Fairphone 6 main camera now works on postmarketOS as Linux phone effort matures

An independent developer has written a working driver for the Fairphone 6’s main camera under postmarketOS, building on earlier community work on the wide-angle lens. Autofocus and color correction are functional, though the output is still grainy and lags well behind a stock Android device on the same scene. Color correction and denoising remain in progress, and upstreaming the patches is expected to take at least half a year, with the fix shipped now so a collaborator can take the lead on submitting it.

The post doubles as a project update on the broader goal of a viable Linux phone. Dutch emergency services (1-1-2) formally approved a scheduled test window to verify that 112 calls work on the device — a rare bit of official cooperation that addresses a real gap, since emergency calling had been unverified. The community has now confirmed the postmarketOS image working across four carriers in the Netherlands, Germany, and Norway. Remaining hardware to-dos include the selfie camera, fingerprint sensor, and laser-rangefinder autofocus.

The developer is also formalizing the effort: incorporating “Catcrafts” as a Dutch non-profit foundation (stichting), publishing live financials generated from bank statements for transparency to donors, and planning to sell flashed devices. Shipping will exclude the US and Canada — corporate liability insurance for those markets is prohibitively hard to obtain from the Netherlands — and Russia, Belarus, and North Korea due to sanctions. Longer term, they float building a fully open RISC-V phone, acknowledging it would likely be slow, hot, and expensive, but positioning openness and an ethical non-profit model as the selling point over profit-driven incumbents like Fairphone itself.