Thank you.
You can hear me?
Yes.
Good afternoon.
Thank you very much for joining the open source for sustainable and long lasting
fun stock with Luca and Agnes.
Thank you very much for being here.
I will be helping you here, helping you with your talk.
Should you need anything?
The stage is yours.
Thank you.
Who knows Fairfun?
Wow.
Happy.
So we are super happy to be here with Luca today to speak about how open source is helping us at Fairfun.
We'll speak about software, but not only.
In this talk, it's not a super-taky talk.
We'll try to speak about all the stuff that we do at Fairfun, which kind of report, which kind of data we open-publish to the public.
We open-publish to push the industry to change.
But first, let's introduce ourselves.
I'm Agnes.
I've been working at Fairfun for the last six years now, and I'm leading the IT and software longevity team.
Software longevity means that we are maintaining the fund for longer.
We are a small team, but the goal of this team is to make sure that we can have long-lasting funds from a software perspective.
And I'm also involved in some collectives.
I founded a company first in France called Ninja Squad, focused on open source, but more on the web layers.
I'm also part of a collective called Duchesse France, which promotes women in tech.
I founded also a smaller conference compared to the first dem called Mixit.
And Mixit is a conference in Lyon, in the center of France, focused on tech and ethics.
And the last but not the least, I'm part of the RézoMutu.
I launched a website in my city, Saint-Etienne, in the center of France called Le Numéro Zéro.
You have also an antenna of Le RézoMutu in Brussels, stu.info.
And those websites are alternative to the mass media owned by billionaires.
You can publish some information about UView on the local news.
And all those websites are built on open source software.
So I invite you to have a look on that.
Luca Froyo.
Hello. So my name is Luca Weiss.
I work as an end-of-platform engineer at Fairphone.
And on the side, I'm a free-time also do a bunch of Linux kernel development.
I maintain the project called OpenRazor, which is an open source driver for Razor peripherals.
And I'm also one of the core maintainers of the Post-Marketers project, which is a Linux distribution for mobile phones.
A few words about Fairphone.
Even if a lot of people here know Fairphone.
So Fairphone started as a awareness campaign on conflict minerals.
I will come back on that just after.
In 2010, and only in 2013, we launched our own company called Fairphone.
And the overall angle of Fairphone is to push forward change in the electronic industry to make it fairer.
It's not an easy game, but we have been doing that for almost 10 years now.
And how we did start on the next slide, please.
Thank you.
So as I mentioned just before, so we started as an awareness campaign on conflict minerals.
And at that time, Fairphone was just a group of activists in between the DRC, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Amsterdam.
And this campaign was to more or less raise awareness about the social damages in DRC linked to the mining industry.
And at that time, a bit of context on that, a US law was passed called the Dot-Fronk Act.
And this law, initially speaking, was good, right?
It required US companies from the US stock exchange to disclose whether or not their products did contain some conflict minerals.
But the immediate consequence of this law was the fact that some big players started to seek resources outside the DRC.
And then people in the DRC, the miners then, were a bit stuck and started to go back to the smuggling activities.
So this campaign was really, really focusing on that, to show a bit what did happen behind the scene.
So after two or three years of campaigning, we decided to change a bit in the next slide, please, to change a bit the way of working.
So we decided to be part of the industry, to try to push for a change from the inside out.
And to do that, we were incubated by a nice place.
I'm not sure if you know this foundation.
This is called the Warf Foundation. So the J is pronounced R in Dutch.
So the Warf Foundation, if you see the tagline making technology and society more open, fair and inclusive.
So yeah, that's not a random incubator, like the French tech in France, which I don't like that much.
So that's really, really focusing on fair technology.
And this is in the center of Amsterdam, in the Red District. You have this castle.
And the Warf Foundation is within this castle.
So we were incubated in this incubator.
And then Fairfun BV, so the company itself, was born in 2013.
This is a social enterprise.
So social enterprise means it's a bit like the scope in France.
That small, the financial profitability is just a means to achieve all the goals, environmental and social goals.
