Green IO #71 Software and Hardware Challenges Manufacturing Sustainable Smartphones with Agnes Crepet
Dec 23, 2025
Agnes Crepet, technology lead at Fairphone who builds repairable, long-lived phones, joins to discuss making ethical smartphones. She talks about modular hardware and extended software support. She covers materials choices, fair wages in supply chains, and the technical and legal hurdles to long-term OS upgrades. She also shares how open source and policy work help scale systemic change.
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Longevity Trumps Material Swaps For Impact
- Fairphone's biggest environmental leverage is extending phone lifespan rather than only cleaner materials.
- Modular hardware plus long software support pushes average ownership from ~3 years to 5–7 years, cutting lifecycle impact ~44%.
Early Product Story Of Removable Batteries And Modularity
- From Fairphone 1 to Fairphone 2 the company shifted hardware design to repairability with removable batteries and modular replaceable modules.
- Fairphone 1 already had a removable battery and Fairphone 2 (2015) introduced modularity to let users change screens and key parts easily.
Negotiate Firmware And Parts Upfront For Long Support
- To promise long OS support you must secure multi-year firmware and component commitments from suppliers, not just ship hardware.
- Negotiate device trees, firmware access and spare-part availability upfront because many subsystems (fingerprint, NFC, camera) require vendor updates.