I managed to meet up with a fairphone 2 user today! We tried lots of things, and found the following:
With MY battery in THEIR phone, it managed to charge easily.
With THEIR fully-charged battery in MY phone, it started without a problem and optimised apps until it was done. Then it started easily.
After optimising apps in my phone, we changed to MY battery. It was now charged to around 6% according to when it was in THEIR phone. We plugged the charger into it, and started it. It was now at 3% and quickly (while it said it was charging) was drained of battery power. It went down to 1%, and then stayed there for a while.
We tried using a powerbank to charge my phone, the kind of powerbank that shuts itself off if nothing is draining energy from it for 1 minute straight. It turned off after 1 minute of apparently “charging” my phone.
I shut my phone off and went home, plugged it in, and it managed to start (now at 0%) and stayed that way for a few minutes with the charger plugged in, until it died.
So, the problem seems to be on the phone. Maybe the part where you plug the charger in?
I am having exactly the same problem - It started 2 days ago after a few apps updated so I thought it was that but the more I look on this forum the more I think it is a hardware issue. I sent a support request and I really hope they just take my phone back and replace it/ repair it because life without a phone is quite annoying at the moment especially because it is so new and also because I’m paying for a monthly package which I am currently not able to use.
I am in Brussels if there is anyone close who would like to try a battery swap… at least if it turns on I can check my SMS’…
I have a feeling it will take them a long time to get back to me which is also quite frustrating.
Same problem here! I sent my support request 5 days ago but no help yet. Once they get back to me I will let you know here. By the way, I also live in Brussels but unfortunately we cannot help each other with two drained batteries…
No reply from the support for almost a month now. Did anyone manage to solve this problem for good? I am quite frustrated I must say. Any help highly appreciated!
Finally I find a thread where everyone have exactly my problem!
It started when I was using my phone with the charger in. It started to flash red. I realised I had just 4% battery left. Stopped using my phone and just charge it. After half an hour it was down to 0%.
Now I’m most frustrated it have taken you a month without answer! I feel it is not a phone for the nature any more… It is a phone for those how want two phones! How many are able to be without the phone in several weeks?
Would be very nice if you came up with the answer from support when you hear from them! I sent my mail to them 30/6. Suppose I will have to wait for some more weeks before even hearing from them
Sorry to hear about your disappointing experience.
To get a fast answer from support please post your ticket number in this thread. They are really swamped, but posting there fast-tracks your ticket.
Dear other Fairphoners!
I am glad to find this thread, as actually I have been looking around for quite some time (in the forum).
My problem is exactly the same: From one day to the other, my fairphone became empty pretty fast (without reason), then when trying to charge it, it would go into the “reboot loop” described above. After some trying, I got it to stay in “Charging mode”, without trying to boot up.
I thought everything was fine but after four hours, the phone was at 50%. I put the phone on “flight mode” over night and the last thing it managed to do in the morning was to wake me up and then die straight away. --> The phone discharged even in flight mode over the duration of 7 hours of sleep. Since this second shutdown I haven’t managed to recharge the phone. I have tried several charger/cable combinations but nothing helped. So I did some research and also thought about possibilies. Luckily, I have a powermeter at home (you plug it into the power plug in the wall and just plug the charger into this device, it then measures, voltage, current and thus, consumed power). What I learned from that:
When plugging the phone in, the charger drains ~6 W (= about 1.2 Ampere, which is norm), while the phone is “booting” into the “charging mode”. As soon as it reaches the charging mode, the drained power of my charger goes down to (almost) zero (i can still see the blue “battery charging screen”! I conclude: While the phone is booting, it is actually taking its energy from the charger, but as soon as i changes to charging mode, it only needs very little energy for itself, as (normally) the battery should now drain the power from the charger instead. But this (as I think) is the problem: the battery is is probably broken and thus, no current can flow to actually charge it.
I hope this makes sense to you, if not I can try to break it down to make it more easy to understand. My next steps: I just got lucky as my flatmate has an external Li-Ion-battery-charger. Right now I am giving the battery one last chance, tomorrow I can give you more information on this. If the battery will not work tomorrow, I will write a message to support to get my battery (or eventually) bottom module replaced.
If you should see the battery is working and conclude it is the bottom module, you could also try the following before having it replaced.
Some people reported that the contacts of the bottom module got loose (when talking about malfunctioning microphones), so potentially taking out the module and cleaning the contacts before reassembling the phone could help as well.
I guess it is worth a try before replacing the whole module.
Dear freibadschwimmer,
Thanks for mentioning the contacts, I had actually tried that as well but forgotten to write about it. My news is the following (maybe this can help someone):
After charging the battery externally I could get the phone to boot normally and even get my stuff saved. I then performed a hard reset in recovery mode and voilà: the phone would even let itself get charged by my normal usb charger! No quick discharge would happen and I was quite happy. But then:
This evening I reinstalled some basic apps (Threema and Whatsapp) and logged into my google account. I wanted to try if eventually an external app made the misery begin. So far my phone is NOT discharging quickly as it used to do, but it won’t charge on my usb device anymore! My Laptop won’t even recognise the phone (again, everything with several cabes/chargers).
I’m not really sure what I have to think about this… it’s quite unreproducible but probably the bottom module is broken? I will wait till tomorrow to see whether the phone discharges again and then probably write a ticket to support. They can then decide so send me a new module or battery or whatsoever…
Hi,
I didn’t have any problems with charging my FP2 within the last months, but in these days it starts with some issues I have read about here: i.e. no charging, instead quick battery drain, deep discharge with getting a quite warm CPU. But still I could charge my FP2 battery outside the phone with an universal charger, so the battery seems to be o.k…
Before these charging troubles occurred, I could charge with some of my chargers and some cables without problems. So this stuff seems to be o. k. as well. My assumption now is, that the issues have to do with unreliable contacts at the USB connection or at the contacts of my bottom module.
