Fairphone has always aimed to persuade the entire industry to act more responsibly for consumers and the environment by establishing a market for ethical products. However, its user-repairable smartphones have traditionally been hard to snag outside of Europe without paying hefty import fees. The Dutch company is now selling devices outside of that market with the launch of theFairphone 4in the United States, but there’s a big caveat.
Fairphone has teamed up with Murena, which is known for its open-source software that’sfree from digital surveillance, to bring the Fairphone 4 to the US market. This means you’re getting a sustainability-focusedAndroid phonewithout Google’s first-party apps onboard, thus no data collection and incessant ad targeting.
“This cooperation with e/OS/ is a great opportunity for us to test selling devices in the US market with a long-term partner and learn more about the American market,” Eva Gouwens, Fairphone CEO, said in a press release (machine translated).
The Murena Fairphone 4 isavailable in two flavors: a $599 variant that gets you 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, and a $679 variant with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. Running Murena’s /e/OS instead of the regular Android version, the device is essentially a de-Googled version of its European counterpart.
Instead, Murena stuffs its default apps into the handset for things like email, calendar, web browser, camera, gallery, messaging, file manager, and more. There’s no Play Store as well, with Murena shipping its own “App Lounge” onboard in lieu of Google’s own app marketplace. Regardless, the apps you download are directly sourced from the Play Store without handing over your data to Google.
The device is also covered by a five-year warranty from Fairphone. And, with /e/OS committing to security and feature updates for the same period of time, we can expect regular support in the country for the Fairphone 4.
The pilot forms the basis for Fairphone’s future strategy in the country, the company stated in a press release. It even mentions the possibility of launching the next Fairphone model in the US, presumably without Google apps as well. At the moment, only the Fairphone 4 is available to US consumers until its successor makes its debut outside of Europe.
