Ubuntu Touch on a Fairphone 4
Ubuntu Touch on a Fairphone 4
The Setup and the Honest Summary
I run Ubuntu Touch on a Fairphone 4 as my daily phone. The
combination is deliberate. The Fairphone 4 is a repairable,
modular, ethically sourced device with a replaceable battery and
an unlockable bootloader. Ubuntu Touch, maintained by the UBports
community, is a mobile Linux that treats the phone as a computer
you own rather than a terminal into someone else's ecosystem.
Both projects share the same principle, which is that the person
holding the device should be in control of it.
The honest summary, before the details: it is a good experience.
Better than the people who have never tried it assume, and worse
than the people who evangelize it claim. The core phone functions
work. The native app ecosystem is small but sufficient. Waydroid
runs most Android apps I need. microG handles most of the apps
that expect Google services. And there is exactly one category of
real, ongoing frustration, which is backups. This post is the
writeup of all of it, with the limits stated as plainly as the
strengths.
What Works Well
The base operating system is solid. UBports moved to the Ubuntu
24.04 LTS base in 2025, and the maturity shows. The interface is
a Qt/QML environment that is lightweight, responsive, and
coherent in a way that mobile Linux was not five years ago. The
gesture navigation is genuinely good, arguably better than the
mainstream platforms' attempts at the same thing. The system
feels like a small, fast Linux computer, because that is what it
is.
The core phone functions work on the Fairphone 4. Calls, SMS,
mobile data, WiFi, the camera for basic use. The native apps in
the OpenStore cover the essential daily needs: a capable browser
(Morph, based on the same engine as the desktop browsers), a
terminal that is a real terminal, note-taking, a decent file
manager, messaging clients including a Matrix client and a good
Telegram client, a podcast app, a music player. For a
privacy-minded user whose needs are covered by open-source apps,
the native ecosystem alone is close to sufficient.
The convergence feature is the standout. The Fairphone 4 supports
Display Out over USB-C, which means plugging the phone into an
external monitor turns it into a desktop. Keyboard, mouse, a
windowed desktop environment, the terminal, the browser, all
driven by the phone in your pocket. For someone whose computing
is largely SSH sessions and a browser, this is not a gimmick. It
is a legitimately useful capability that no mainstream phone
offers in the same open form.
The privacy posture is the reason to do this at all. No Google
services running by default. No telemetry phoning home. No
advertising identity. The device is yours in the sense that a
Debian laptop is yours, which is a sense that no stock Android or
iOS device can claim.
Waydroid - Most Android Apps, in a Container
The native app ecosystem does not cover everything. The apps that
a modern life assumes (the bank, the transit authority, the
occasional proprietary tool that has no web version) are Android
apps, and Ubuntu Touch is not Android. The bridge is Waydroid.
Waydroid runs a full Android system inside a Linux container,
using the same namespace and LXC technology that containers use
everywhere else. It ships preinstalled on the Fairphone 4's
Ubuntu Touch build. Initializing it is a single command, and once
running, it presents Android apps alongside the native ones in
the app drawer. The integration is good enough that many Android
apps feel like part of the system rather than a separate
environment.
The community's rough figure is that around 80% of Android apps
work correctly in Waydroid. That number matches my experience.
Messaging apps work. Most productivity apps work. Media apps
mostly work. The apps install from F-Droid for open-source
software, or from the Aurora Store for a de-Googled front end to
the Play Store catalog, or by copying an APK directly to the
device and installing it from the shell.
The cost of Waydroid is battery. The Android container is a full
second operating system running inside the first one, and while
it idles cheaply, it is another layer consuming power. The
mitigation is to stop the container when it is not needed, which
is one command or one toggle, and to start it only when an
Android app is actually required. On a normal day where I use one
or two Android apps occasionally, the battery impact is
noticeable but not severe. On a day where Waydroid runs
continuously, it is real.
microG - Most Apps That Expect Google
Many Android apps do not just want to be Android apps. They want
Google Play Services: push notifications through Firebase Cloud
Messaging, location through Google's location provider, the
various Google APIs that Android apps have been built to assume.
On a de-Googled system, these apps either fail or degrade.
microG is the free, open-source reimplementation of Google Play
Services. It provides the APIs that apps expect, in an open form,
without the tracking that the real Google services perform.
Installed inside Waydroid through F-Droid's microG repository,
microG makes most of the Google-dependent apps work. Push
notifications arrive. Location resolves. The apps that check for
Play Services find something that answers, and most of them are
satisfied.
Most, not all. This is the boundary worth being precise about.
The apps that use Play Services for convenience work with microG.
