Donation SHIFT6mq
In 2022, the German company SHIFT donated three smartphones of their model
SHIFT6mq as a loan for life to
F-Droid team members. This was done without asking for anything in
return. However, we do want to share our experiences with the devices.
The SHIFT6mq phone ©
SHIFT.
First of all, SHIFT has a focus on making sustainable earphones, tablets and
smartphones, called SHIFTphone
so they use fair trade materials and even substitute the use of a specific
rare metal by using ceramic capacitors. All their products are modular and
therefore easier to repair.
Link to YouTube video
showing how modular the SHIFTphone is.
One of our team members really went to town with his SHIFT6mq. The devices
come with their own flavour of Android which is called ShiftOS-G and is
certified by Google. In his article “Android without Google:
Shiftphones”
he reviews the device and its operating system. However, he takes it one
step further and de-Googles it by installing ShiftOS-Light (ShiftOS-L). Best
is to read that article before continuing here. That article also helped the
other team members to explore this smartphone more thoroughly. Further
feedback praised it for its battery life and less data use when de-Googled.
At the moment, SHIFT6mq is the only model from SHIFT which is supported by
LineageOS, as this support is
done by one of the developers of SHIFT. We expect that their future models
also will work with LineageOS and SHIFT8 is due to be released at the end of
- For those who don’t know, LineageOS currently supports almost 200
different Android devices and works well together with F-Droid apps.
LineageOS for SHIFT6mq supports Calyx Institute’s
SeedVault
for making complete backups of your device. And this will also be offered in
upcoming version 12 of ShiftOS-L. Without going too much off-topic, for more
information read NLnet’s article on
it. See also SHIFT’s well-maintained
forum, mostly in German, but you can ask
your question in English too.
F-Droid client
with the SHIFT6mq smartphone frame as shown on F-Droid’s homepage.
The F-Droid homepage used to show a smartphone frame around the screenshot
of the F-Droid client from a not so open manufacturer. We wanted to
replace that for a while. At our request the SHIFT team provided us with the
design of the SHIFT6mq smartphone frame and permission to use it. Perhaps
you have already noticed that as it is currently seen on our homepage.