Any way to fix the lag on Android 7?

Ever since I updated to Android 7, my FP2 has become a very sad lag-fest. Apps regularly pause. Sometimes for over half a minute. The “app isn’t responding windows” regularly shows up, and using the phone for daily tasks such as Google Maps has become a chore.

I was hoping these were issues that would eventually be fixed with newer Android 7 updates, but nothing seems to have changed. The latest 19.05.3 update made my phone not boot and required a manual downgrade to the revious version, so I haven’t been able to check that one out yet.

I’m about to give up and downgrade to Android 6 to finally get rid of the lag. But my experience seems like too much a breaking behavior for the Android 7 version, that I’m starting to doubt if it actually affects every single Android 7 FP2 user on the planet, or if there is something else I have / haven’t done to induce the behavior when upgrading to Android 7?

Has anyone else noticed these problems with Android 7, and figured out how to fix it?

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As an inhabitant of planet earth with quite a well-behaving Fairphone 2 on Android 7, I can hereby confirm it’s possible :wink: . As for how… upgrade processes are a tricky thing, especially for FP that couldn’t rely on Qualcomm (the guys who really know their hardware) to provide the necessary software. Every update/upgrade changes small things in the system, and if a step is missed things might break. But enough high-level waffle. A couple of follow-up questions:

  • Are you an avid app user? Anything in there that could be eating up your resources? Although the Facebook apps are apparently notorious, I would be more suspicious of the less-known small little tool or game that interrupts you with an ad every 40 seconds. Likely they’re trying to monitor you on the background, and aren’t subtle about it.
  • Have you tried or considered a factory reset or manual install of the full OS rather than just the upgrade? Bringing the OS back to a known-clean state gets rid of a lot of unknowns (like upgrade quirks or background processes from apps). Mr A. Elk posted links to some excellent instructions for that in the next post. :wink:
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Have you already rebooted the phone after the trouble arose?

What you describe is not normal.
If you didn’t install any new Apps or changed any major settings after the upgrade, then …

… you upgraded.
While there’s nothing much wrong with trying, upgrading an OS installation to a major next version in place may work out … or not, nothing to do with a particular device or OS.
It’s complicated … vendors do the best they can to avoid trouble for their users, but in the end they can only keep their fingers crossed that most of the upgrading will work out fine…

The clean approach, and a way to get rid of trouble possibly introduced by upgrading in place, is to install from scratch … how ever unpopular :slight_smile:

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Maybe going into the “storage” setting clearing the entire cached data has a positive effect before going the long way of reinstalling.

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Maybe going into the “storage” setting clearing the entire cached data has a positive effect before going the long way of reinstalling.

Nope, doesn’t seem to do a thing. I guess factory reset and reinstalling is the only option then… though I think I’d like to do a fresh install of Marshmallow before doing the factory reset, just to confirm that Nougat is indeed the source of all these problems…

Well, indeed you are not the first user “stepping back” to Marshmallow.
Too sad, but despite of Fairphone’s efforts at last it’s not all their fault, but rather unforeseen massive troubles that came up due to the missing “support” of Google & Qualcomm which in former Android Version delivered proprietary device drivers which Fairphone now have to “replace” (re-program) all by their self. Unfortunately this task is bound to any “individual” platform and code cannot simply be copied from another phone out there. :slightly_frowning_face:
Many functions therefore are (still/again) missing or unwanted behaviour often is interpreted as fault.
FP is putting a lot of energy into getting Android 7 running as satisfactory as possible, but time does not stand still and many users are complainting about their disappointment with the Android 7 update.

Well, if being used to having a flawless operating phone not wanting to test out if the individual (software) setup will work reliable, I think Marshmallow is still the best alternative to chose. Maybe even LineageOS may meanwhile do a good job which btw. is based on Android 9.

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