And in 2013, when we launched this company, we started a crowdfunding campaign, which was quite cool,
because in the end, we managed to sell some funds in total, something like 50K funds, which is not that bad,
without any marketing, the website was built by our own team, etc.
And if you see the tagline on this screenshot, it says that a seriously cool smartphone that puts social values first,
it shows again that Fairfun really, really started as a social activity.
And we wanted to show how it is difficult in this industry to be a miner in DRC, etc.
So perhaps some of you people have heard about how it is important to be more ecological friendly in this industry,
but we do think that the real issue is the issue that you have on the people side.
So if we pretend to build an ethical fund, we think that we should have a decolonial approach.
We think that we should focus on the people, not in the western countries, but far away from us.
We think that we need to respect the miners in DRC, and the people, the workers in the assembly line.
But why a phone, Luca?
Yeah, so why a phone?
So as you, I think, are aware that the digital industry is causing a lot of greenhouse gas emissions,
that's about 4% of the global greenhouse gas emissions, and of that 84% is actually going into device production.
And the remaining 16% goes into running it, like networks and data centers.
And yeah, electronic waste is really the world's fastest growing waste stream.
With over 50 million tons per year, it is a really big problem in the world.
Most of it is not recycled. Some of the phones, for example, are just kept and drawn, or thrown away to landfills.
It serves like 1.2 billion phones a sort every year, which is a huge amount.
And since most of them are only kept for 2 to 3 years, most are thrown away afterwards.
And then 20% are recycled and the rest are just dumped somewhere.
And also in the world, millions of people are working to dispose of this electronic waste that is not recycled properly.
And this of course can cause a lot of environmental and problems to the people that actually work in this sector.
So kind of where Fairf don tries to kind of make things better is in the materials, so in the mining sector,
in the factories where the phones are produced and the components for the phones, longevity so you can actually keep the phone for longer,
and then also reuse and recycling. So what happens to the device after the user is done with it, let's say.
So kind of how we try at Fairf don to actually change something in the industry to not just be another smartphone company,
is to try to change things.
So we try to raise awareness to tell people about this issue, like in the stock we are doing today.
We also want to set an example. So we want to show other companies and we want to show the industry that it's actually possible to do it differently and to do it better.
And by doing this we want to motivate them to actually also come along, because of course if only Fairf understood the things that we are doing,
not much happens in the world, but then if bigger companies like Samsung, they actually also implement the same programs,
I think we could change a lot in the world.
So in the last 10 years that Fairf don has existed, we have launched 5 smartphones.
So we started with the Fairf don 1 in 2013 and then kind of had a phone every 2 years, more or less.
Fairf don 3 and 3 plus are a bit of also great examples where if you have a Fairf don 3,
you could actually just upgrade the cameras in the Fairf don 3 and have a Fairf don 3 plus and then just have better camera quality.
At least starting with the Fairf don 2 we are also really focusing on software updates.
So we had 7 years of software support for the device, so starting with Android 5 and upgrading it all the way to Android 10.
And for example for our latest device, the Fairf don 5, which launched mid of last year,
we want to provide software, or we are promising software updates until at least 2031, so 8 years of software updates,
but hopefully also aiming for being able to provide updates for 10 years until 2033.
So now let's look at the hidden side of how it is difficult to build a long lasting phone,
how we can try to fight off-sodience and we will try to speak a bit about software and also about hardware.
So why it is so important to do to reach longevity?
So speaking about the stuff that we open publish, for every device that we build,
we open publish what we call a NELCA, Lifecycle Assessment.
So this is a methodology to assess the environmental impacts linked to each stages of your life cycle of the product,
so production, transportation, usage and life.
And we hope that at one point all the manufacturers will be obliged to publish such a report.
This one is done by an academic partner called the Fraunhofer in Germany.
And if you read this report, it shows that if you keep your phone longer than the average,
the average being 3 years for the Android stack,
if you keep it 5 years, you can cut global warming by 31%,
and it goes to 44% if you keep your device 7 years.
So this is key, this is really key to keep your device longer.
And how we do that?
So first of all, I will come back on that just after, but when you see a fair phone,
you will see that you can easily open it and change some spare parts,
because in the end, the obsolescence comes from the fact that it's super hard to repair your phone, right?
