I’m having a similar problem to Imogen, with the phone randomly shutting down, and only restarting if I remove the battery and replace it. I want to be sure that putting a small piece of paper in the back of the phone isn’t going to damage anything, as the battery also gets hot.
I would only do it if the battery doesn’t sit tightly on it’s own. But if that’s the case than the paper could fix the crashes and the phone may even stay cooler then.
I spent a few months trying to find a useful pattern here. I think I may have come up with something but I’m not too sure. I have a possible way to reproduce this at the end of this post.
Note that this is reproducible in two different phones, but it’s happening more often with mine than with my boyfriend’s.
First of all, the symptoms: The phone suddenly stops responding for a few seconds, and then the screen goes black and the phone apparently turns itself off. I can bring it back to life by long-pressing the power button, but the battery often feels hot and I often see the battery being drained more quickly after the reboot. If I go to the battery settings, the consumption is caused by Miscellaneous. Note that Miscellaneous is usually the top battery consumption culprit, even after I reset the battery.
Sometimes it’s so bad that the phone is at 0% battery when I see it and/or it cannot charge. Then I need to remove and reinsert the battery. However, usually it’s fine if I just restart it once.
I tried disabling 4G but it made no difference at all. I also tried placing a piece of paper just now, will get back with updates in a few days. Also, it’s happened when my phone was in flight mode. (Not to mention I’ve missed a few alarms - not helpful)
What I noticed is that it happens more often when I’m using the phone than when I’m not, and also more often when it’s plugged in than when it’s not. Especially if I’m using the phone when the charge is above 95% and it’s plugged in - then it will almost certainly crash.
One behavior that I noticed in both my phone and my boyfriend’s: It almost always crashes if we wake up in the morning, pick up the phone while it’s still plugged in (but charged), and start browsing or chatting or anything. Not immediately, but it will crash within half an hour at most. I’m not sure if the weird lying-down phone position (you need to turn off auto-rotation) in combination with the full charge play a weird trick. The phone is usually just fine if I unplug it before I empty the internet in the morning.
I raised a support ticket about this and eventually was asked to factory reset. I did and the problem went away for a couple of weeks.
It’s happened though a couple of times since, but nowhere near as often as previous. Perhaps it’s something that builds up?
This issue has gotten worse for me lately. Many missed mornings at work due to alarm not going off. Today my first alarms went off then it crashed while snoozing!
Maybe I will try the factory reset mentioned above.
Just another “me too”:
Symptoms:
- (if using the phone) - screen freezes for a few seconds (does not respond to touches or keypresses) then turns black. Now the phone is in a “crashed” state.
- (if not using the phone) - one finds the phone unresponsive (same “crashed” state) and battery mostly drained the next day
- if keeping the phone in the “crashed” state, battery is drained much faster than during normal usage (from ~80% to ~10% within 3-4 hours), heats up a little bit (over the course of e.g. 1-2 hours)
- Restoring phone functionality requires battery in/out or long press
- happens about 3-4 times per week for me. (note that I use the phone very little, it’s mostly lying in a corner - I have a feeling crashes happen more often when I use the phone more actively)
- behaviour is very random; with/without GPS, with/without actively using the phone; with/without WIFI enabled; using apps or doing nothing;
My current OS version:
- Build number userdebug 5.1 FP2 fp2-sibon-16.06.0
Hypothesis:
- the randomness of this problem occuring reminds my software developer brain (not a mobile developer though I’m afraid) of a race condition triggering this problem.
- the increased battery usage in the “crashed” state could mean there is some infinite loop, or a deadlock/livelock is being triggered - that could also explain the short initial screen unresponsiveness.
Is it possible that there are multiple JVM threads accessing something that is not thread-safe?
Questions:
- Race-condition-type bugs are hard to debug, sure, since reproducing the issue is time-intensive. Still, can we get this problem onto a list of issues that fairphone developers will take a look at? This thread has been open since January 2016 after all.
My suggestion
More messages of the kind “me too” don’t help much - what’s needed is someone familiar with the FP2 codebase to make an educated guess as to which part of the codebase is likely to have a race condition that could lead to the problems explained in this long list of posts. And then to construct a test case exhibiting that potential race condition, by executing certain parts of the code hundreds of time. Then either that part is probably race-condition free, (in which case the next educated guess should be done), or one can start narrowing the issue to a smaller area of code, making changes, re-running the test, etc. At least that’s how I’d approach this problem as a backend developer. Not sure how easily this is done on android.
Thanks.
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It is: commonissues
The issues of frequent crashes and random reboots are not considered bugs as
- (a) root cause(s) has/have not been found yet
- in general they are not FP exclusive issues
- it’s hard to draw a line as to which cases are related (have a common FP specific root issue) and are not caused by user behavior, 3rd party apps, SIM cards, physical damage, …
- therefore it’s hard to say how many are affected, but it’s save to say that it’s not a majority
but still they are issues that the FP team seem to take very seriously. In the beta release there is a kind of crash reporter that sends data to them and hopefully some new info will come to light soon.
