Fed up with Fairphone battery problems

Recently, ly Fairphone battery only lasted 3 hours.
After contacting thé support many times, they told that my battery was probably out of service.
So I ordered and received a new one but thé problem remains: my battery life is still 3 hours long !!!
I’m desesperated, who can help ???
Thé top of my phone ils always vert hot.
Please avoid standard answers. Is theez an efficient way to check which is consuming battery. I’m pretty sûre this is not an aplication, but I could check with a tool if you know one.
FYI, just writing this message tooks 25% of my battery !!!+9
Thanks for your help
Guenhaël

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Standard answers became standard because they are the most efficient and helpful.

When it comes to charging/battery issues it can be the software’s fault (check the batteryguide) or one of these hardware elements: wall socket, adapter/computer’s USB outlet, cable, bottom module, battery, core module. Oh and rapid discharging (especially combined with heat) can also be a sign of a faulty/old SIM card (after 1-2 years you usually get a new one for free if it’s plausible that it causes issues).
To know for sure which part it is you could try to meet up with a fairphoneangels and exchange modules until you find the culprit.

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Hi Guenhaël,

I assume you are using Android 6 on your phone. Battery issues are getting better with Android 7.

Until Android 7 is ready for the FP2:

  • Did you tried a factory reset? After the reset you can install just the Apps you really need.

  • You should consider to use 2G instead of 3G/4G (my phone becomes very hot with Android 6 when using the other two).

  • Ban every App that doesn’t really need it from using background data.

  • Use Wifi when it is explicit needed, because of Android 6 Wifi battery drain bug.

  • Disable network notification for public WiFis

  • Use display brightness at lowest setting and never at automatic.

  • Don’t use location services if not needed.

Best,
Christian

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Dear Guenhael,
I had the same problem with a ‘refubished’ FP2. It was impossible to use and eventually the company sent me a ‘new’ battery but there was the same problem. When I told the customer service staff someone told me that they weren’t expected to work properly when put into the phone first and had to charge and discharge several times before they would work! I never had that problem with FP1.

Unfortunately someone stole my phone before I could work out how to use it with this terrible battery problem. As I couldn’t afford to buy another FP2 I bought another phone from another company. It was a lot cheaper and works far far better than FP2 did.

The Fairphone customer service has been extremely poor, maybe they are a bit better now.

Good luck,
Susannah

Yep, Although I would really like to continue using FF, I think I’ll also switch to another brand. Fairphone has to change their product’s quality and support for them.
All the answers I received are ‘disconnect your data connection’ (well, I do not have 3g data on my subscription: I can’t imagine m’y phone with data connection activated all day long ! My battery would be drained in less than 3 hours !), switch wifi when not needed (spend all my time switching it on and off ?). That’s not the way a phone should work, and all other phones I use do not have such problems : at work, I use basic and cheap Wiko phones connected in both wifi and data all day long, and the battery lasts for more than a week : makes me dream !
I have to stop: writing this message made m’y battery Lebel fall from 37% to 22 % ! I’m pretty sure that Wifi module is responsable for that battery problems, but who cares ?
A very disappointed FF user.
.

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You really should give Android 7 a try on the Fairphone.

Release Candidate is out now and battery life is much better with Android 7.

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Sounds like an app is using a lot of CPU, have you already tried using a CPU monitoring app to see if there’s any rogue battery usage? I have had this with the GMail app once because it had trouble with one e-mail account; but it can be virtually any app that’s malfunctioning.

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It really doesn’t have to be the hardware that causes the Fairphone’s accu to discharge quickly.
I had the same problem those days and was able to solve it completely.
Here is my contribution translated from German.

I had the following problems:

  • Fairphone became subjectively slower,
  • in the upper right corner (back) always very hot (i.e. to the right of the camera)
  • the battery became extremely fast empty, one could watch how the battery became less in the second cycle

My solution:
I installed the app “Simple System Monitor” and first checked whether the Fairphone still goes into the so-called “Deep Sleep” in standby mode (= screen switched off). This mode is used to save battery power. This mode can be prevented by permanently loading the CPU of the mobile phone with an app (that’s why it gets hot and slower).

If Simple System Monitor runs for a while (about 1 hour) and the Fairphone screen is off, the time under “Deep Sleep” should increase significantly (less than 1 hour but more than 30 minutes).
It quickly became obvious to me that the Fairphone was running at maximum performance even in standby mode and that it was actually not going into “Deep Sleep” any more.

After that I checked in Simple System Monitor under the tab “Active Processes” which apps use and load the CPU especially frequently/continuously.
I was able to identify “Outlook” as the culprit after about 1 minute of testing and see, after uninstalling Outlook all (actually all) problems have disappeared.

If you then search for “Outlook Android battery drain”, you will quickly find what you are looking for.

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^ there you see, it can be any app. Facebook is also mentioned at times on the forum, so please install a system monitor. (I used CPU Monitor Advanced Lite, from the Play Store)

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Good luck Guenhael, and I know what you mean when the battery drops from 37% to 22% in 10 minutes. When I had so much trouble for weeks just after I had bought my new phone it seemed that FF was not really wanting ordinary people to use their phones, only specialists who were competent (and prepared) to fiddle about trying different solutions to problems. After I had tried a ‘new’ battery and it didn’t work the support person told me:

Drops in the battery report graph—instead of an almost linear area—can appear the first days of usage, the battery needs a few charging/discharging cycles to be calibrated. So the screenshots you sent seem normal for us.
If you still see drops that are not linked to any specific behavior, please try to kickstart your battery:

  1. Let the phone turn off by itself (when it reaches 1% of battery left);
  2. Take out the battery;
  3. Wait for half an hour and put the battery back in the phone;
  4. Connect the Fairphone to a charger;
  5. If the charging light is blinking, it means that the battery was totally empty, wait for some minutes until the red light becomes fixed;
  6. A loading battery icon should appear for a few seconds (a short press on the power button will display it);
  7. Charge the battery until it reaches 100% and let it charge some more.

