I get that that article is supposed to be a bunch of good things that they did about the device, but it makes me really uneasy as someone who was curious about fairphone learning that when they had an obstacle in their path they chose to just remove the feature instead of provide workarounds.

I don’t personally use aod myself but it’s never a good thing to add a feature to a phone and then remove the feature cold cut for better battery performance. A simple on/off toggle would have sufficed greatly like what every other phone with AOD has