Hi everyone,
I read with interest all the posts. I am also noticing problems with my memory management. Same story with apps regularly reloading. I activated the dev options to see the memory usage, I will check in the next days, for now it says average 63% with first app being the OS (1,6 GB) and then the Interface (230 MB).
Hi,
I donāt have a solution, but just wanted to add that Iām seeing similar issues on other apps:
Amazon Music stops playing randomly (when in background). If I switch back to it, the app is completely closed (doesnāt even remember which song it was playing before).
Lately I tried to do an online payment where my bank requires 2FA from the banking-app. When switching to the banking app to accept 2FA, the browser tab (Firefox) reloaded, so payment did start over and I couldnāt continue. I reproduced this issue several times before switching to split-screen mode instead of sending the browser to background. This way it worked.
Same with 3rd party launchers (Microsoft) where it reloads all the widgets when switching to home-screen or even closes the keyboard when I try to use the searchbar.
Battery optimization is off (unrestricted) for amazon music. Also it seems like the severeness of the problem varies from day to day.
No crash reports or anything did appear. So I really think there is an issue with memory management.
So now thereās four of us encountering the same problem. Iāll keep you posted as soon as I get an answer from Fairphone Support.
In my message to FP Support, I descreibed a similar situation as Aichitho did with a banking app.
I might think that is a warranty thing and that we should receive a new phone.
My previous phone was a Redmi Note 10T. That one always closed apps in the background. It was really hard to sign in to websites that required the MFA code from the MFA app there, because after opening the MFA app, the browser was reloaded and the state of the login page was forgotten. Drove me crazy. My solution there was to open the browser into a āfloating windowā before switching to the MFA app. Then it stayed open. Iām wondering if that could be of help here? No idea if the FP5 has floating windows, though. On Redmi, one had to go to the window switcher and then click on Floating window at the top and pick eg the browser. Just an idea.
You can see two app at the same time by: app switcher - > click on the currently open app icon (top middle) - > split screen - > select another (opened) app.
Did some testing today. To me it boils down to a RAM-Management issue. Amazon Music is using (comparably) a lot of RAM in background due to music-caching (0,5-0,9GB). If there is a second app using a lot of memory in foreground, android will kill amazon music to free up some space.
I can reproduce the error by watching running services (developer options) and switching and opening new tabs. Firefox tries to free the memory immediately by unloading tabs, but when I keep it switching tabs it fills up the memory and amazon music stops playing if there is only about 500MB of free RAM left.
Some apps will never close (e.g. Gmail, Launcher, etc.) I guess they are whitelisted and amazon music is not.
This might sound like a get-a-phone-with-more-RAM issue but itās not. My previous phone only had 3GB and I never ran into such problems. Also the app-killing sometimes happens very randomly, I just tried to force-reproduce the issue and opening browser tabs is a very straightforward way to do that.
I guess we will have to wait for an update fixing the problem. Maybe reinstalling the OS might help but I donāt have the time to do that now.
Summary: The Fairphone kills RAM-heavy background apps although it should not, as they are āactivelyā being used. I donāt think itās battery optimization, I personally think itās a memory management issue. I guess the only thing we can do is check ārunning servicesā and see if there is any app using some ram which we donāt need (in my case Iāve uninstalled microsoft launcher again to free up some MB) and hope fairphone will fix this. If not I might even return the phone at one point.
Thanks for your message! Testing around, I also think it is a RAM management issue on Fairphoneās side (with or without Ms launcher). I also noticed that clearing some caches (like the launcherās) makes it better for some short time, so maybe it is also a caching problem?
Did anyone have feedback from the FP technical team on this topic yet? Are they working on it?
I came here just to say that Iām seeing the same problem, and itās driving me up the wall.
I use Gadgetbridge to connect to my watch, and it constantly gets killed in the background, to the point where I just donāt expect notifications on my watch to ever work anymore.
Iāve had times when Iāve tapped to send a picture in Fluffychat, only for the chat client to seemingly get killed in favour of the photo picker it just requested, so Iāve picked my image for nothing and have to try again and hope it works this time.
I was just trying to have a lay down, take a quick scroll through a PDF while listening to a podcast, and the podcast keeps getting killed.
Iāve already done all of these things, and it hasnāt helped.
I never had this happen with my old phone, a several years old Xiaomi, with the exact same set of apps, launcher, etc.
Hi, I am also heavily affected by this problem. I have the 6GB variant. My biggest issue is Spotify being killed constantly when in the background. Here are some of my observations:
All apps that are not in the foreground are potentially killed (e.g. firefox, spotify, google services, widgets, ā¦)
It happens with the stock launcher, and also with other launchers (it feels like third party launchers make the problem a little bit worse ā more ram usage = more apps killed?)
A reliable trigger for killing Spotify is opening the camera app. It happens more times than not, to the point that I am surprised when the music does not stop after I take a picture.
Rebooting gets rid of the problem, but not for long. After a few hours (at max.), the frequency of apps being killed is unbearable for multitasking again.
By looking at the logcat output of the Android low memory killer (LMK), it seems that memory pressure and/or thrashing is so high, that processes are killed constantly. When switching between apps, opening the camera, etc, the LMK killed almost a process every second!
I want to find out if I can trigger the issue in safe mode, and maybe factory reset my device to see if that makes a difference. But it almost seems like that the Fairphone memory management really does not like background apps (but then why does this also occur in the 8GB model?).
I hope that a solution will be found. I like my Fairphone a lot and would really like to be happy using it, but at the moment, my old Motorola (that worked perfectly with only 4GB!!!) would probably spare me all those troubles
Yes, I deactivated battery optimizations on all the apps that were affected the most, which changed nothing. I also experimented with the dev-settings from earlier in this forum post, with no success (if it made things better, it did by so little that I didnāt notice).
