For some weeks, my FP2 (and my wife’s one) doesn’t work anymore with any of the Browser’s apps : Chrome/Ecosia tested, and reacting exactly the same way, as it’s not arriving to load webpages, and after some time, tells me that the App is not answering, and let me the choice of waiting again, or shutting down the app.
However, the phone is updated (see enclosed screenshot), and I tried to fix the issue several times by removing any cache/app data to start from zero again : it’s reacting the same way.
The Fairphone 2 doesn’t get updates anymore. For more information read the article from Fairphone.
This could be the reason that apps stop working.
Is the app DuckDuckGo also giving problems?
I personally have now /e/os on my phone. See /e/os Fairphone 2 for the install doc. They have a degoogled android version R (= android 11). It is not certain that after March 2024 Android 11 will get updates
I just checked on a freshly installed Fairphone 2 with Fairphone OS 23.02.0-rel.0 and Chrome is working fine out of the box as well as after updating by the Play Store, so it seems Fairphone OS would not be the culprit. Edit: After a reset of the phone Chrome’s performance is noticeably worse than initially, but it still works.
Is it only the browser(s) having trouble? Can other Apps access the web?
What about a browser not based on Chromium, like Firefox?
Do you use a firewall App or similar, which may have turned overly protective?
Apart from that @Lidwien is right about the update situation, using Fairphone OS any further is a larger security risk than using e.g. /e/OS which still gets security updates on the Fairphone 2.
