A friend had the Fair Phone 4. It broke after a year. Hostile customer support, not worth her time. Idk. Stories of "good guy" indie companies who drop you as soon as you fell for their marketing keep piling up. It may be greed, short sightedness or an incompetent understanding of what it means to have customers, the results are the same. See Framework for another example of this.
This doesn't match my experience at all. I'm writing this from my fairphone 3 purchased in 2019 the day of release. I purchased one for me, one for my wife. I replaced the battery on mine once, my wife never had to change it. Her phone started so show sign of age a few month ago, she switched to the FP6. I will switch to the FP6+ soon as the support come to end this month for the FP3 (I could switch this one to eOS, but performance wise, it's not in it's prime, so I figured I could afford an upgrade after 7 years ^^). I reached out to support quite a few times for my wife or I (for order reasons, issues with operators, bugs, etc) and they have always been excellent for me.
Also as you probably noted, I'm quite enthusiastic about their products and have convinced a bunch of my surrounding to purchase fairphones when they had to change phone (models 3, 4 and 5 so far). I never had any of them tell me they regreted following my recommendation and as far as I know they still use their fairphones.
My Prusa Core One 3D printer has had two upgrades available at reasonable prices since I purchased it. These upgrade kits are a bit more involved than swapping out a battery or camera but in the end, I will have the latest hardware. They are a great example of "good guys" continuing to hold up their end of the bargain. I hope they make some profit from the upgrade kits because this kind of relationship is worth rewarding.
Moral licensing probably. If they get social points for building a “fair” product they’re less incentivized to be “fair” in other areas. Also why the people who virtue signal the most tend to be the quite rude irl.
Supply Chain is hard, Apple is the pro at it. Small companies struggle. Who are the founders? Are they experienced in hardware? They are doing something ambitious (keeping old stuff in stock costs money).
Just checked, as of now all the Fairbud parts seem to be out of stock defeating the entire purpose. Maybe they will get more stock once the sales kick off.