I wanted to write something positive about the Fairphone Fairbuds. Here it is:

They are a great idea.

That’s it. Please move on.

Continue reading for gory details, but this really sums it up: Replaceable batteries at the cost of a larger form factor is a tradeoff I am absolutely willing to make and advocate for. I hope more companies try this in our greener future.

Still I’ll be returning them because the actual experience makes them useless.

Hardware Setup and Sound

The pairing experience is flaky; we had trouble pairing them for the first 10 minutes. I guess the buds’s batteries were empty by default, but the case didn’t indicate that, so we just didn’t get the blue light that should appear after holding the case’s sole button for 3 seconds. There’s no way to know the charging level of the earbuds themselves apart from within the app – if you can get it to read these values, that is. (Foreshadowing.)

First advice for new buyers: remove the protective piece of paper so that the earbuds can charge from their case, then wait 15 minutes. No matter what charging level the case indicates, the fairbuds are likely not ready after unpacking.

To actually see and then remove the paper strip, you need to take out the earbuds. If you’re tech-savvy like our family is, you may exercise patience and not take them out, because of course you know that you need to pair the earbuds while they are in their case. So why take them out if they won’t do anything? You’re smart, you follow the manual. The manual just tells you to (step 1) press the button shortly to check battery (green, >60% charge level), then (step 2) hold for 3 seconds to start pairing, then (step 3) … have fun? The manual doesn’t say “first take out earbuds and remove protective paper slip”.

UX-wise, this was terribly confusing: All we noticed was that the pairing just wouldn’t start.

Even after removing the paper slip by sheer accident while I wanted to check contacts it didn’t work. Note that hours later, I had no trouble using the button’s three possible interactions (short press, 3s hold for pairing, 10s hold for factory reset), so I suspect it was indeed a charging issue. You just wouldn’t know because there’s no feedback.

As a hairless ape, I want to press a button like I’m told to, so that I get the reward of experiencing the promised effect. If that promise then is not fulfilled, I first doubt my button pressing technique, then the button’s manufacturing, then life. Despair usually has no place in an onboarding process.

So remember to remove the paper slip, charge the earbuds from their case, and wait a while.

Once paired, the earpieces play back sound like you would expect.

Touch the earpieces to play/pause, that all works well. There’s a delay of less than a second, but there’s a delay. The touch-sensitive area is a bit on the larger side: the earbuds also react to touch input on the rim of the piece that sticks out of your ear, which can trigger playback when you take them out or fiddle with them inside the case where they lay sideways. The touch-sensitive area, holding the battery and all, is maybe too exposed.

The stock sound is meh. It sounds like you’re listening to playback from a tin can; or a bit like the music in an empty shopping mall videos. This needs tuning. Thankfully, there are tips to tune the equalizer settings and they promise to make the sound better. (I tried, and failed, but we’ll get to that.)

Before you tweak the sound and complain, first make sure you get a good fit with the different size silicone rings to ensure fit and sound is as good as it can possibly be. You get a couple of different sizes within the packaging, so that’s good.

Software Setup and Despair

After bluetooth pairing, there’s the app.

The problem, no, all problems, with the Fairbuds are 99% software. The battery-holding pieces are maybe a bit on the larger side, but you can replace the batteries, that’s the trade-off I made during the purchase.

The app is available for iOS and Android. I tried both. I tried 4 devices total and went through multiple dozens of factory resets via the case to debug the process. Then I gave up. That’s the experience in a nutshell.

Best thing I can say is that the Android app is much faster at recognizing that the buds exist. That was all, though; it couldn’t detect their version number (they need a firmware upgrade, but this way the app won’t offer one), it couldn’t detect their charging levels (“N/A”), and the equalizer didn’t equalize anything.

Still Android is the smoother experience: pair with bluetooth, open app, done.

So how did iOS fare?

Well, worse, as I just suggested! :)

With two different iPhones I each got a one-time opportunity to do something with the earpieces from the app. Like update the Fairbuds’s firmware, or play with some settings.

Once I closed the app, once the iPhone went to sleep, or once the Fairbuds’s case is closed, and they disconnected from Bluetooth, I could never get the app to recognize them ever again. Meanwhile, sound playback works like before. It’s just the app that causes trouble. It’s always just the app. I restarted, opened, closed, and re-paired everything in all possible permutations. No luck.

