While they were happy with what the fairphone 4 brought to the table, they seem to like what was changed for the fairphone 5.
What are you guys’ opinions on this? A welcome change? would you get one if your phone died within the next year?
And you can prove that the binaries I receive are the binaries from the developer?
F-Droid has reproducible builds, so definitely yes. You can even check the exact code used to build every app on F-Droid.
The rest of stores, it depends. Every store has their own policy and the only one I recommend is using F-Droid or downloading directly from the devs’ website or Github repo. There’s an app to automate this process for updates too, so it’s actually a quite good method.