If your display is broken, if you want to change the battery, sometimes it's screwed,
and you cannot do that easily.
So that's the first fact, the hardware aspect, I will come back on that after.
But on the software side, perhaps some of you people have seen this message,
the app is not compatible with your device, it means that apparently your app is not compatible with OS running on your phone,
and probably it means that the OS is not resaving any security updates.
So if we go to the next slide, so let's look at the device, so you will see a fair phone 3 in the middle of this slide.
And on this fair phone 3, you have several components, right?
And as a manufacturer, we need to choose some components, so a fingerprint sensor, a camera, a sock, system on a chip.
And those components are not built by the same supplier, and it's quite difficult to have access to the code, the firmware running on those components.
So as a manufacturer, you have not a lot of options, you can either contract long term support with those suppliers, right?
But it's not always easy, because some of them are not at all willing to do that.
For example, for fair phone 3, I put this device on purpose because we failed on fair phone 3 with the fingerprint sensor.
We didn't manage to have a long term support agreement with the fingerprint sensor manufacturer.
And when we wanted to upgrade to a great 1.13, then it means that for some people, for some users, they were obliged to use a pin cut and not to use their fingerprint, right?
So it was not super nice.
So sometimes we fail, but it's also something that we are not ashamed to mention.
So you can either contract long term support agreement with your suppliers, or you can try to have access to some code.
And obviously the second part is the most interesting part that we want to do.
And if I look at just the Android part, so Android is just running on the CPU.
You see the sock on the right, so on the sock you have plenty of subcomponents.
You have the CPU, the GPU, the modem, etc.
And if I look at just the Android part, if we go to the next slide, perhaps you have heard that Android is open source, but Android is not fully open source.
Just AOSP, Android Open Source Project is open source, but the rest is not open source.
So if you look at the orange layer or the purple layer, the hardware abstraction layer or the native daemons and libraries, this is not open source.
So it comes with all the downside that I mentioned before about the lack of longevity.
But on the older layers, close to the high level layers, you can find also some closed source, and it could be even worse.
Speaking about some SDK, so if you are an app developer, perhaps you can have the willingness to integrate some SDK,
because it could facilitate your development for your app, for example.
So you can integrate Facebook SDK for your base whatsoever.
And the second big black spot could be that those SDK could be big data artists.
So that's the second issue that you see with those kind of SDK.
It's not only an issue about software obsolescence, but that's also an issue for your own privacy.
Yeah, I think we don't have a good slide, but that's okay.
I wanted to skip this slide, but in the end I will speak about it.
Just, yeah, it's a bit, that's a sad story about Facebook disclosing some private message between a mom and her daughter about an abortion that this daughter wanted to do.
And Facebook disclosed all the private message to the justice, the American justice.
So that's another, that's an example of how it could be better to have all you data in the big giant.
If we go to the next slide, so let's speak now about the software updates that we do at Fairfax.
As Luca mentioned just before, for Fairfax 2 we reached 7 years.
And for Fairfax 5, which is the last device that we launched, we hope to do 10 years with a strong promise of doing 8.
So I think I'm preaching a bit to the wrong audience to explain why we need software updates, but just to make sure, of course, there are any software that is out there kind of has issues and decisions need to be patched.
There's always new security vulnerabilities found.
So for example, in the Android world, Google is publishing a security bulletin every month with a bunch of new security issues that should be fixed on the devices.
And of course, with new Android updates, with new Android versions, you can get new features which Google has implemented.
So for example, better auto-fill or better permission management.
So bringing Android to devices is quite a complex effort that is between multiple stakeholders.
So any Android release starts out as AUSP by Google.
This thing is taken by the SoC manufacturer, so in our example Qualcomm, which then modifies the AUSP code to actually make it compatible with the given SoC.
And after they're done, then finally the device manufacturer can get this code and can integrate their changes in top, which makes the software work on the specific device.
So for example, adding support for the display or for the touchscreen that's on the specific phone.
Still, there needs to be implemented a bunch of changes for operators.
So for example, to make voice of a LTE work correctly or make some settings be according to their requirements.