The app offers two interactions (apart from assembly tutorials), and both failed:

1. Firmware upgrade. The Android app didn’t offer anything because communication didn’t work well and no device information was extracted, it seems. The iPhone app offers to update, but boy is it not prepared to carry this through. The update screen says that it takes 5–6 minutes to update the firmware. It took more like 10.

   Meanwhile, the app doesn’t prevent standby, so the iPhone screen faded and then turns off eventually. This stops the update process, because the app is so terrible it neither prevents device sleep nor does it support being run in the background or recover from transfer issues.

   As an app developer, I know that this is possible, of course, so I’m less confused why it doesn’t work, and more enraged that this wasn’t implemented. I had to factory reset and start from scratch – because the app won’t recognize the devices after it was closed, put to background, disconnected from the earpieces, etc. –, with charging cabled plugged-in and iPhone auto-sleep turned off.

   I managed to get to 100% and then some beeping and restarts later, I returned to the phone and earbuds, then had to re-pair the devices again – because the app won’t recognize the devices after it was closed, put to background, disconnected from the earpieces, etc. – and was greeted with a notification that I could update the firmware! This time, the update button was not tappable, though. (Sometimes, some button won’t react to touch events, or they will carry out the tap animation and not do anything.)

2. Equalizer settings. While firmware update no. 2 wouldn’t want to work, at least the app communicated with the earbuds, and we wanted to finally test the sound. Since it is terrible, we tried the equalizer settings. The settings didn’t do anything at all. Foolishly, we restarted the app, but then had to re-pair the phone and earbuds – because the app won’t recognize the devices after it was closed, put to background, disconnected from the earpieces, etc.

   We came to the conclusion that maybe my wife’s phone is cursed and/or her German localization settings mess up something, so I tried with mine, set to US Enlish.

   We came to the conclusion that both our phones are cursed.

   I did manage to change the equalizer settings from my device. It positively sounded different. Once you go to “studio mode” to adjust the curve manually, the sound would improve massively – but only for about two seconds before it would reset. Since the earbuds responded to the settings change just fine, I don’t believe it’s a hardware issue. I believe something is wrong with the app. Some state update resets. With the speed of my veteran StarCraft II fingers, I could manage to tweak the decibel settings of 3 bars before it would reset. Touch the fourth, all go to 0. When I did this more slowly, it would reset when I interacted with the second adjustment widget.

So all in all I could neither update the earbuds to the latest firmware which promises to improve sound quality, battery life, and everything else really, nor could I make the earbuds sound better.

Software Problems

The app’s last update was in July. The update before that was in April. The July update promised stability fixes – I have no clue how the app behaved before, but if you search the internet, it’s hard to ignore complaints about software issues or battery drainage.

Why can’t we flash the firmware from our computer? My keyboard (!) has a web interface to tweak settings, and then flash the firmware onto the device from the web browser. You don’t even need an actual app, you just need a Chromium-based browser for this to work. Then you could also use and update the earbuds without having to carry an Android or iOS smartphone for people who want to use them with their computers.

So that was the Fairbuds experience with the allegedly improved app version 2.x that sits at a 2.5-star rating in the iOS App Store and 0 ratings in the Google Play Store.

A reviewer on the App Store summarized their experience with similar concerns:

Then it insists I must update the firmware but “don’t turn off the earbuds!” OK, but do I just keep them in my ears with music playing? Put them in the box? Can I close the lid of the box or does that count as “turning them off”? Do I have to keep the app open? Worst instructions ever. Update stayed at 0%. Starting again. App won’t pair. I may be sending these buds back.

—interlard, 2024-06-29

I don’t expect a magical v3 update around the corner with the capabilities to prevent the phone from falling asleep during a firmware update, so I’ll send the Fairbuds back. (Since their packaging includes a tear-off paper component and like a box of Kleenex cannot be reassembled, I’m afraid that they’ll actually become e-waste at this point rather than being returned to the manufacturer. Let’s hope that’s not the case.)

Now if you happen to read this in 2025 or later, check the Fairbuds app’s rating in the App Store again, and whether people stopped complaining in the meantime.

Also try to find more recent reviews that address these issues. Maybe the company blog also tells about hardware/software revisions that hit the market in the meantime. If the firmware update would’ve helped with everything, given the broken state of the apps, a revision of the earbuds that shipped with the latest firmware version would be part of a fix. Maybe by the time you find these lines, they do produce a batch with more modern revisions, and a functional app.