I’m not a developer, so I’m not familiar with the things you are talking about, but if you feel like you could help the FP team find the root cause it may be a good idea to join the beta testers.
1 Like
I have been meaning to post about this too.
I have frequent crashes daily; either screen freezes and needs a reboot or goes black and power button doesn’t work, both requiring me to remove the battery to reboot.
I am worried that this constant removing of the battery will compromise the lifespan of my battery as well!
I tried putting a small folded piece of paper between my battery and phone but it still crashes. If it is an overheating issue, then Fairphone need to provide a good solution and replace what is necessary.
If anyone has any other ideas to stop please help. I love my phone but the crashing is unbearable.
Me too.
I’m really struggling with this issue now, I’ve uninstalled a lot of my apps with only superficial improvement (the phone boots quicker but still freezes after~5mins of startup.
My big issue is that I am traveling around Asia, which makes ring different fixes very difficult, and I don’t want the hassle of going through support again (if it is a hardware issue I have no address so can’t get a fix. I’m very close to buying another phone (defeating the purpose of buying an ethical phone)
My last ditch will be to try reinstall the update, but understand from the forum that this is not a permanent fix, anything else I can try?
Since yesterday evening my Fairphone crashes every 10 seconds… it’s impossible to do nothing! I reboot but it doesn’t work. What can I do?
This is still happening to me.
When it happened today, the app went through the “Android is optimising apps” screens like it does after a reinstall when I restarted it. After the phone restarted, it was very slow and the Facebook apps refused to start. Then “systemui” app crashed meaning my wall paper disappeared. Other apps don’t seem to be working correctly either!
It feels like the latest crash has corrupted something badly! I’m also getting that weird shearing you see on the screen when scrolling more often now.
Losing my patience with this phone
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Have you found a solution? Mine started crashing this morning after an update, and have been crashing since
I also found my self with the same problem for already more than two months.
My problems are similar:
-
Screen goes black (in ocassions with almost full battery), the LED white light blinking slowly, and the power button not responding at all. The only option is to press the reboot button for 15sec.
IT HAPPENS 2 or 3 TIMES PER DAY. -
sometimes the screen freezes and I need to press the reboot button for 15sec.
-
After charging the mobile for two hours, it happens that the battery goes down very fast. This could be a battery problem, but I have no clue of the possible causal relations.
I’m also afraid that by pressing 2-3 times per day the rebbot button, I might have damaged something.
I think FAIRPHONE is an awesome initiative, but unfortunately so far, I don’t have the conviction and satisfaction to convince other people to join the community. These problems are extremely annoying and getting on my nerves.
2 Likes
I also experience rather super annoying crashes, sometimes 2-3 a day. I really have no clue what would cause it and haven’t had the time to go around debugging.
In my case it often happens during normal use, like in example situations:
In the morning or evening in the bus ride to work/home, listening to music via Google Play Music and doing some web browsing, WhatsApp chatting, nothing really power hungry. (Got 2 SIM cards in, one with 4G, crashes appeared before having 2 SIMs too.)
Just today it happened when at work connected via wifi, just doing simple web browsing.
I can’t make a rhyme of it. My next idea was to put the FP Open OS onto the phone, monitoring if the problem keeps happening then.
Oh and @paulakreuzer saying something like “in general they are not FP exclusive issues” is kinda weird, after all I never had that frequent crashes happen on any other phone I owned. So I don’t know, something must be acting up inside the system and I hope someone will find out the root cause in the near future.
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Update about my phone, which (touch wood) appears to be working now.
I had been stubbornly refusing to do a factory reset as I did not want to lose any files or pics from the phone, and was waiting to have access to a PC. I did notice that many apps had downloads pending, and made an effort to update them.
I’m guessing one of the updates fixed the issue on my phone… hopefully nobody else is suffering from this!
Installed the latest update and for 3-4 days I didn’t have a single lock up, so I thought HURRAH! and then I had one 
Annoyingly, after restarting the phone *(via long power press) there is no crash caught by Hiccup
Since then, the phone just randomly rebooted while taking a phone call the next day. (VERY ANNOYING) but this has generated a crash file.
- Do you think anything of the initial lock up may be reported in the 2nd crash log?
- If not, could we add something to hiccup where when turning it on, it will generate logs on a long power press? This way we could set up hiccup to make sure we catch logs which might tell us what’s causing these horrible lock ups?
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This worked for me after installing the update from the google play store. Now it also generates reports after long press-reboots!
Hmm! I haven’t seen that yet! I’ll cross my fingers and hope that lovely juicy logs are getting to the team!