Fairphone Open 17.06.4 (Android 6.0) release

how right you are. and more than that!

[ i would have done that for sure if the ‘updater’ would have told me that it’s an OS update, not just a regular one. (in my case it’s even worse: the phone started the update by itself via ghost touches.) sitting on a bench and keep telling that everything is fine to people passing by and struggle trough no fault of one’s own is not helping the fairphone communtiy at all. in my case it just drags me away personally…]
:wink:

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I apologize, that wasn’t my intention, and I understand your situation and the unfortunate part Fairphone played in it with deploying the upgrade this way.
I’m just a bit allergic to giving backups a seemingly negative touch with “(unfortunately) necessary” :wink: .
People don’t backup enough as is. And I for sure know I don’t.

actually i just wanted to encourage every lazy ass like me doing the effort to backup.

as a friend of mine, part of the international dance music scene just screwd his *book without any backup there. it’s not the first one in my surroundings. i’m just lazy with the phones man…newer the studio works. :wink:

njoy ur sat nite…

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Hello necrosis,

It seems that your battery is deep discharged. Connect it with a charger and wait 30 mins.
If the LED is still flashing red, your battery is dead or your phone can’t charge it due to a damaged boot and/or system partition.
Turning on the phone with a connected charger results in reboots due to the drained battery.

Flashing the phone without inserted battery might help:

Follow the steps described in Installing Fairphone Open OS using Fastboot (Step-by-step Guide)

Start your phone into fastboot mode as follows:

  1. Remove the battery.
  2. Press and hold volume down and power button, then connect the phone to your pc. The fairphone boot logo appears. Now, release both buttons.

Your phone is now in fastboot mode. If the phone still reboots, verify if both buttons were pressed while connecting the phone.
Install the previous 17.04.0 version as described in the wiki above.

Insert the battery and connect the phone to a charger (don’t turn it on). The LED will start flashing red, then flashing should stop and the battery loading animation shows up.

Your data should still be in place since the manual update package does not contain a data partition, and the flash.bat and flash.sh scripts do not contain wipe commands.

You may now try again the update to Android 6.

Good luck!

A backup shouldn’t be necessary*, but a recommended precautory measure. Android has a well-designed migration system to avoid troubles —far better from most desktop OSes, IMHO. I’m sure you say that in the best of intentions, but can be interpreted as blaming the user, which has no fault at all.

*= if you run FP Open as is, without Xposed or system-wide mods (microG and stuff)

Well, just to add my experience - quite the same as previously stated.
We have two FP2, both FPOpen and “rooted”, one with XPosed/XPrivacy one without.
When the Updater showed up “new version available” I did not imagine it would be the long awaited upgrade to Android 6 - so I did not take any precautions (backup apps / nandroid-backup).
Both phones were in a boot loop after the OTA-update. Sometimes I managed to enter the PINs, most of the time the phones did not accept any input.
Finally I decided to down- and upgrade the FPOpen as described further up. In Detail:

  • downloaded fp2-sibon-17.04.0-manual-userdebug.zip (Link somewhere up in this forum)
  • downloaded fp2-sibon-17.06.4-ota-userdebug.zip (from https://code.fairphone.com/)
  • unzipped the ...17.04.0...zip
  • started the FP2 in Fastboot-Mode (Power-On + Vol-Down)
  • run the ./flash.sh in the unzipped folder
  • rebooted phone (Android 5.1, stuck in boot-loop, optimizing apps)
  • switched off by pulling out the battery
  • booted into Recovery (Power-On + Vol-Up)
  • in TWRP went to Advanced -> Sideload, on PC did adb sideload ...17.06.04...zip
  • rebooted
  • phone started normal with Android 6.0.1

My system settings were all there (including photos, SMS, contacs, call-log), but all application settings (including data) were gone.
I managed to recover the most important settings from old Titanium Backups and a nandroid-backup (I made after the first upgrade in TWRP).

The recovery of the two phones took me about 10 hrs. :disappointed::angry:

I really appreciate the work the Fairphone-Team is doing, but an major upgrade has to be announced in some way - this one showed up like any other upgrade before.
And on top it seems like the bug was well-known before - this is not professional work. :-1:

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I haven’t been able to find that link. There’s links to 17.06.4, but not the earlier version.