And then kind of the last step is that you actually need to get launch approval by both Google, which is done by running millions of tests in the compatibility test suite and other test suites.
And every single one of these tests needs to pass to actually be able to get launch approval.
But also the operators test the software and make sure that it conforms to their standards.
The process for security updates and normal updates are not a major version upgrade, but just on the same Android version look a bit differently.
So every month, as I said, Google is providing security updates. The same is also happening from Qualcomm and some other parties.
Network operators may have new requirements and new, for example, new app updates that need to be integrated.
And then the device manufacturer is responsible to actually pulling all of this together to make sure it still works correctly.
And then to go through the whole process of the approval again, so running many, many tests and making sure that everything works correctly.
This process can be followed for about three years, which is kind of how long Google is maintaining any given Android version.
And after that, or hopefully already before that, the manufacturer needs to update to a new Android version, otherwise you're out of support.
So, yeah, as was mentioned already, while Android itself is actually open source, now as some modifications by Qualcomm,
there's a lot of other proprietary components going into the system.
So on a modern system or a modern SOC, there's a lot of code processes that handle a lot of different tasks.
So for example, audio or modem or GPU.
And these are run proprietary codes.
So one where either only the device manufacturer can access the code,
or actually for some even only the SOC manufacturer.
So what happens if actually this chain is broken?
So when the SOC manufacturer...
When the SOC manufacturer doesn't provide support for the new Android version anymore.
Well, this is generally where support in the industry stops, where device manufacturers no longer can provide any updates.
So for this, we can look at Fevon 2, which was our device launched in 2015 with Android 5 in 2016, got an Android 6 update,
but already back then the SOC went end of life.
So other devices with the same SOC stopped...
So other devices with the same SOC, so for example Nexus 5, stopped receiving software updates.
But still in 2018, we managed to launch an Android 7 update in 2021 Android 9 upgrade and in early 2022 Android 10 upgrade.
And to understand how we achieved this, we actually need to dig a little bit deeper.
So we took over the role of Qualcomm a bit.
We reused some proprietary parts from Android 6.
And we looked at the Codel Rural Forum and the order name for Codel Rural, so where Qualcomm is releasing their open source changes.
And we looked at some of that codes to give us a reference to how it really could work correctly.
The kernel is also quite an important part that we needed to take a look.
But yeah, for this we also looked at Linear Trials, which also provided some...
Yeah, for Linear Trials also because they have a great reference of how the code could work together.
And also provided quite a lot of fixes for some components in the system.
So to enable communities like Linear Trials, we try to open source whatever code that we can do.
Of course all of our devices also have an unlockable boot loader.
And we share all of our code on our platform code.ferfn.com.
Of course, open source is also great for a lot of other projects, like post marketers, which are more involved in.
Which is a real Linux distribution for phones and other mobile devices.
You can still check out the standard in the AW building to learn a bit more.
So for Android as we said, normally ASP itself is open source,
but normally all the changes that the manufacturer does to it are not open source.
So the legal minimum that any manufacturer needs to publish is the kernel sources.
So the Linux kernel which license another TPL license.
But on top of that we also try to publish the full Android sources wherever we can.
So for example, for Fevon 3 and Fevon 2, we had the complete Android source code
with the proprietary components as pre-built.
This version was then without the proprietary Google services and DRM and a few things like this.
But essentially you can just download all of the code, compile it yourself and then flash on the device.
And you have essentially a relatively similar build on your device than what we provide for regular users.
For our new devices for Fevon 4, we currently only published all of the Android source code
that our manufacturing partner, our ODM, produces.
Unfortunately, the way that Qualcomm has structured the source tree normally
makes it not possible that regular users without Qualcomm proprietary sources can compile this.
But still we think it's really important to have this public as a reference.
Because for things like the audio hire, still people can look at it and see what was changed for this device
and then take over some of these changes for example for custom ROMs like linear joys.
And we also managed to get permission to get the kernel divest tree sources public.
This was quite a struggle because by default they are part of the proprietary package.
But we managed to convince Qualcomm to allow us to publish them also because a bunch of other manufacturers also published them.
