The Fairphone Gen 6 Plus is everything an Android phone should be — and no one will buy it

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Every year — or maybe every other year — we all have one thing in common: we shop for a new phone. Phone makers know that even when sales are in a slump, there will be millions of eyeballs looking at what’s out there and what the market has to offer. The flashier and “louder” a product or feature is, the more attention it grabs and the more sales it generates. Even if you didn’t buy a Samsung foldable, you might have bought another Galaxy phone you saw while shopping.

Sometimes though, it doesn’t work that way, and the lack of fanfare doesn’t drive all those eyeballs to a product or manufacturer. Fairphone is a great example, and what may well be the best phone out there and the one we should be buying is one that almost none of us will: the Fairphone Gen 6 Plus.

The Fairphone Gen 6 Plus is not the average Android phone, filled with manufacturer and carrier apps, services, and bloat. It will have only the apps Google forces phone makers to include, and a utility called My Fairphone . This means your data isn’t flying the airwaves to any unnecessary place. Samsung or Apple can’t say the same.

Things don’t stop there, though. Fairphones have another trick up their sleeves to keep Google — a pesky data-hungry company that wants to know everything — out of the picture completely. Since Android is open-source at its core, alternatives have been built that exclude any and everything Google. / e/OS is one of them, and the Fairphone Gen 6 series was designed to use an easy installer so you can switch yourself.

/e/OS is recognized as one of the most secure pieces of software available, and if you care about this sort of thing (it’s cool if you don’t, though), you’ll want to take a look at what it has to offer.

Fairphone prides itself on a simple ideal: Sell products “ made fair from the inside out .” From the design to the final sale, and all stops in between, everything is done with the idea that people deserve to be treated respectfully and that the bottom line isn’t what’s most important.

Now, I admit I can’t read minds and have no idea how strongly the people at Fairphone feel about this, but I can say they’ve been at it for a while and have done everything right so far. A Fairphone  Gen 6 Plus was made by people earning a decent wage, in places that don’t require suicide nets on the windows, and aren’t using rare materials mined by kids under slave-like conditions. This matters, and isn’t something other companies can say. When profit is the driving factor, the cheap cobalt mined in the DRC looks awfully inviting.