I found this:

https://code.fairphone.com/projects/fp-osos/dev/fp2-blobs-download-page.html

…but it doesn’t have 17.06.4 and I’m not even sure it’s the right thing.

Also, I would expect to be able to edit the URL to browse for earlier versions, but it doesn’t work:

https://storage.googleapis.com/fairphone-updates/

Can you point me to the right link?

Oh OK, found it:

https://storage.googleapis.com/fairphone-updates/a88b516b-d990-4219-aef1-c23b3c30c104/fp2-sibon-17.04.0-ota-userdebug.zip

And if, like me, you’ve never used Fastboot before:

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Gah! That’s not manual-userdebug.zip it’s ota-userdebug.zip. Again, can anyone point me to the right link?

Here you are.
Luckily it’s still in the Installation Guide.

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I have problems taking screenshots. Seems, that it doenst depend on the app or the launcher where i try it. Everytime appears the message, that it isnt possible to make screenshots because the app or the company doesnt allow it.
I searched in the internet, but didnt find a solution.
I think it is a simple Android 6 thing, which i dont know until now.
Thank you for your attention and help.
Here you can see an “oldschool” screenshot.

Is the SD-card-writing-problem still existent on Android6? I told my cameraMX and OpenCamera to write to my SD-card. LeafPic shows me the fotos, but in the Windows-Explorer, all files have 0KB file size and I can’t open them.
Do I still have to change the platform.xml?
How do I get my pictures back???

Downgrading to 17.04.0 has not worked for me. The phone is trapped in a reboot loop - it does the “optimizing apps” thing, then it briefly flashes an error message that “unfortunately…” something, and it reboots and starts again.

I want to try upgrading back to 17.06.4, and then see if I can use TWRP to upgrade XPosed. Can someone point me to the manual-userdebug version of 17.06.4?

@jeanrjc: Are you still having this issue? I had the same issue and got my Fairphone working again by loading the OTA Build switcher from here: https://code.fairphone.com/projects/fp-osos/user/fairphone-open-source-os-downloads.html

This will destroy all your apps and data !!

  1. Boot to TWRP
  2. Get ‘adb’ (android developer bridge) on your computer. This depends on what operating system you use, but one way to do it is to install Android Studio.
  3. Download this FP Open ROM: https://storage.googleapis.com/fairphone-updates/7331b609-5926-4507-9401-bf13d28115f7/fp2-sibon-17.06.4-ota_from_gms-userdebug.zip
  4. Choose the adb sideload option in TWRP
  5. run 'adb sideload path/to/fp2-sibon-17.06.4-ota_from_gms-userdebug.zip

Voila.

I guess that would somewhen replace the 17.04.0 version currently present in the Installation Guide, so it’s not there yet.

How about booting into TWRP without flashing it and then using the OTA file?

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What Gapps should I install? the one I’m already using or…? Thanks

Hooray! It’s back up and running! And I don’t seem to have lost any data.

This procedure actually resolves a long-running question I had. I have XPrivacy installed specifically to prevent apps slurping my address book. But the way I’ve installed updates before, the phone briefly boots without XPrivacy. I don’t know if, so I assume that, apps are briefly started in the background and do indeed slurp my address book before I have a chance to re-install Xposed.

So the correct solution is:

  • Download the OTA update as a zip file
  • Download Xposed from here: http://dl-xda.xposed.info/framework/sdk23/arm/
  • Copy those onto the SD card
  • Boot into TWRP
  • Install both (in the case of Xposed, it seems necessary to disable integrity checking)
  • Immediately after booting, run Xposed Installer and check it’s installed correctly

No. This update brings Android 6, you need to download also you favorite opengapps package for Android 6.

Thanks, that did it. Indeed I had to boot directly into recovery after flashing TWRP via fastboot, otherwise it would have been overwritten by FPOOS. Now I can make backups of my encrypted data partition.

In conclusion the stock TWRP (3.0.2) has two major flaws for me:

  • Encrypted data partition cannot be mounted (which prevented me from flashing official TWRP directly from recovery).
  • Reboot and shutdown options don’t work, instead the phone freezes and has to be rebooted by holding down power for ten seconds.
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That’s what I thought but just to be sure… :wink:

What version of xposed should I install (just to be sure also)

Reading all above messages I’m a bit worried… I don’t want to spend my sunday trying to make my phone work again… I’ll see…

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