So one problem that we also have with the software on our devices is that the chipset manufacturer
provides us with a kernel version that is normally already by the time the device launches multiple years old.
And it's never really updated to any newer version so the Linux kernel version that the device was launched with
was basically the one that it stuck with.
This means after a while that security patching can become quite tedious because there's a lot of changes on top of the Linux kernel release also.
And of course also if the kernel releases end of life upstream then it becomes even more difficult to backport security fixes.
Generally being stuck on this Linux kernel version doesn't make too much difference to a user.
But especially lately we've seen that also new Android versions require new features in the Linux kernel.
And if we are not able to update the Linux kernel, yeah we cannot really update to a new Android version then.
So we can try to instead push the device in the SoC and device-specific support to the mainline kernel so upstream to kernel.org.
With this done in the perfect word you can take any recent kernel release, put it on the device and have everything working.
Unfortunately currently it's still far from feature complete but it is really cool and still can be used for a lot of purposes.
There were also lots of great talks yesterday in the Boston Mobile Devices classroom. You can watch the recordings later.
So some of the other things that we do.
So we try to provide team-win recovery project builds, so TWP builds for the devices.
For example for the FF5 we managed to get the build public on day one when the device was announced.
We have factory packages on our support page.
This is quite useful for third-party ROM developers so they can just take the new build and extract the proprietary components from it and integrate into their build.
Also where possible we try to support third-party ROM developers so try to answer some questions and help them with some problems where possible.
We think that default OS is great for regular users but for some users that prefer to have a bit more privacy oriented or security oriented operating systems.
For example for VOD Google services we think that custom ROMs are really important for users.
Hopefully OS is soon the app for our Fairbats XL headphones will be open source.
A few words about the reparability on the hardware side.
As I mentioned before it's quite easy to prepare a fairphone.
If you look at this screen you can see a Fairphone 5.
You have 10 modules on Fairphone 5 so if you break your screen you display you can easily change it.
We also want to have an accessible decent price for that because one of the downsides of the reparability is the fact that sometimes a repair cost could be super high.
For a display for example the cost replacement is on average 44% of the original price.
It results in the fact that the users want to buy a new phone and not to just repair their display.
The battery is the same. I'm not sure by heart the cost of our battery but for Fairphone 4 I think it is 20 or 29 euros.
We really want to make sure that it's not super costly for one of our users to buy a new battery.
Of course the batteries are not glued. I personally think that it should be forbidden to have glue on a phone.
So we really really strive for having more modularity on the phone and we also fight or we try to do some lobbying to push the older manufacturers to do the same.
We were part of some discussions at the European level or the French government level to have modularity as a criteria to define the coming index of reparability.
And the last but not the least we do also an extension of the warranty from 2 years to 5 years for free to convince people to keep their phone longer.
And we also publish the schematics.
So about those schematics we just published the Fairphone 5 once a few days ago.
So when you discuss with the competitors they can mention some reasons that it's not possible to publish those schematics.
And the reasons are for example some intellectual property issue or some security issue.
And this is all bullshit right. This is all bullshit. They cannot pretend.
So intellectual property this is hard choice. If we want to publish those schematics right.
If we want to not hold back on the intellectual property it's possible.
And for the security reasons this is not the right clue to explain why open source is not an issue in terms of security.
But you have to know that when you speak with some people at the European level or the French government whatsoever some lobbying from the big tech could convince those people that security could be an issue with open sourcing.
So yeah that's something that we want to highlight today to show that it's possible.
Yeah so let's talk a bit about the materials in the factories where we also try to improve the situation.
So a smartphone contains over 50 different materials. One of those we selected 14 so called focus materials so where we think that's where improving things can have the biggest impact for now.
We try to integrate these materials into the supply chain so they actually end up in the product.
We also have for different materials we look into a bit more in the recycling part in the so trying to use recycled materials and for some other trying to get fair version materials.
So we also try to map the journey of the materials and we publish this on our website so you can look at it.
Why we want to do this is because we want to scale the fair sources we want to get more of these into our products.
