The Fairphone 3 (and the Fairphone 3+) comes with a stock Android. For those who are used to Android on the FP2, this means you won’t find “Maintenance” in the Settings of your FP3 (yet). For those unfamiliar with it, “Maintenance” on the FP2 includes both a tool to recalibrate your FP2’s proximity sensor as well as the “Checkup” tool, a set of simple hardware tests that allow the user to test her or his phone’s hardware components like the display, microphones, speakers and the like. This is especially helpful in cases of malfunctioning when you want to narrow down the cause of a technical problem with your phone (e.g. “can the the person I called not hear me because there’s something wrong with my microphone or is there an issue with the SIM card?”). These individual tests can be performed with a lot of other apps, but Checkup bundles them in one place and makes it convenient for everyone to perform these tests without having to look around for and newly install one or more apps.
While I do not know if or when Fairphone will bring Checkup onto the FP3 in a later system update (for a brief status quo, see @anon52719359’s post below), what you can already do right now (once the FP3 is in your hands) is to install Checkup as an app. You can
Note: While you can also find Checkup in the Google Play Store, I won’t link to it here because its version of Checkup is now 32 months old and – as far as I know – still needed some issues to be ironed out. I recommend only to use the version that F-Droid provides. The version provided by F-Droid is just 12 months old, and I just tested it and all its tests I could try (I was not able to test the SIM card tests) work on the FP3 .
Another important note: The secondary microphone test in the Checkup app causes sonic feedback – in some cases even escalating and getting shrill – under several OSes (LineageOS on the FP2, Fairphone OS on the FP3). Don’t use it this test. Instead, you can install and use a simple sound recorder app to test the secondary microphone’s basic functionality.
As far as we heard at the efct19 the functionality of checkup is planned to be brought back integrated into a larger project. I’m not sure how much we are supposed to say about it.
Downloading the Checkup app now is especially helpful for those unlucky customers who might get an FP3 where something doesn’t work out of the box.
Since you ask and this just recently came up at my work as a Fairphone Angel: One thing I’m missing in the FP2 checkup app is a test for the proximity sensor.
Sometimes I just want to test if everything works on a phone and actually don’t have a SIM card around, so I can’t make a call to test the sensor.
I always find the (two) microphone tests a bit “vague” because you are supposed to directly hear your own voice. The problem with that is that while there is a small delay between speaking into the (primary/secondary) microphone and hearing yourself in the earspeaker/loudspeaker, you can still get confused because of the (too) brief delay between actually hearing your own voice “live” (right when you speak into the microphone) and through the speaker (afterwards). This is especially problematic when you utter more than a brief “Hello!” – once you speak a sentence, speaking and hearing starts to overlap.
Maybe you can look into letting the test record what is spoken and letting the user play back that recording only after pressing a button on the display. After all it’s a microphone test, not a speaker test (those are separate tests that are fully fine in my opinion).
For the sake of completeness the FP3 comes with a service test tool preinstalled.
The tool can be helpful to track down all sorts of hardware problems.
Seems to have a similiar purpose as the Fairphone “Checkup tool”:
This suggestion is implemented
You can find this tool at the very buttom of developer options as Service Menu.
(developer options need to be enabled first)
Too bad @anon52719359 left and took the information with her.
Anyway, I expanded my original post. Several users reported and I was able to confirm that the secondary microphone test in the Checkup app comes with (major at times) feedback issues (see above). It should not be used, a simple sound recorder app can be used instead.
Some of you have probably noticed it before, but I only just noticed that a couple of basic instructions have been fed into the Troubleshooting Tool for the FP3. Previously it only included the Support request form. As far as I tried it, there aren’t that many unknown “tricks” in it yet, but I think it’s good that it has been launched now.
Hopefully this troubleshooting tool does not fill up to soon.
Because an extensive troubleshooting tool means lots of troubles.
So, maybe it’s a good sign, that this tool has not been fed before and the troubles reported in this forum are mostly rare or even singular occurances.
I’m having issues with the Fingerprint reader on my FP3 and was wondering if anyone knew of a hardware testing tool to diagnose and check the fingerprint reader. Does that exist?
(the first in 4+ years)