The Fairphone 6 no longer feels like a compromise (except in the US)

The Fairphone 6 arrives almost two years after the 5, a testament to the company’s approach to the upgrade cycle. If anything, I suspect the company would be frustrated if Fairphone 5 owners were considering a new model already — these are phones to keep, to repair, and to hold on to until the bitter end.

The newest Fairphone continues the company’s commitment to user-repairability, long-term customer support, and ethical production. That means compromises for the consumer: You’ll find more powerful phones with prettier displays and more capable cameras for less money. But this year those compromises are smaller and easier than ever before, while the phone remains a lot better for the planet — you can’t say fairer than that.

The Fairphone 6 is available now across the UK and Europe. It costs €599 / £499 for a version running Fairphone’s custom Android software, which is fairly close to the stock experience, or €50 / £50 more running /e/OS, a privacy-centric, Google-free version of Android made by Murena. If you’re in the US, that’s the only model available, and you’ll have to buy it directly from Murena for $899, a price that Murena founder and CEO Gaël Duval told me reflects tariffs on US imports. It’s a substantial price difference that takes the Fairphone 6 from competing with midrangers like the Pixel 9A in Europe to flagships like the Pixel 10 or iPhone 16 in the US, making it significantly harder to justify.

I’ve been testing the privacy-focused /e/OS version of the phone. It might not look a million miles from stock Android, but the out-of-the-box experience is quite different. It has quick access to options to block tracking cookies within apps, fake your geolocation info, or hide your IP address, along with a “Wall of Shame” listing your apps by how many times they try to track your activity. Murena describes it as “de-Googled,” which means it’s built on the Android Open Source Project, but doesn’t require a Google account to use, includes no Google apps by default, and should share none of your data with Google.

If you’re ready to commit to the Google-free life, there’s an array of relatively simple stock software, like calendar and map apps that look like they’ve been lifted from a decade ago. An app store defaults to open-source options, giving every app a privacy score with details on the trackers it uses and permissions it requires.

The app store also lets you install just about any Android app — even the Google ones — but only if you want to. That’s thanks to microG, an open-source alternative to Google Play Services. The only caveats are that Google Wallet won’t work for NFC payments, and that some apps are a little… janky. Most seem to work, but MyFitnessPal won’t run, and a few others tend to stutter and crash.

On the hardware side, the Fairphone 6 is smaller and lighter than the 5, with a brighter and smoother 6.31-inch 120Hz display. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 chipset isn’t flagship hardware, but it’s smooth enough most of the time, and with 8GB of RAM, it’s powerful enough for anything except serious gaming. The 4,415mAh battery lasts more than a day, and the 30W wired charging speed is fine but unimpressive, with no wireless option.

The cameras remain a big downgrade compared to the competition. The 50-megapixel main lens and 13-megapixel ultrawide are fine for the basics — and exceeded my expectations every now and then — but they struggle in the dark, in complex lighting, or with fast-moving subjects. If you just need your phone camera to be good enough then these definitely are, but you can get much better cameras for the same money (or less) elsewhere.

The other big addition to the Fairphone 6 is a range of semi-modular accessories, similar to those offered with Nothing’s CMF Phone 2 Pro. There’s a lanyard, a card holder, and a loop grip, but the clever thing is that all three screw onto the phone’s rear, becoming integral parts of the hardware. I hope more options are coming.

More important is the phone’s ability to last for years. Whether you buy from Fairphone or Murena, you’ll get an extended five-year warranty. Fairphone also commits to eight years of software updates and seven Android version updates, though Murena only promises five years of software support for its version — worse than the likes of Apple, Google, and Samsung.

The phone is made from fairly sturdy plastic, with Corning Gorilla Glass 7i on the display, and feels tough. There’s one big durability downside, though: it only has an IP55 rating for dust and water protection — good, but not great — which is the drawback of a repairable design that swaps glue for less watertight screws. So while the Fairphone 6 is more repairable than other alternatives, there’s a slightly higher risk of needing that repair in the first place, at least when it comes to sand and water.

Speaking of: you only need a single Torx T5 screwdriver to strip the phone down to parts, which connect and disconnect with a simple push, clicking into place. You can replace the battery, display, rear cover, each individual camera lens, speaker, earpiece, USB-C port, and SIM tray (which doubles as a microSD slot for expandable storage). Spare parts are sold by Fairphone and iFixit, with a promise to stock them for years. In the US, Murena should stock them, but at the time of writing, the parts aren’t on its site yet.

I wanted to confirm if any idiot could pull off a repair, so I took apart every bit of the phone I could and put it back together again, which took a little over an hour and left me with a perfectly functional phone on the other side. Fairphone has some good YouTube videos to run through any given repair step by step, and it couldn’t be much easier, so long as you pay attention to screwing everything back in the right order (ahem, not a mistake I’d ever make…).

The “fair” bit of the name applies to production too. Fairphone claims to use as many recycled materials as possible, and to work with mines, recyclers, component factories, and assembly lines with fair working conditions, from living wages to worker representation. There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, but Fairphone claims to get as close as it can.

I’ve been cautious to recommend previous Fairphones. The elevator pitch is great, but paying a premium for underpowered hardware is still a hard sell. But pure power isn’t the differentiating factor it once was, so even if the Fairphone 6 is less powerful than its counterparts, it’s still powerful enough for most of us. Still, improvements in software support and durability from other manufacturers have made Fairphone’s offering less unique — though no one offers repairability like this.

Up against midrange alternatives, as it’s priced in Europe, the Fairphone holds its own. There are small compromises, but it remains a fair choice for just about anyone. In the US, where it costs more than some flagships and comes with the de-Googled /e/OS whether you like it or not, it’s only for those truly committed to the cause.

Photography by Dominic Preston / The Verge