I’m happy that I finally got a workable kind of modern phone again after using a very slow FP3 for a year, yet it is of course not ideal regarding to security. I’ll also leave the bootloader unlocked as I’ve read there are some downgrade preventing fuses that renders the phone unbootable if locking it again.
Have other people this kind of experience with downgrading? Is it worth trying out newer upgrades? Are there still security updates maintained by Fairphone for FP4/Android 12? Is it possible to upgrade to a newer android image without upgrading the qualcomm firmware that seems to cause the drain issue?
Another good news here. After installing the Android 12 rom, I reinstalled the latest Fairphone Android 13 rom again. After 3 days the battery issue is still gone, and I managed to successfully lock the bootloader again.
So it looks like resetting to an old rom and reinstalling the newest again seems to help on this battery drain issue.
I will still need to experience daily usage of the phone for a longer time of course until I definitely can say this is a good fix.
After two weeks and a minor OTA from update from Fairphone I can confirm the system is still working fine! When working from home I can easily do 2 days to go from 100% to 40%.
There’s a link to Fairphone’s OS install instructions given in the first post of this topic.
How to relock the bootloader is a part of these install instructions, please see there how to do it.
Won’t wiping and just reflashing A13 do the job? We need to find the way to fix it, we definitely can’t count on FP support. The bug of kernel being called every second was documented about 2 years ago and nothing was done about it until now. Should be really easy to find on this forum.
I guess they won’t be the only manufacturer to make A15 work on this SOC - i. e. Samsung officially states that this SOC is not supported by manufacturer anymore.
The question remains if this will help to solve this issue permanently?
BTW, I filed 3 Tickets with the support until now, and nothing happened as they did not want to believe me that it is a kernel wake lock problem in the first two tickets. The third one is still open, last info from FP is that they would forward the info to the dev team.
You could be right, but I won’t try that anymore as everything is fine now
In my experience the most work is to get everything reinstalled eventually because wiping the phone seems unavoidable to solve the issue. Installing A13 over the existing A13, or first installing A12 and then A13 again, is not much extra work. Or just try it out after every step by leaving the phone on the table for 24h to make sure the problem is away, before reinstalling everything and start using the phone again, like I did.
If the solution is so easy, there should be a way to fix the issue with a patch.
I don’t think that is automatically the case. Probably there is some error in the OTA update process leaving bad configuration behind, I expect something in the firmware of the hardware. Especially as it seems not easily reproducable because only a subset of the users are having this issue, so probably there are some unknown factors that makes this bug to appear or not. That is really hard to debug which is necessary to create a patch.. And if the upstream SoC support is bad that makes things worse, which is aparantly the case with Qualcomm.
Just wiping everything and reinstalling so it removes old update leftovers is a common solution pattern for this kind of problems. Especially if you can hard-reset to a historic version that you know that didn’t have the problem.
The question remains if this will help to solve this issue permanently?
Indeed that remains the question, and also if it will work for other people with this issue as well. In any case, I’ll report should the problem reapear.
