A local tech store in Germany currently has a deal of being able to shop VAT free. Being able to buy a fairphone 6 for 100€ less (or even 150€ less compared to the murena deal) is kind of too good to pass up on.
While installing a custom OS on my phone is absolutely no problem for me, I did think of buying the murena version for the added support and to make sure finnicky apps like revolut will work better. Though I don’t think the end result of installing /e/ OS myself and locking the bootloader would be any different from buying it preinstalled?
I did hear somewhere that you could buy a “support package”? Would that lead to similar support for my device? The only official thing I could find that sounded similar were on the e.foundation donation page, where the 32€ and 64€ list “We’ll listen to your needs carefully”.
For the Hardware fairphone offers its 3 years of extended warranty no matter where you bought it, right?
Since even with the 64€ tier I would be saving a ton of money over buying the phone from fairphone or murena directly, this would be my preferred path of action.
Is there anything significant I would be missing out on compared to buying it directly? (Aside from obviously needing to do returns through the seller)
Will pass on this feedback to the team.
The one issue we have with user installed devices is they come in with some issues. To explain further. Some years back we offered support to install /e/OS on user devices. The result was we ended up with devices on which we had no installation experience, or devices which had hardware issues and we were getting into arguments with customers who now insisted we flash /e/OS on it. It was repair first and install next. All without losing user data.
This service had to be stopped as we did not have the resources to commit . A simple support option on devices which were user installed would means devices with community builds on them which cannot be bootloader locked and as such an app like revolut would still not work on it. (Revolut expects a locked bootloader)
That makes sense to me. However I don’t plan to install a community edition on some third party device but only the official build on a fairphone 6.
I understand that it’s difficult for you to ensure that I did everything correctly but would that change anything about possible support?
User installed devices which are also sold on the Murena store - bootloader locked. The additional resourcing that it would require and the possible services that can be provided. I have passed the feedback but it would require some thinking if it is possible if at all. Will get back if there is any progress on this.