Been using a FP4 in Washington State USA under T-Mobile for about 6 months now. Bought it from a British reseller.
Very occasionally I need to bounce the cellular connection, I suspect because I land on an unsupported band/channel. Otherwise LineageOS runs on it like a charm.
I’d love to have a Fairphone as a dev test device but yep, they don’t sell in NA.
It seems to be a common thread with interesting phones… back when there was still some buzz around Sailfish you couldn’t get a device running that in NA either, which may have contributed to that project fizzling. There’s a lot of mobile devs with disposable income you’re opting out of by not selling in North America.
>There’s a lot of mobile devs with disposable income you’re opting out of by not selling in North America.
I'm not in this specific industry, but there are some generic trends with the USA
There could be a lot of non tariff trade barriers if you go to the USA.
And you get exposed to a lot of laws, like having to give up all of your data to uncle Sam, having to run specific programs in the company on top of what the EU wants you to do, and be exposed to the maybe not so independent DOJ.
Negociations for industrial products also seem to attract ears at the homeland security, because it's a national security risk when you sell cheaper than American companies.
Contracts are trickiest to write, because justice is based on what you write in the contract, and century of precedents (contracts in mainland Europe are much thinner because there are laws)
And nobody would want to have to report women who get an abortion out of state, nor to dispute the requests, nor to run several legal programs when you're a smallish company, nor to risk having your board held up in jail until you sell to GE (then charges can be dropped).
Also, there is the Buy American act, so you can't just sell in bulk to the government.
European car manufacturers no longer sell in NA, because meeting the weird standards would cost more than they would do by selling their little cars.
Fresh food like cheeses were sometimes suddenly bumped back to Europe.
Overall, if you're a small company, you avoid the USA to not be crushed.
