to design around that in numerous ways.

“There are a number of things that you need to weigh against a higher IP rating,” Hatton said. “You can achieve it in a very small form factor with higher costs, or you can achieve it with a larger form factor—you could increase the Z dimension and perhaps also the other dimensions, and that way you could create all sorts of gaskets and other things. But we assess the whole landscape and say, ‘Hey, the customer doesn’t want a phone that’s a brick.’ They also don’t want a phone that’s incredibly expensive. So within those boundaries, what IP rating meets their needs?”

It’s a trade-off, but it’s one that many people would probably make in the name of repairability if given the choice.

The Fairphone Gen 6+ is similar to the Gen 6 that launched in Europe last year, but there are a few notable changes. The new phone has a slightly upgraded Snapdragon chip, and it has more memory than the last Fairphone at a time when AI has driven up costs considerably.

“We decided to increase the RAM to 12 gigabytes,” said Hatton. “This is something that I think is a little bit unique, given the current circumstances in the consumer electronics industry. But the reason that we did is that it really underscores the value proposition of longevity that we’d like our customers to enjoy when they purchase the Gen 6+.”

Google, meanwhile, is catching some well-deserved flak for regressing from 16GB to 12GB of RAM in its latest Pixel phones, which start at

“We have not immediately jumped onto the bandwagon of creating AI features without really understanding what the use scenario is and what the customer really wants,” said Hatton. “We see that people are quite interested in understanding how their data is used and having control over their data and privacy. That means that as we continue to use more AI in all sorts of different settings, we’ll continue to work on AI features for our devices that focus on these aspects that are important.”

Fairphone has been offering devices with generous support windows for years. The Fairphone 3, which launched in 2019, just reached end-of-life a few weeks ago. The Gen 6+ will be supported through 2033 with software updates and replacement parts.

Hatton says that multiple factors go into determining the length of support. The availability of hardware in the supply chain is part of it, but it becomes impossible to update devices once vendors like Qualcomm stop supporting the underlying firmware. Seven or eight years is the functional limit for any smartphone due to vendor support, so it’s impressive to see Fairphone in the same range as the likes of Google and Samsung. It really can’t do more than it’s already doing here.

At $650, the Fairphone feels like a good deal in 2026. Maybe a year or two ago, the device wouldn’t have seemed as competitive, but with price increases and RAM regressions becoming standard, Fairphone comes out looking much stronger with the Gen 6+. It has a solid mid-range Snapdragon chip, ample storage (with a micro SD card slot), and 12GB of RAM, which is still flagship territory.

There’s also something to be said for knowing that your phone is repairable if something goes wrong, and when the time comes to replace the battery, you can do it yourself in a few minutes. Fairphone is committed to keeping all these parts in stock for the duration of the phone’s support window, which runs through 2033.

The Fairphone may not be everyone’s style, but I like the utilitarian vibe. My design complaints are fairly limited and minor: the volume buttons are too low, and the power button (with fingerprint sensor) is too hard to find by feel.

The modular design allows for a little fun in the form of accessory back panels. You can swap them just by removing the two external screws. There’s a finger loop back (below), a card holder, and a lanyard that works with any of the backs. Hatton notes that the accessories also invite users to open up the phone to see how easy it is, something Fairphone recommends people get familiar with even if they don’t have any accessories to swap—it’s like knowing where the spare tire is in your trunk.

The Fairphone Gen 6+ runs a minimally customized build of Android 16, so it’s a bit behind the latest and greatest. Thankfully, Google doesn’t limit as many features to the latest builds of Android anymore. It has almost no bundled software outside of the standard Google apps, which is nice to see, but if you’re hoping for a phone that’s crawling with snazzy software features, this is not it.

One of Fairphone’s few software customizations is called Moments, which you can toggle with the brightly colored side switch. Moments can help limit distractions by hiding most of your apps behind a minimalist UI. It’s just a full-screen app overlay rather than a completely custom home experience, though. If you don’t fancy the digital well-being approach to mobile tech, you can remap that switch. Using it as a flashlight toggle is nifty, for example.

The camera may be the biggest compromise if you switch from a Google or Samsung phone. The hardware is typical for the mid-range, with a 50 MP Sony 700C joined by a 13 MP Omni Vision OV13B10. That third lens on the back is actually a window for a time-of-flight sensor that helps with focus. With ample light, both rear sensors produce good images, and the primary even does fine in some more challenging conditions.

Capture speeds are long, though, making it hard to get clear images of moving subjects. Colors look a bit flat, too, and autofocus speed seems on the slow side. There’s a 32 MP selfie camera, which looks a touch dimmer than most devices in this price range.

The Fairphone Gen 6+ (left) might not be as sleek as the Pixel 11 Pro XL (right), but you don’t need a hairdryer to open it up.

With support increasing for making electronics more repairable, other companies may need to start moving in Fairphone’s direction. In Europe, regulators are preparing to require removable batteries, and more US states are enacting right-to-repair laws. The Fairphone CTO stresses that other OEMs have what they need to make phones more repairable.

“We’re producing our phones on the same production lines as our competitors, and often with many of the same components,” said Hatton. “It’s actually quite a small industry when you’re in it, and there is very little room for one of our competitors to say it’s impossible when on the next production line over it is happening.”

The Fairphone Gen 6+ is available directly from Fairphone, as well as on Amazon. It’s unlocked and works on both AT&T and T-Mobile.

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Key Takeaways

• Fairphone’s CTO explains how and why the Dutch company builds a different kind of smartphone
• Smartphone longevity didn’t used to matter
• The new $650 Fairphone Gen 6+ is designed both for longevity and easy repairability
• These days, Google, Samsung, and Apple support phones with software updates for the better part of a decade, but will the hardware last that long