So I installed an /e/ OS into my FP4, used it for about a week and decided to go back to stock.
Installed a stock OS offline as in the official guide and then decided to lock the boot loader. Locked it. Rebooted. And saw my phone is corrupt. It was my first ever Android, so no surprise I screwed it quite soon.
Been all over the forum only to find out you guys send your bricked phones to France.
I can’t though because I’m in Ukraine - it’s war here and we can’t even send those 30 euros from here these days due to restrictions.
Therefore has anyone found any other way to unbrick the device? And I mean any - jumping some wires and using TTY methods and any others will do too, just give me an idea :))
Unless someone here comes up with a trick unknown to me yet, please clarify if you can send and receive anything (or more specifically, your FP4) to/from France at all right now. Quite directly, I am confident someone in this community might actually be willing to help out with the payment issue (right now I won’t promise it myself, but I might discuss it with my local Fairphone Community here in the next days).
Update: Did you check with Fairphone Support if Fairphone’s France repair centre would even accept an FP4 send-in from Ukraine? This Support article suggests they do not service your country https://support.fairphone.com/hc/en-us/articles/202005103
Hi there,
bad to hear this still happens! At the moment, there is no known alternative to sending the phone to France.
Maybe someone who experienced this can clarify if the service fee is also applied if the current OS is the stock ROM. It could be cometly covered by warranty, but I’m not sure.
Did you buy your phone directly at the Fairphone online store?
This would be a great opportunity to confirm or deny for the record if Fairphone supports EDL imaging for the FP4.
I saw a post for an earlier model that showed test points on the board (e.g. jump two solder blobs) to get INTO EDL… the question is if FP will provide a signed EDL image for use along with QPST/QFIL/QDL.
Bonus points if there is a key combination, or can use a EDL cable (grounds the D+ line for ~6s at startup).
This would be amazing to have, as it means we have means of recovering a relatively expensive brick.
Getting into EDL is easy, we discussed that already in this thread, but without a loader / firehose file we can’t do anything meaningful with it.
Everybody’s waiting for one to get leaked at some point…
I get why they can’t just release the loader, there’s probably an NDA involved, but the amount of people who have bricked their phones just in the last couple of days…
A lot of those cases would have been preventable, in my opinion, if the factory images weren’t based on the outdated A.142 release.
I haven’t checked, but my guess would be the latest /e/ release is based on A.149.
Anti Rollback Protection gets triggered when the bootloader is locked → Phone =
I really hope they’ll reconsider this in the nearest future. Because all of those people including me now will have to buy a new phone in case they too can’t send it in for recovery - bad for the planet and totally against the whole Fairphone idea if you ask me
Hey @hirnsushi thanks for that article, I somehow missed that one. Great discussion there with a lot of answers.
I guess I really don’t care if an image “leaks” or gets posted officially, as long as we have one that lets us use firehose/sahara. It was interesting to learn that the FP3 does NOT need signed images… Motorolas usually have a “blank” flash EDL image that just puts back bootloader/fastboot, from which you can load the rest. I wonder if that evades whatever the non-disclosure stuff mandates?
But yeah, I hope FP reconsiders, at least while they campaign on having an “open” phone. I’m sure there is already a back door for government agencies to make forensics of the phone without any further special permissions… that the bad guys probably know how to use (or exploit)… so pretty much everyone that knows how to do this can do so OTHER than us schmoes that actually paid for the hardware… sigh.
The loader for the FP4 is signed, you need that specific one.
Nothing has changed in the last few days and since Fairphone won’t release the loader, all we can do is wait for it to get leaked, which might happen tomorrow, or never…
Got it. In the meantime does anyone know how do I send the phone to service? Support takes ages to reply. I got it to Switzerland already and still can’t manage to get an address from Fairphone support
