Android 7 issues

Hi all,
I was really pleased to finally be able to upgrade a couple of weeks ago now, but I’ve noticed several issues so far and wondered if others had / they are being addressed by the Fairphone team:

  • My FP2 won’t shut down - it only reboots when I select this from the menu so the only way to turn it off is to pull the battery out
  • If the battery died before with all previous versions of OS I could plug in and turn on the phone. Now I have to wait until there is a bit if charge in there then unplug, boot up the phone and plug back in to continue charging.
  • The Wi-Fi won’t always reconnect automatically when I get home. It show’s different WiFi networks from a particular point in the day “frozen” there. Even turning the WiFi on and off doesn’t help, only rebooting the phone does.
  • I’ve been getting really mixed results with the battery saver option. In the past I have always turned on overnight, never really being sure if it was actually saving power. I hoped this would be clearer that it was working on the new software. Instead there’s been times were the phone has dropped 30-40% charge overnight.

Sorry to be negative, but what has this new OS actually brought us in benefits?

Best wishes

Richard

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Hi @Richard1,
I saw the WiFi issue and the shutdown issues. I found that the workarounds mentioned on the forum work for me, so the flight mode toggle means a faster fix. Not ideal, but faster than a reboot.

I did see a significant improvement in the battery life. On Sundays when I use it a lot and used to have like 20% at 2pm, I now often have enough battery for the whole day, often only needing to o recharge at like 8pm. That was a big worry for me. I do use some battery saving techniques, but these didn’t work with Android 6, for some reason.

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Please see …


The possible benefits are listed here …

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What I recently had to realize reading through this forum was, that there are more posts and guides coming up explaining how to return back from Android 7 to Android 6.

Now this clearly shows that there is a noticeable quantity of users being used and wanting to keep specific attributes they know from Pre-Android 7 OS versions.
Some still remaining, obviously not so negligible, bugs also contribute their part to the decision to convert back or elsewhere.

Now this is surely nothing what Fairphone had planned when deciding to move on porting Android 7 to the FP2.
But having invested so much money in the development and now loosing a part of users back to Marshmallow (or 3rd party OSes) and others not even taking the approach of upgrading (such as me) is counterproductive.
I think it’s mainly because of a few specific but profound remaining bugs and missing features.
After all (me including) I believe many users simply want to have a reliably functional phone not having to first “fix” tha thing before it can be used for whatever purpose.
This is even more annoying the more often problems occur or if just wanting to have a tiny issue quickly done which then turns out as an exhausting issue needing to get tha thing working first wasting much more than only a moment, if the phone would simply operate flawless (as the majority of mobiles out there probably do). No one likes troublesome gadgets.
Yes, sometimes there are helpful workarounds for bugs, but missing features cannot be replaced by them. So not to keep an expensive piece of waste users take their decision on available options and may not be willing to accept Android 7 in its actual state. I am afraid its benefits are not outmatching the impact of some bugs and missing features it actually still has. It does not look like a higher security level is more important to all users than having a properly working handset and individual valued features as known from Android 6.

There is still a way to go for Fairphone unfortunately also pricey until a fully acceptable state with specific bugs fixed and all former (good) features and more new features lifts Nougat to it’s appropriate level.

Good luck anyway and happy Xmas to all of you! :evergreen_tree:

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Could not agree more to @Patrick1.
I still run Android 6, although I by now got the update notification, as I happily wait for the greatest bugs to be fixed.
I really really appreciate the effort of bringing Android 7 to the FP2 and I can imagine the pressure to finally release it, as the security patches for Android 6 have been abandoned and many users were growing impatient. So my guessing is, that FP released the Android 7 upgrade a bit early, while they were still fixing some bugs (hoping maybe to get the fixing done during the rollout). I may be totally wrong of course.
Maybe, just maybe, it would be an option (for future cases) to crowdfund some money for an update to make it possible keeping the actual OS up to date while working on the update. That might reduce the pressure to release a premature OS?

Still, to be clear: Thx for the hard work and all the efforts FP has put into the phones!!

@All
Have a merry X-mas and a happy new year.

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That really depends on the circumstances. For example, Google stopped patching Android 6 in September. So any amount to be crowdfunded would have to compensate for the effort of developing on two versions plus doing the security updates themselves instead of getting them “for free”. Of course, in the future the situation might or might not be similar.
In any case I assume throwing money at the problem won’t solve anything if not accompanied by the right (additional) people.

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Thanks all for your replies - I have been able to make a note of the work arounds.

Best wishes for 2019 to you all

Richard

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I see three issues this far. I could not find a post describing it so i list here in case anyone have an idea. All was OK on Android 6:

A) Mirroring to my Samsung TV: video is OK; but audio goes out of phone rear speaker instead of TV.

B) The app “Mina fordon” fail when trying to scan QR code, with message: “Unknown scan library error”. Other camera apps work. This phone is from the first large batch and OK with original camera, but the newer camera fail both before update, even after i got a replacement and after update. (and yes i got it refunded )

C) The FLIR ONE app thinks it connect, and so do its USB add-on camera (LED turn green), but image is just black. ( Was OK before: FP2 compatible with Flir One? )

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