I’ve been pretty happy with my fp4 for the last three years, I’ve had some complaints about battery time but that was mostly due to handling. Now with the update to a15, the experience of using the phone has changed drastically.
Battery time is way down, having to charge multiple times per day. The ghost touches are back. I’ve had random reboots now and then, nit even at specific times. The phone is insanely sluggish, my launcher (nova, should change that now apparently if it’s dead) is slow, widgets don’t update, and brightness changes haphazardly. Another weird thing is my mobile internet not working when wi-fi is on and unconnected. All of these issues taken together is just a bit too much.
It almost feels like planned obsolecense by update, and from what I can find I can’t even rollback until a15 is more stable?
Pretty sad that it has ended up like this, and quite frustrated.
I’ve had to revert to an old Huawei. It’s smaller and showing its age a bit, but apparently a total severing from Android was a godsend.
My fairphone “works”, so long as I don’t insert an SD or SIM card. If FairPhone are okay with breaking perfectly working hardware without any official help or messaging, they should be offering to buy back the hardware at full retail price.
Which of the issues remain after a factory reset?
Which of the issues perhaps remaining after a factory reset remain after an OS install from scratch?
I’m not against trying in-place upgrades to new major OS versions first, but on any device with any OS they just don’t work out well for 100% of the users. There’s always a possibility to draw the short straw, but in the absence of hardware failure there are still options to try to remedy the software situation, even if the options are not fan favourites.
I’m using two Fairphone 3 (one as a backup device) with an Android 15 variant (/e/OS), and while of course many variables differ when comparing to your Fairphone 4 so detailed comparisons have limited value, at least I don’t need to charge multiple times per day, and the phones aren’t insanely sluggish, and these are less potent phones than yours.
(I installed my daily driver from scratch with Android 15, the backup phone was upgraded in-place, so at least halfway I’m walking the walk when talking the talk.)
So very generically looking at it, your Fairphone 4 shouldn’t behave the way it does just because of Android 15.
This is a very reasonable answer. My largest problem with this at the moment is just a lack of energy. I don’t have the energy to spend hours to find the culprit among the apps I have, mostly because everything worked before the update. I want the update, I want the safer system, but sometimes I just don’t want to sit down and solve all the problems that arise by myself, but having it just behaving smoothly.
I certainly know the feeling.
Having to surrender time and nerves to intruding necessities so often and especially at the most inopportune of times wasn’t advertised before growing up .
If you happen to have Fairphone Angels in your vicinity (community volunteers offering to help in their spare time, see angelsmap), you could ask whether they would perhaps be able to help with this.
If you can bring yourself to get to it, we can certainly answer questions here in the forum, too.
Backing up everything important beforehand is key (and very time-consuming if you don’t want to rely on the Google cloud, and the internet knows the Google cloud isn’t perfect).
If the phone can be brought back to this state, it hopefully should last a while again.
My phone still reboots religiously, sometimes not even finishing the “Phone is starting…” phase of booting before restarting again - even after the factory reset and the NXTVision “fix”.
I haven’t had the other problems snorful is experiencing - though I can’t check mobile data as my only “fix” is to remove the SD and SIM card.
Did you install the OS from scratch by chance, or did you indeed do a factory reset as offered in the Settings or in the recovery?
An Android factory reset will wipe user data, Apps installed by the user and their data, some settings … but the OS will remain untouched, and if there are issues with the installed OS itself unrelated to user stuff, those issues will remain after a factory reset.
While it can be done more quickly compared to installing from scratch, a factory reset would leave open the question whether the upgrading process perhaps left an issue in the OS itself.
I installed A15 via the FairPhone upgrade settings. The phone began its reset cycle, and once it crashed enough times to prompt a factory reset, I declined, attempted to debug and push through. The second time I gave up and performed a full factory reset.
I do not appear to have any options to “finish” or “fix” the install process.
On the assumption you’re replying to me - the SD card was set up correctly, and has been for as long as I have had the phone. My SIM card is set up for 5/4G on the preferred network.
It’s not more related to the SIM card than it is to whether or not I have made my sacrifices to Sobek.
The SIM worked and works in other phones, and worked perfectly in the same phone in A13 - so does the SD card. I have tried with 5G enabled, disabled and in aeroplane mode.
I’m as in contact with support as I can be, they are either ignoring or not responding to my messages. That’s somehow worse than the last time I contacted them about ghost inputs, which was apparently a physical fault with my phone, until the software update came out.
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