Fairphone 3+ Extremely Slow

Help Fairphone 3
,
1

Hi there,

I’ve had my Fairphone 3+ now for just over 4 years, but the last few months it’s been incredibly slow to respond and laggy. I will often get “this app is not responding messages” that don’t go away even when the app does start to respond again.

I have factory resetted it a couple of times in the last few months and it doesn’t seem to help. My storage level is good at only about 60%. I am up to date with all updates.

One interesting thing that I wonder if it is related is that every time I switch off and on my phone I will get a notification saying Quickstep is not responding and I have to close the app. I hear this app is used in the background to open apps? Not sure if there is another app I can use for this, or fix the original, but I can’t seem to find the app anyway.

Is it just time to get a new phone? I’m not sure if “designed to last 7 years” means it still works but works very badly, but quite disappointing. It has always been a little slow to respond, but this is now getting pretty unusable.

Any ideas much appreciated.

Benji

2

Hi
Quickstep is a launcher, you could try a different launcher and see if that helped.

You can search forum for suggestions of alternative launchers, for example

I am currently using Pear and it helped with some of my issues. Yet I need to say I advised it to someone on Reddit and it apparently didn’t work as intended.

Btw have you noticed any, even temporary, improvement after the factory reset?

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Perhaps an app is slowing down the phone.
If you up to it, start your phone in Safe mode and try who it behaves then.

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Just my personal anecdotical evidence: I am using /e/OS on my own FP3+ for four years now (by now on Android 15) and compared with another FP3 that ran on Android OS (formerly called Fairphone OS) Android 13, the FP3+ runs smoother and snappier. This might be the case with other Custom ROMs as well, however Android OS will certainly provide the highest possible compatility with apps.

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So I factory reset my phone when I posted on 23rd Oct. I’ve now just had the last couple of days where it has got a bit laggy and apps have come up saying they are not responding. So it is a gradual degradation after the reset that seems to get worse quite quickly.

I have just tried installing the Pear launcher, thanks for the recommendation. I will see how that goes in the next few weeks.