Same as any other major employer, surely? At least, you’re describing how it works at my previous employer (large private enterprise).

The university should push the maintainance to the holder of the phone? That seems unreasonable.

As mentioned in another comment. Universities already have in house it services. Being able to fix the phone right there with spare parts is likely very cost efficient.

If the university didn't make phone repairs themselves they would have to send the phones off for repair, or contract with a local phone repair shop. Or the secret third option: telling your employees to get it fixed and send you the invoice. None of them are cheap, and some of them will make you very annoyed with your billing/procurement/finance people. After a certain scale doing it inhouse makes sense, and with the right phone it's not much more difficult than fixing a business laptop, which is also commonly done inhouse with available spare parts

If they already have an IT department, they already have the staff to take care of this additional workload (after a bit of training). How much difference is there really in repairing a "repairable" phone and a computer? Not much really as "repairing" a computer is often just fiddling with the software and / or just about changing an easily available and "standardised" parts. (When was the last time any of us saw any IT department doing actual board level servicing to repair a computer?) It will be the same with the Fairphone too (Fairphone makes it easy to change the battery, the board and the display screen).

If it is like my usual experience with European academia, it may be intended to more heavily push use of Microsoft 365 services, which tend to somewhat assume phone availability. I think that usually universities cannot force the use of personal devices for work, so providing mobile phones on request is one way of moving to more a more purely Microsoft service infrastructure. It looks like Radboud is a Microsoft shop, so I would not be surprised.

My university, for example, is gradually removing all office phones (already voip) and replacing them with Teams voip as the only phone system for the university, encouraging personal phone use of Teams, but having computer-based use as the option for people who refuse. As they don't provide mobile phones, however, they can't require Microsoft Authenticator, and so at least officially will still give hardware keys on request (and fortunately still allow TOTP, even if they don't advertise it).

> The announcement implies that the university is responsible for phone maintenance and repair

It says "Do you require a (replacement) smartphone for your work at Radboud University?", so it's probably for a handful of board members and the like, not the actual faculty staff.

Environmentally speaking, (re)using existing hardware / buying second hand probably beats everything.

I often wonder why there still hasn't been a YC-backed attempt to disrupt the "replace your phone every couple of years because your battery became slower" cartel in 2026. Seems like such a low-hanging fruit, especially given the very visible success of companies like Framework.

They are currently on the Fairphone 6, and at least in Germany the official online store still sells a wide selection of parts for the Fairphones 3-6, and the display and camera for the Fairphone 2.

Sure, you don't get meaningful hardware upgrades (apparently there were some small ones), and Fairphone are far from the only ones selling spare parts for their phones. But in terms of keeping old phones alive with authentic parts and easy to execute disassembly steps, they are pretty good

I guess it was a Fairphone 2 from 2015? They are still selling screens, cases and camera modules but not the rest of the parts unfortunately:

https://shop.fairphone.com/shop/category/spare-parts-4?categ...

I bought a Fairphone 3, released in 2019.

The charging port wore out. I bought another one in 2023. They still sell that part today. https://shop.fairphone.com/shop/fairphone-3-bottom-module-37

In fact, I see they still sell parts (the screen, at least) for the Fairphone 2, released in 2015. First-party parts 10 years later, what a concept! https://shop.fairphone.com/spare-parts

I don't know your friend's scenario, but this was mine.

It's not an either-or, like "either buy first-party parts for a Fairphone OR buy a second-hand Samsung". You can buy a second-hand Fairphone too. It would be nice if you got first-party parts for Samsungs, years after they're released.

I guess maybe if the comparison you're looking at is the one you mentioned? Second hand normally beats everything else since it's avoiding what would other wise be waste, and there's nothing new that needs to be manufactured.

That said, I bought a fairphone about 4 years ago, in that time, I've had a bunch of issues that'd have meant replacing the phone for other non-fairphone models (this list doesn't make me look great at taking care of things): - USB charger broke after getting mortar in it - Screen broke after dropping the phone directly onto screen - Battery replacement (due to age, not my fault this time!) - Screen broken yesterday after dropping my phone onto concrete after falling over during a run.

If I'd had a Samsung, or non-repairable phone of another kind, I'd be buying my fourth phone today, instead I ordered a spare part and will repair things easily in a couple of days when it arrives.

So, hard to beat the sustainability of second hand tech, but definitely from an economical point of view, my fairphone has easily been a good call.

Of course your mileage may vary, especially if you are better at taking care of things than me.

Edit: worth saying, the fairphone 4 was discontinued a year or so ago, but that isn't the same as saying parts aren't made for it. Spare parts are still really easy to get hold of.

> Four years later and the model had been discontinued

Which model? Was it the FP1? It sounds like your friend was extremely unlucky - FP2 is 11 years old & there's still (a limited subset of) parts for sale for it (display & camera). FP3 (7yo model) still has all the parts for sale.

That said - I'm critical of another aspect of device longevity: software support. I upgraded from my (still working) FP3 to the FP5 because apps I needed stopped working on the highest version of Android supported by FP3. That Android version is still officially supported by Fairphone & receiving security updates but without major version upgrades the app support can be problematic. Obviously that's ultiamtely the fault of bad app devs, but ultimately it's hard to overcome.

*designed in holland

The default OS is not de-googled Android though, but regular Android. You have to buy the /e/OS variant, which is slightly more expensive (or flash it yourself).

But with the long-term support and access to spare parts (the university can stock them), this seems like a good move. Also happy for FairPhone that they are getting more traction.

Made in Suzhou, China.

As far as I know only Gigaset and HMD manufacture in Europe. And even those two only do final assembly in Europe, the components are still made in China.

Technically Fairphone could ship you a box of parts and have you assemble the phone yourself. Then it would be "Made in Europe" (or where-ever you live).

In the province* Holland, but the country The Netherlands :)

Partially, AOSP is still made by Google.

This no different from the fallacy of using Chrome and VSCode forks.

> Android

> without being tied to Google

That's a contradiction.

With all the US/EU issues currently, you might even be able to spin up a company to support European services that need management based on OSS management software.

And with an unlockable bootloader (that can be easily unlocked without needing to contact the manufacturer or require any special software).

I've read that the Fairphone 6 is more like a "regular" phone than the previous one, because it has a standard phone chip (Snapdragon) instead of an IoT one.

They did that to get longer software support from Qualcomm, but now they can get long support for Snapdragon chips.

https://www.gsmarena.com/sony_xperia_10_v-12264.php + https://docs.sailfishos.org/Support/Supported_Devices/

> web browser on a device that isn’t serviced by Apple or Google

Which browser though? But what you're describing sounds a lot like a Linux tablet, which do exist: https://itsfoss.com/linux-tablets/

A camera with optical zoom would be indeed nice.

For me another feature is what disqualifies it. Fairphone 6 would have been otherwise acceptable for myself, as it has quite decent specifications, but it only has USB 2.0.

Other smartphones at around the same price not only have USB 3, but also DisplayPort 1.4 (e.g. from Motorola).

I hate when I see even on many smartphones over $1000, that they save a few cents by implementing USB 2 instead of USB 3, and a few dollars at most by not implementing DisplayPort.

The SoC used in Fairphone 6 supports both USB 3 and DisplayPort, but its designers have saved a few external components by not offering these features.

Pixel is also disqualified for me by the same reason. Unfortunately only some smartphones made in China offer complete features and without excessive locking of the phone.