Three questions to be successful with fixing this failures:
What auxiliary materials like sandpaper or high-proof alcohol should I use to clean the contacts?
Should I protect the contacts against corrosion with grease or something else afterwards?
If grease is o. k., has it to be a special kind or could it just be ball-bearing grease?
Meanwhile I have taken apart my phone. Nothing wrong I could recognize there. I cleaned the contacts (with paper only) and put it together again. All the action didn’t have any success in the end. So I have to ask the support what to do, unfortunately. 'Would prefer it a lot to let them doing there task to solve existing software issues!
Edit: Over night I charged the phone and it worked! So I will see how it is going on and wait for the coming update for the open OS.
Similar problems here, no solution yet. Does anyone have an idea on how to rescue data (photographs) from the internal memory?
Friday evening the battery drained to 0% and the device shut itself down and wouldn’t restart properly since.
By now I’m confident the battery is charged:
The battery was charged with an external battery charger.
The led used to be blinking red during charging, now is greenish.
The blue battery charging screen shows an almost full battery.
Yet the device won’t boot; I get the familiar scenario’s:
It hangs on the black “Fairphone powered by android” screen. This is the usual scenario and it hangs (at least for hours) until I remove the battery.
It reboots after a few seconds on this black screen. This happened when the battery wasn’t fully charged yet, or when I boot the phone when plugged in a charger but without a battery inside (didn’t know this was even possible).
It reaches the ‘optimizing apps’ screen and reboots after a handful of apps are optimized. This has happened only once when the battery was still almost empty.
It shows the blue battery charging screen, when plugging in the phone without turning it on. It seems to charge.
I can get to the recovery menu by pressing volume-up + power to boot. Flashing the cache didn’t help and most other options look destructive.
My main issue is that there are some pictures on the internal memory that I’d like to save. Anyone an idea on how to do that?
adb devices doesn’t show the device, neither on the black screen, nor on the recovery menu. (On Linux, I’ll try windows later.) Perhaps this is possible somehow? The option ‘apply update from ADB’ seems to indicate it should be possible.
Perhaps I can flash an update from the SD card to let the phone boot properly?
A factory reset would probably wipe the DCIM directory, right?
Would Fairphone support be able to assist with this? (I’ll ask them, but maybe one of us has experience.)
I’m not sure which version of the Fairphone OS it is running. It is a few versions behind, because last time I updated it took some effort to get root access back.
Well, what do you know, success! Apparently it got scared after my threatening to factory reset or contact support.
A summary of what I (recall I) did:
Let the phone rest for a night with the partially charged battery removed.
Insert the battery, realize the phone still won’t boot properly, make forum post. (Not sure whether this part is really important. ;-))
Boot the phone into recovery mode to see how the ‘apply update from ADB’ option is labeled to list in in the forum post.
Actually select that option, connect cable to PC, try adb devices and see it is still not listed.
Let the waiting for ADB connection time out (while writing forum post), return to recovery menu.
Wait a while, reboot the phone from the recovery menu (first option).
And now it seems to work properly; it updated all apps and now I’m on the home screen. Haven’t rebooted though. The battery was charged only 26% though, less than I expected.
Well, got everything backed up, but can’t say the phone works well.
It kept rebooting more often than usual (normally it only reboots when running heavy games like PoGo). Got stuck on the black Fairphone screen once more, which was fixed by reinserting the battery. And then it refused to charge at all. The battery was at about 68% percent, and it was a race to see whether I could copy everything with Titanium Backup. Suddenly at almost 15% it started charging again, just after the backup finished.
I tried putting some paper between the battery and the phone, tried various chargers / cables / computers / sockets / powerbanks, which all used to work, didn’t work for about an hour and now suddenly work again. It seems suspicious to me that such an apparent hardware failure starts with an empty battery.
I’ll factory reset and do all the updates to see whether that helps. Nevertheless considering to buy a new phone, because it’s too unstable and is taking too much of my time. It’s only in my possession for about 9 months so it’s probably still within warranty. (8 months, 4 weeks and 2 days to be precise, never thought I’d find a use for that lockscreen widget.)
Perhaps also interesting: it only boots properly when the black Fairphone screen briefly flashes white after a few seconds. Also, I got the blue ‘start a movement’ screen once, always a surprise when that one appears.
So to everyone else with this problem: keep trying things, because it seems rather random and you might just succeed on your next attempt.
I’m not sure whether grease is actually a good option. Gold as a contact material is chosen for exactly the reason that it doesn’t easily corrode. Cleaning dirt is still a useful solution I might expect. What I would suggest, you can actually clean the contacts with pure alcohol and an cotton bud/Q-tip (I used isopropanol), but be sure everything is dried before you start up again (battery removed of course ). I have even seen a (russian?) guy on youtube cleaning his usb connector with wodka (no joke) and apparently that worked as well. As your phone isn’t that old, I wouldn’t expect a lot of dirt in the usb connector yet, but you might give it a go?
Also has your condition normalised already? I think it really helps people if they learn what finally helped you for your problem.
Hi Gandalf149,
thank you for your advice! My FP2 works fine still. What I have done in addition?
I deleted some apps which have to do with USB but which I don’t need, and I have found out, that one of my cables has got a defect, a kind of short cut or rupture, it didn’t have before. This might have caused the battery drain. The update to version 16.11.0 went quite smooth!
). I have even seen a (russian?) guy on youtube cleaning his usb connector with wodka (no joke) and apparently that worked as well. As your phone isn’t that old, I wouldn’t expect a lot of dirt in the usb connector yet, but you might give it a go?