But also again we want to follow us we want to see that other companies see what we're doing and actually can look into exactly how we're doing this and then hopefully they are following us and also implementing this.
For example here you can see the map of some of the materials in the FFIV and if we click on one of them for example for Tangsten here you can see it is mined from a town in Rwanda.
Then it is processed in a I think it's a smelter in Austria and then goes to a different manufacturer in China and then finally to the final assembly manufacturer in China where the phone is actually being put together.
We have a very long list of all of the suppliers, smelters and refiners also in these documents so you can see exactly what companies are involved here.
What about the fair factories and just about the list of suppliers so the ultimate end goal is to convince the competitor to use the same list right because we have been doing this work of convincing the suppliers to act more responsibly so we hope that the competitors could do the same.
What about the fair factories so I'm not sure if you have heard about Foxconn, that's a big factory owned by a Taiwanese company called Foxconn and this is one of the largest employer in the world, almost one million of employees and this company is known for bad working conditions, bad revenue etc.
So what we try to do is to collect the workers voice.
We don't want to pretend that we know better than them what is a good working condition right this is a decolonial approach also so we have Chinese employers working with the assembly line workers to make sure that we understand what are the best working conditions for them.
We disclosed also in terms of open source we disclose a methodology about how you can implement leaving wage in the factories.
So in this toolkit you have plenty of things to calculate this leaving wage you have some templates for the agreement for the workers etc.
And I'm speaking about this notion of leaving wage so if you speak with the workers they will tell you that the most important thing for them is to have a leaving wage, a decent wage.
If you look at the daily wage for an assembly line worker this is approximately $13 per day.
And if they want to have a decent wage to avoid to do extra hours for example they will tell you that they need the double more or less right so $28.
So you have a big gap right between the daily wage and the leaving wage.
So what we have done at Fairphone we have paid this gap right we have paid those $28 per day.
And the ultimate consequence for us in terms of price was to dedicate even less than $2 per phone to be able to pay those people correctly.
So in this lobbying that we have done about the leaving wage, this toolkit, of course we have tried to convince all the manufacturers to do the same so far this is a big failure.
But we are still hoping that it will work at one point because let's imagine that all the manufacturers could do that right, it would be super nice for the people there.
We can go to the next slide.
Yeah, so a lot of companies have recently also put recycling very big on their front covers.
So for example, Apple, Samsung or nothing they are very big on the recycling.
Unfortunately the way that recycling is being done is also of course sometimes not great but also just the way that the economy works.
You cannot take a phone, recycle everything and then get 100% of the materials back to put into a new phone.
There will always be a big junk that actually goes to waste and which you can't recycle because either it's made into alloys which you can't separate anymore or just different components where it's either not worth getting the tiny amounts of gold back out or anything.
So there will always be new mining needed and somebody needs to look into this to actually make it better.
But also kind of what we are doing with e-waste in Europe is sometimes shipping them to places in Africa.
So here are some pictures from Akra Bloschi which is in Akra and the capital of Ghana.
And you can see kind of where teenagers are burning some copper cables to get the plastic or to burn the plastic off to get the copper back to actually recycle the copper.
And yeah of course you can't imagine that this is healthy for anything in the area.
And also recently I think Ghana has also done a bit to clean up this area a bit but of course it's just going to happen somewhere else and it's probably happening in a million other places.
Okay, time for the conclusion.
So yeah the conclusion that we wanted to know if Luca was to speak about techno discernment and social justice.
So we will use a quote from a person called Ivan Illich.
I really like this guy not because he's Austrian like you Luca.
But yeah I mean I started to read this philosopher a few years ago.
And yeah he influenced my life as a software engineer.
He wrote this book in the 70s called Tools for Conviviality.
And if you look at this quote he's saying more or less that the modern tools, so if you extrapolate a bit think about your daily work.
The modern tools should not be at the service only about a small group of experts but at the service of all the people, a bigger group.
Right? So more or less how cool today with Luca.
We don't want to speak only about fair fun right?
We want also to invite you to step aside from your daily work and from your expert position.
Of course open source is great right? We are in a super nice conference.
I would like to force them by the way to the organizers.
That's super great.
