Another one is https://murena.com/ which (IIRC) is based in France. They don't have their own hardware though, they sell partner phones with their ROM preinstalled.

For once Fairphone never updating their phones will work in our favor! If Google roll sthis out in early 2026, anyone with a Fairphone can rest easy that they won't receive that version of the operating system until mid-2028 at least.

Fairphones are also LineageOS and postmarketOS compatible, both options are without tracking and without Google's mandated policies.

LineageOS without gapps is really usable if you set aside the "big" social media apps. WhatsApp can be sourced from their website as an APK. The social apps like facebook, instagram, snap, tiktok and others all require Google Play's tracking services (aka gapps).

For YouTube there's multiple better alternative open source apps available, and mastodon, amethyst and the fediverse apps on f-droid are far superior in terms of performance to the Google Store alternatives.

> Fairphone never updating their phones

I have a Fairphone and i get updates pretty frequently so not sure what you mean?

What major version of Android are you on? Last I checked (a few months ago) all Fairphones were still on Android 13.

Ah, you mean that. Yeah it's still 13.

I have Android 15 on my work phone and 10 in private. I don't really see the difference besides that they've made it more annoying to turn wifi off (requires an extra tap now, first the general internet menu and then a small slider for wifi or mobile data). Genuinely not seeing any significant changes from a user point of view (I'm sure there's lots of new SDKs for the developers, but while I've made apps before, I'm not a mobile dev keeping up with the latest things)

That Fairphone has 13 just tells me they don't waste employee time in their small business on useless upgrades just for the sake of it. Their point is fair wages and ethical mineral mining: better that they have a workable phone without even more fluff, it seems to be tricky enough already in this world :(

Android 15 has things like native satellite communications. It's not just UI changes, the backend OS is more capable.

Right, that is nice to have, though in this case the hardware would also have to support it which an older phone that didn't ship with Android 15 won't have

I'm talking about things like T-mobile's starlink texting. The only hardware requirement is supporting eSIM, which Fairphones 4 and later do. It uses standard LTE.

The sole blocker preventing someone with a Fairphone 4, 5, or 6 from sending text messages via satellite is that they are not on Android 15.

Oh! I didn't know that, thought it required a special antenna. That's cool, thanks for the correction!

The Linux Experiment podcast has a nice review of the Vollo phone https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dh-rIxrGXFU