Really!! This was supposed to be a new battery. And I never had this sort of problem with my earlier Fairphone 1.

I hope you find something that suits you and works well very soon.

Best wishes,

Susannah

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@sqw, @Guenhael
I really feel for you. The battery seems to be an especially weak part of the phone.
And support seems to take two or three tries sometimes, before they really hit the mark.

From my own experience I can confirm, that a hot phone with a draining battery is most likely caused by some app/system process running wild.
When I switch off the phone and start it again (sometimes it takes up to 3 cycles) for me gets the phone back to normal behaviour.
So, I guess, using a system monitor to find the source of the problem seems to be a good idea.

While I really agree, that almost every other phone usually might cause less trouble, please keep in mind what you are comparing:

  • A company that has sold less than 200.000 phones in approximately 5 years;
    that has developed a revolutionary new modular concept and
    that is funded/financed in a different way as well.
  • Companies, that sell 200.000 phones on a monthly base (at least),
    that are built in the standard, hard to repair kind of way and
    that are part of the “big money”.

That’s just a few of all the relevant differences. Social responisbility e.g. is another factor.

Of course, they will not yet be able to provide the same service or reliability; but they virtually have just started their journey (or so I do hope).

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Hello Bert,

Thank you for writing. I very much agree with you what you say at the end of your message. I had never had a mobile or smart phone until I bought the FP1, which worked well and the support people were helpful and answered a few queries I had. The nightmare started with the refurbished (supposed to be ‘good as new’ FP2) and it was after weeks of the phone not working properly and very poor response from the support people that gradually my faith in FP declined. Eventually I still hope to buy FP3 if there are reports that one can use it properly as a reliable phone and get decent support.

If FP is charging 500 euros for a phone one can reasonably expect that it works properly, or they should make clear in the marketing that only people with technical prowess should consider buying them. Like you I wish them well but they need to sort out their priorities or they will lose support from people like me (and others I have come across on this forum).

Best wishes, Susannah

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I wanted to share my recent experiences. I bought a FP2 in early 2016 and bought my second replacement battery a couple of weeks ago since the first two batteries I had started draining very rapidly after 9 months or so of using them. I could make it through a day, but what was terribly annoying were unexpected drops.

I haven’t experienced that with the new battery suggesting that the behaviour was not due to any apps.

I’m running the latest LineageOS and battery life with the new battery and the latest system has improved dramatically. If you’re willing to pay the €25 or so for a battery (and delivery), give LineageOS a try if you can. It’s been great for me so far.

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Yes, could be a nice solution, I also heard that switching to Android 7 (my current is 6) could change things … I subscribed to beta test program for that but did not receive any information from support yet to make this upgrade.

Is lineageOS supported by FF2 official support ? How do you upgrade ?

Thanks !

Best regards

Guenhaël

No. LineageOS is supported by the LineageOS community.
Fairphone support their own OSes, Fairphone OS and Fairphone Open OS.

https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/FP2/install

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Hi @fishmi, I use Outlook on my phone and have had battery problems for ages. Do you think I would see the improvement if I did a “forced stop” of Outlook? Or would it need an uninstall?

Hmm. The uninstall and force stop buttons are greyed out. It also says that zero mb was used in the last 3 hours and 1% battery since last full charge. Even worse is that it has half a GB of storage usage. I will try to uninstall it somehow. See screenshot![Screenshot_20180929-144631|281x500]
(upload://zwYwfNEHANk0jNGZKQwKUzIFe7W.png)

Sorry for so many messages here. I could not uninstall it until I deactivated it as a device adminstrator. Dog. Let’s see how the battery fares tomorrow without outlook.

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I don’t think “forced stop” brings much, at the latest with the next restart the problem is there again.
I have completely uninstalled Outlook because I don’t need it either. I have always used Aqua Mail.
You can forget the normal indicator for the use of the battery (under the options), it is completely unusable.

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Thanks for this! I’ll give Simple System Monitor and deinstalling Outlook a try. I already went through everything in the #batteryguide and what @sqw wrote and it improved a bit. I have also installed AccuBattery. But it didn’t identify any app running wild. It is not every time. I havent’t been able to reproduce it.
But if i charge my FP2 to 100% or go lower than 20% it lasts less in the next cycles. You can set an alarm in AccuBattery to stop charging at 80 or 90%, but this means for me at the moment charging the phone twice a day!!! as I am just able to use it from 80% to 20%.
I’ve been waiting for Android 7, as it was said, that it might solve the problem. I think that it started after the last Fairphone OS update in April '18.
I can feel with you @sqw sometimes, at night I have 50%, in the morning something like 40% when i first look at the FP2 to switch the alarm off, and in 10 min (checking whatsapp and FB) it goes down to 20% and in 1 minute it switches off!!! Or I have approx. 30%, have to check train timetables or navigation to walk somewhere and it drains and is empty in a few minutes. It’s like, why should I have a smartphone, if it only works properly just to make calls?
On top, always after these “drain switch offs”, the FP2 says the SD card is damage, so I need to format it -> not able to use the SD, as I would lose all files . At the beginning I thought it was because the phone was getting so hot at the CPU area, but I was told, that the 50 C shouldn’t be a problem for a SD, and after formating it, I works again properly.

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