Fairphone is known for its sustainable and repairable phones that are built to last, long before Google and Samsung started offering seven years of software upgrades on their flagship phones. But a long software update cycle means nothing if you don’t keep adding new features during the lifespan of a device. Fairphone proved how it’s done with a big upgrade for the Fairphone 4’s camera. I sat down with Fairphone’s Technical Product Manager, Javier Manique, to find out how the company achieved this.
What’s in the Fairphone 4 camera update?
The company provides some impressive before and after photos
Fairphone introduced a big surprise camera update for its Fairphone 4 in February 2024. The handset was originally introduced in 2021 and is slated to get support until the end of 2026. The company always aims to further extend the window whenever possible, but since it depends on chipmaker Qualcomm for some core interactions between the hardware and software, it may not always be possible.
With this update, Fairphone drastically improved the camera performance to get it closer to what the Fairphone 5 is capable of outputting. The company touts that it managed to improve the first-shot-time by a whopping 230%, increased the quality of low-light shots and more details and contrast in all conditions, and enhanced its electronic image stabilization in videos. In my review, I’ve had my gripes with the camera in particular — a sentiment, Manique tells me, that is shared by many of Fairphone’s customers — so the improvements are greatly appreciated.
Fairphone shared a few before and after comparisons
The results speak for themselves, at least based on the comparison shots that Fairphone provided. The image quality is consistently better across the board, with some particularly big improvements when zooming and in low-light situations.
How did the team of 70+ people accomplish this big task?
It’s all about being smart with the available resources
The big question is — how did a small team of about 70 people, according to the Fairphone website, achieve this upgrade? After all, Samsung, Google, Apple, and other players likely have camera teams that are bigger than Fairphone as a whole. Manique tells me that it’s all about using the experiences made with the Fairphone 5.
Fairphone 5 review: The most uncompromising repairable phone yet
Fairphone learned all the right lessons from its previous phones
“We had different updates over the past years, of course, but now we want to address the problem with the camera on a bigger scale to make it even better with the software updates,” Manique says. “We worked with a new partner for making the software of the camera of the Fairphone 5. And our partner also gave us a lot of knowledge that we accumulated, and can now bring to the Fairphone 4. The Fairphone 5 camera was one of the points that we wanted to also bring to the Fairphone 4 to improve the user experience and make it a unified set of software for our community.”
You may be surprised to hear that a smartphone manufacturer reaches out to various partners, but it’s a common practice in the industry, especially when you’re a small player or a newcomer. Nothing started out with off-the-shelf software for the Phone 1 as well, slowly tweaking it more and more to its liking, and something similar is happening here. “You need to use different algorithms from different brands for camera tuning, and that’s also the choice you need to make when you’re evaluating new camera features,” Manique explains.
I also asked Manique how he feels about community projects like GCam mods, which are essentially ports of the Google camera for different phones. From what the community says, these worked really well on the Fairphone 3, but the Fairphone 4 and 5 have since made it more difficult to access all necessary bits for these mods to work well. Unfortunately, but understandably, this isn’t a priority for the company. “We are now focusing on our own app, and that’s something that we can control, and bringing all those features, all that responsiveness to our own app.”
What can we expect in the future?
Fairphone on the US market, hardware upgrades, and Android 14
With the Fairphone 4 available in the US market, I also wanted to learn about the company’s plans for the Fairphone 5. Unfortunately, at the moment, there is nothing to announce on this front. “For now, we are focusing mainly on Europe for Fairphone 5. One day, we might include the US as our market, but of course, that’s going to mean a redesign of our antennas because it’s not a global antenna tuning, it’s more localized for Europe.” Manique mentioned that many big brands usually also offer international and US-focused versions of their phones, which is a much bigger problem for a company like Fairphone that moves smaller numbers.
For the Fairphone 3, the company introduced a new camera module to give the handset a serious upgrade that wasn’t purely possible in software back in the day. That’s why we were curious to learn if Fairphone has similar plans for its latest two phones. It seems that the strategy has changed, though, and the company learned a few lessons from the Fairphone 3 upgrade.
The Fairphone 3 and its comparatively tiny camera module
“The decision was to have this upgrade for the Fairphone 4 with software only that can benefit all consumers instead of having only a one-to-one replacement in hardware with another software on top,” Manique tells me. “We saw that we still had room for improvement there and we took the opportunity to make it available for everyone instead of generating more e-waste.” That’s definitely good news for the planet.
To end with more good news, Fairphone confirmed to us once more that it will update both the Fairphone 4 and 5 to Android 14, after already teasing the update on its blog. The company previously hadn’t confirmed whether it could bring Android 14 to the Fairphone 4, but it looks like it managed to clear out all potential problems. Android 14 is “coming up in the coming months for both devices, Fairphone 5 and Fairphone 4,” Manique says. For now, though, this massive camera boost will have to do.
