In my mind, it allows the firmware to continue to receive updates that are managed and maintained by the community, not necessarily starting from scratch on a new OS.

Both options are just a dream until the world’s governments get serious about right-to-repair legislation that makes it happen.

and yet my hands remain as small as ever

If the alternative is relying on child labour and funding genocides, we as a society need to get our shit together on this issue.

Oh no the billionaires will end up with less yacht money.

But obviously some companies want it also to be your entertainment system and that seems to drive up the size. — Vi

If it were still getting updates - even just a quarterly security patch - I'd be fine with just paying someone to handle replacing the display (glass is pretty cracked) and battery (its aging a fair bit) and going from there. I technically have a second one with an even more fucked up screen & definitely need to be replaced battery, but the cost to fix em up just doesn't feel worth it when I can get a decent phone that'll allegedly last a good few years for not much more, with a couple of quality of life improvements I actually care about.

They do need to make a smaller phone that people with smaller hands (like 50% of the population) can use without repetitive stress injuries.

The trend towards phones being massive fondleslabs is ableist as hell, I said what I said.

Software licensing won’t save the people harmed at each stage of the supply chain.

Software licensing doesn’t address how hazardous the human labour involved in recycling old electronics can be.

The system needs to change. Open source alone can’t solve this. Big companies need to be compelled to act responsibly.

The only reason my old phone doesn't work, is because I threw it in the sea.

Ok I didn't throw it. It just got a little wet. It was meant to be water-resistant. It wasn't.

"Even better than Apple's options"

Haha, yeah, the golden cage spyware experts who record your every word. Sorry, I can't take anybody serious who believes their lies about privacy...

And Graphene, again, they ONLY support GOOGLE phones and potentially a few from another US tech company. And they certainly do not write their own drivers. So, under the hood, the same closed source drivers that corrupt all the alleged security of every phone, even the alternative ones.

The Fairphone with /e/OS is a very good compromise between safety and usability. Above all, they keep the US megalomaniac data thieves OUT. And that IS a big gain for me.

But that was not even the original question in this thread. It was about sutainability and updates, and there, the Fairphone wins hands down. Transfer Graphene on these, and I will give it a try. If I have to shower US companies with my money first, no thanks. They are the OPPOSITE of who I want to support...

The GrapheneOS folks are clear that they will only support platforms that have Memory Tagging Extensions (MTE) going forward. as they are a security-focused distro. That allowed them to find security flaws in the Bluetooth software that could be used to take over your phone, for instance, and they contributed the fixes back to Google.

Even Google's Pixel 11 line has regressed and disabled MTE, so they won't be supported, but Motorola's next flagships will have a high-end Qualcomm chipset that does. The Fairphone and most other Android phones just don't care about security. Even Apple only recently introduced MTE to the iPhone starting with the iPhone 17.

That's why I also mentioned LineageOS, that has lower requirements and supports more phones, including quite a few Fairphones, going back to the Fairphone 3 of 2019:
https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/#fairphone

Fairphone is a very nice idea, yes. eOS I don't know much. However, both lack up-to-date patchlevels in terms of security (they're typically months away from them). So if you use them for valid reasons, you prioritize other things than security. HTH