Fairphone Open 17.06.4 (Android 6.0) release

Same problem here. How do I downgrade again?

Canā€™t even get into recovery anymore - grrr!

Do you have a backup? Restoring a backup from TWRP should be enough.

If you didnā€™t do a backup, you need to summor your best luck. Downgrading data between Android versions is not supported, but we can try and I hope it works for you:

  • Download Fairphone Open 17.04 flashable ZIP
  • Boot into TWRP (#dic:recoverymode)
  • Connect your phone to your computer and copy the downloaded ZIP linked above
  • Wipe (Advanced Wipe) Dalvik Cache, System, and Cache
    • WARNING: keep Data, Internal Storage and Micro SDcard
  • Install the downloaded ZIP
  • (if you had Xposed or mods, install them, because not doing that could cause that your phone donā€™t boot at all)
  • Reboot and cross your fingers. Seriously, do it.

Upgrading the Android system can refactor some internal data, so restoring the former system could break in a lot of different manners.


You wasnā€™t supposed to do a backup because this is an official upgrade and it should have been properly tested. Shame on you, Fairphone.

Iā€™m a beta tester and I feel my time testing FP Open 6 --and having this exact same bugā€“ was wasted. I donā€™t test to early-adopt, I test to avoid this kind of things. Iā€™ve not lost any data, but Iā€™m quite pissed off.

Thatā€™s not the way to do things, Fairphone.

9 Likes

@Roboe
I had this freezing during unlocking and several reboots. This is my first FP Open update that went wrong.
After that I did a factory reset and started my app installations and phone setup from zero.
It is not that bad for me, I see it as a chance to clean up but -

Isnā€™t there any file manager included in FP Open anymore? Amaze or something?
This is very uncomfortable since it means that the first thing I have to do is open an internet connection to download f-droid and then a file manager to get to my sdcardā€™s content, where I have a security app and my wlan keyā€¦

Same here. After reboot I have ui freezes and a little bit later, it reboots in a loop.

I didnā€™t check, but according to a blog entry here you can go to settings, storage and usb, explore. Thatā€™s a basic file manager

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On my phone Amaze is still there. But I mostly use Total Commander anyway, so I canā€™t remember whether I did something to Amaze to make it stay ā€¦

Edit: Itā€™s in my F-Droidā€™s list, so I must have reinstalled it some time early on and donā€™t remember.

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Well, i definitely had the correct xposedā€¦ But maybe flashing this after upgrading is the wrong way. I tried clearing system, but to no avail. Then i made a gaffe and did a factory reset, instead of wiping system and dataā€¦ Luckily, i had a recent backup of data thatā€™s not in twrp/tibu backups.
My caldav (with owncloud) works flawless

One thing thoughā€¦ Pulling up the home button seems to not work any longer? I switched my device off with this functionality, and i miss itā€¦ (Default was to open search)

I was hoping for more luck the next day. It was in cyclic reboots half the night until I turned it off at some point. Now when I turned it on itā€™s a mix of reboot and ui freeze. This sucks.

Luckily, I did one as part of my standard update routine.

Nevertheless, it is an annoying routine. Iā€™m really disappointed! After waiting so long for this upgrade, hoping that it will fix quite a few issues I have with my open OS right now, the upgrade rendered the phone completely useless and I will have to waste some time now trying to downgrade! Highly annoyed and disappointed indeed! :rage: :cry:

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I also ran into UI freeze and reboot after the upgrade (though on beta 3; not sure if and how this version differs).

Had to factory reset and made a clean install of Android 6. That worked, even if the upgrade failed.

My point is: Iā€™m not sure if a downgrade is necessary. You could give it a shot to just install A6, pull your data backup, and go from there.
Hopefully upgrades from A6 to A6 will then be smoother in the future.

Was able to fix it:

  1. Downgrade to fp2-sibon-17.04.0-manual-userdebug.zip via fastboot
  2. Upgrade to fp2-sibon-17.06.4-ota-userdebug.zip via TWRP.

Status: Nothing from the sdcards is lost on my encrypted partition. Happy about that. But I lost most of specifig android configs (data).

@AnotherElk
After the factory reset of the new FP Open 17.06.4 Amaze is definitely gone on my FP2ā€¦

@lklaus
Thank you.
Indeed there is an Explore function under Storage and USB after you touch the sdcard entry.
You get a very simple file manager that can open some file types like pictures and txt files.
Unfortunately it canā€™t open apk files to install them.
It is not too much of a problem but it leaves me wondering ā€¦

From the release notes:

The Amaze file manager is no longer included, as in Fairphone OS versions based on Android 6. A file management structure is now built into Android. In Settings ā†’ Storage & USB ā†’ Explore. You can still install the Amaze app, or any other file manager.

3 Likes

After backing up all my data with Titanium I dared to upgrade via TWRP. Additionally I flashed the F-Droid privileged extension ZIP. It went perfectly smooth, although the flashing process took a little longer than before, as did the optimisation of apps.

Then I let Android setup my SD Card as internal storage. It took some minutes more than the anticipated 38 seconds but was fine eventually. Maybe data encryption is to blame for this.

Verdict: :grinning:

Got the updater notification today, and so far it seems to work nicely.

A few observations:

  • Wi-Fi Privacy Police warned me of possible connection issues in Marshmallow with location access turned off. This seemed to be happening to me until I turned Location on.
  • The power button menu has lost functionality for airplane mode and silencing the phone. This is unfortunate, IMHO.
  • Several applications requested to be exempt from battery optimization. Seems like Google ā€œoptimizedā€ a little aggressively in Marshmallow?

Overall Iā€™d say excellent work, Fairphone! :thumbsup:

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Upgrade went fine for me in general, when asked for root permissions for Xposed Installer it would hang though. But second time I uninstalled it before this case and no problems. Also selected the SD card as expansion like before, and no issues, all my data is there.

Thank you very much fairphone team!

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Is there anyone with UnifiedNlp installed (and no GAPPS) ? Does this work out-of-the box, does it require fiddling like with the previous Android version, does it require different fiddlingā€¦?

Also how about the battery life?

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Weird. Could you elaborate on that? I canā€™t see technically why downgrading and following the same upgrade process could fix the error.

Edit: I donā€™t know why, but it seems to work:

https://forum.fairphone.com/t/accidentally-updatet-to-android-6-phone-doesnt-respond/29653/6?u=roboe

I carried UnifiedNlp over from 17.04 and it did not require any fiddling or tweaking, it just works.

Energy consumption has, as far as I can tell for this short period of time, improved; at least in energy saving mode is consumes definitely less energy.

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Suffered endless UI freezes followed by reboots; occasionally these would be preceded by a message looking for permission for Termux trying to access external storage (though it wouldnā€™t react to tapping either Deny or Allow). Removed Termux & freezes appear to have stopped.

Iā€™m mystified by the fact that the 'phone no longer knows what to do with an APK though ā€” how can I install APKs that Iā€™ve Bluetoothed across from a Play-enabled device now? Will this behaviour only be re-enabled if I, say, reinstall Amaze?

  • [answer: Amaze knows what to do with them, but the Bluetooth files received list doesnā€™t]