Fairphone 2 - Installation Guide

This guide describes the installation of Fairphone Open from the stock Fairphone OS.

Warning

This installation guide only applies to Fairphone 2. It is not intended for Fairphone 3, as we are currently not providing Fairphone Open for Fairphone 3.

Warning

If you switch to Fairphone Open, all your data (including apps, messages and pictures) will be erased. Make sure to backup first!

Hint

Fairphone Open does not include Google Mobile Services, and thus no app store. We recommend to explore alternatives like F-Droid, which contains free and open source software.

Manual installation (using fastboot)

  1. Download the manual switcher package.

  2. Extract the manual switcher package (it is a regular ZIP archive).

  3. Boot your phone into fastboot mode (hold the Volume Down button while you power on the phone), it will display a still screen with the Fairphone logo.

  4. Connect the phone to a computer using a USB cable.

  5. Execute the flashing script

    1. On any GNU/Linux distribution, make sure that you have “fastboot” installed from your package management system, and execute the flashing script by typing “sh flash-for-unix.sh”. If you have not installed “fastboot” using the distribution package management system, you need to prefix the command above with “sudo”.

    2. On Apple Mac OS X 10.10 and later, double click on the script called “flash-for-mac.command”.

    3. On Microsoft Windows 7 and later:

      1. Windows can install the USB driver automatically, let the system handle the driver installation if the device is not recognised.

      2. Double click on the script called “flash-for-windows.bat”.

  6. The on-screen instructions should appear immediately and guide you through the installation process.

When the installation finishes, press Enter to reboot the phone into Fairphone Open.