The apps that use Google's Play Integrity API or the older
SafetyNet attestation to verify that they are running on a
"genuine" Google-certified device do not work, and cannot be made
to work, because the entire point of Play Integrity is to detect
exactly the configuration I am running. This is the category that
includes most banking apps, some payment apps, a few streaming
services that enforce DRM through device attestation, and the
occasional game that ships with aggressive anti-tampering.
For those apps, the answer is the web version where one exists,
or a second cheap device where one does not, or doing without.
For my bank specifically, the web interface covers everything I
need and the app was never necessary. Your bank may differ, and
if your bank's app is mandatory and Play-Integrity-locked, that
is a real consideration before committing to this setup.
The One Real Cost - Backups
Every other limitation of this setup is a known trade-off with a
workaround. The one that has no clean answer, and the one I would
warn anyone about most emphatically, is backups.
The Ubuntu Touch system itself has a backup mechanism, but it is
limited. It captures the native app data and system settings, but
its coverage is incomplete and its restore path across OS updates
and device changes is not the seamless experience that the
mainstream platforms have spent a decade perfecting. There is no
equivalent of the "sign in and everything comes back" flow that
Android and iOS users take for granted.
The Waydroid layer makes this worse, because Waydroid's app data
lives inside the container, separate from the Ubuntu Touch backup
scope. Waydroid ships Seedvault, the same open-source backup tool
that GrapheneOS and other de-Googled Android systems use, and
Seedvault can back up and restore the Android app data with an
encrypted archive and a passphrase. But it is a manual process,
it lives in a different place from the Ubuntu Touch backups, and
the two do not compose into a single "back up my phone"
operation. You have two backup domains, each with its own tool,
each requiring its own discipline.
The practical consequence is that recovering from a lost or
broken phone is not a thirty-second restore. It is a
reinstallation of Ubuntu Touch, a manual restore of the native
side, a re-initialization of Waydroid, a Seedvault restore of the
Android side, and a re-authentication into everything. For an
operator who is comfortable with manual, scriptable, understood
processes, this is acceptable. For someone who expects the phone
to just restore itself, it is a genuine downgrade from the
mainstream experience.
The honest framing is that this is the price of the architecture.
The same properties that make the system yours (no cloud account
tying everything together, no vendor holding your data, no
automatic sync to someone else's servers) are the properties that
make the effortless cloud restore impossible. You cannot have
both the independence and the seamless vendor-managed recovery.
The independence is the point, so the recovery is manual. Knowing
this before you commit is the difference between an informed
choice and an unpleasant surprise.
The Smaller Caveats
A few other limits are worth naming briefly, none of them
dealbreakers but all of them real.
The Fairphone 4 under Ubuntu Touch is limited on the cellular
modem. VoLTE, which most carriers now require for voice calls as
they retire the older networks, is experimental and depends on
the carrier, the bands, and the region. Before committing, verify
that your carrier's voice calling works on the Fairphone 4 UT
build, because this is the limit most likely to make the phone
unusable as a phone.
GPS can be slow to get an initial fix. Bluetooth is functional
but occasionally temperamental with specific devices. The camera
works for basic photography but does not approach the
computational photography that the stock Android camera app
extracts from the same hardware. These are the expected rough
edges of a community port, and they improve with each release,
but they are present.
Who This Is For
This setup is not for everyone, and the honest version of a
recommendation has to say who it is not for. If you need your
banking app and it is Play-Integrity-locked, if you depend on the
effortless cloud backup, if your carrier requires VoLTE that does
not work on this build, or if you simply want a phone that never
requires thought, this is not your setup. The mainstream
platforms exist because they serve those needs well, and there is
no shame in needing them.
This setup is for the person who values control over convenience,
who is comfortable with a manual process in exchange for
independence, who does most of their computing in a browser and a
terminal, and who wants a phone that is a small Linux computer
they own rather than a device that owns a slice of them. For that
person, the Fairphone 4 running Ubuntu Touch with Waydroid and
microG is a genuinely good daily driver, and the manual backup
discipline is a small tax on an otherwise liberating arrangement.
Closing
I have run this setup as my actual phone for long enough to have
a settled opinion, and the opinion is that it is worth it for the
right person. The Fairphone 4 is the right hardware: repairable,
ethical, with the bootloader access that makes any of this
possible. Ubuntu Touch is a mature-enough mobile Linux that the
core experience is good rather than merely tolerable. Waydroid
closes most of the app gap. microG closes most of the
Google-services gap. And the backup situation is the one
standing cost that you accept knowingly in exchange for owning
your device outright.
The phone in my pocket runs a Linux I control, syncs to servers
I run, installs apps from stores I trust, and phones home to
nobody. For that, a manual backup discipline is a trade I make
without regret. If the same trade appeals to you, the Fairphone 4
and Ubuntu Touch are a combination worth the afternoon it takes
to set up, with the limits understood going in.