Open source is a super good lever for responsible projects.
But open source doesn't make automatically a project responsible right?
So that's an invitation for you people to think about broader right?
From a broader perspective.
It's always good to do open source for sure.
But where the code will run right?
When we think about the hardware we spoke about about the social damages behind the cobalt right?
Behind the extractivism in general.
So we really need as experts to think about how products and we really need to ask ourselves if this product will really empower people.
And also this is an invitation to think not only about how people, how community, but people far away from you.
People far away from our western countries.
Thanks.
Thank you.
You guys have any questions?
Here is.
Thank you for the great talk.
You have told a lot about software upgrades and updates and support of your phones.
But what about hardware updates?
Because the most important part for the pollution is hardware waste, but not software.
And if you, for example, if you upgrade your phone, I don't mean the main parts like CPU, but maybe displays or cameras or whatever on your current models.
Maybe it would reduce the electronic waste as well.
And did you think about it?
Yeah.
So for kind of reusing old phones, there's actually a project by a Belgian company ongoing where they are looking into kind of how they can reuse old FFM2s to actually do something with and use them for example for some IoT use cases.
Yeah, some of the problems still apply there.
Of course, the software support is gone for the old devices.
And also, yeah, then the same applies to kind of the old firmware on the device.
So you cannot, it's tricky to kind of make a secure product out of the old phone because all of the proprietary software support is just stopped.
In terms of kind of keeping modules between different phones, which I think was kind of part of the question.
It is definitely something we are thinking about, but we also currently can't really limit ourselves to kind of keeping the exact same form factor, for example, for the cameras.
So the camera modules are compatible between the different phones.
Hi.
I have a fair phone here and it's five years old or so and maybe I want to buy a new battery for it.
It's still fine, so I don't need it now.
So I think I would want to buy a new battery.
Would it be a battery that is produced last year or so?
Or would it be a battery that has been laying on the shelf for many years and I think keeping a battery lying around,
without tension, is not very good for such a long time.
So how do you ensure the quality of batteries is still okay after five years?
I mean, for Fairfond 3, for example, we have car suppliers to produce batteries over four years.
We are still producing the battery.
Oh, by the way, we stopped a few months ago.
So we make sure that we are not buying all the stock ones and we make sure that the supplier is still around.
That's also for us quite critical for the software updates because that's, to be honest, ultra tricky because normally speaking, in the industry, when you stop to buy the spare parts or whatsoever,
the supplier is not willing to work with you anymore.
So for us, you know, still buying batteries after years and years, it helps us also to have them still around for the software part,
especially for the Qualcomm preparatory components.
For Fairfond 3, for example, we don't have access to the source code of those components.
So we needed the supplier to do that, the assembly, what we call the ODM.
So we are still buying batteries over the time. This is what we try to do.
We have time for one more question.
Hi. Quickly, so one question was on the business model. How do you stay afloat in such a market?
Is it coming from the premium price of the devices which I was happy to pay?
That could be one factor, but I was wondering if you have investors who are particularly interested in sustainability and stuff like that, or where does the money come from?
And the other one was how do you guarantee the 10 years of updates?
Do you think you'll be able to force Qualcomm into giving you a 10-year long-term support?
Long-term support or?
For the 10 years of support, the Fairfond 5 is actually using an IoT chip set,
so long-term support where we actually have from Qualcomm at least for way more years than with a normal phone processor.
It works very similar. It's just a different product line from their side.
What was the first part again?
The business model.
Of course, we want to attract new customers, of course.
I think it's also...
I mean, we don't need a single customer buying a new phone every two years.
We are also happy with them if they keep the current phone for six years or eight years, and then come back to us.
And I think there's a lot of room for expansion in just making people keep the phone for longer.
People are already keeping their phones for longer, not just because of longers of the support from the manufacturers,
but also because the life cycle of the improvement of the smartphone industry has a bit slowed down.
So the phone that you buy now is not that different to one that you bought four years ago.
It also helps in keeping them.
We know it's just better for the environment, so we try to convince people to keep the phones for as long as possible.
Thank you. Let's go.
Thank you very much. The time is up.
Thank you.