FP2 Frequent crashes requiring reboot by holding power button >10s

This has started to happen to me. Initially about once a day, but it’s not 2-3 times every day. If it keeps increasing my phone is going to become unusable - and I’m worried the constant crashes are going to do long-term damage

I’m also experiencing regular system crashes which require the ‘>10s power button’ reset.
Frequency is about once every 2 days. Sometimes more often, sometimes less.

I can’t see a pattern which triggers the crashes. Sometimes the phone just won’t turn on, sometimes it crashes while using but I have not found a debug-friendly trigger to produce logs.

I’m using a self-built (up-to-date as of last week) FPOSOS with the 16.04 binary blobs.
No Xposed.

There was another thread about 4G/LTE crashes and I have the impression that restricting my phone to 3G/UMTS reduces the frequency of the crashes but does not solve them.

To the affected: Are you using 4G/LTE networks?

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@tphysm: Thanks a lot for changing the title of this thread - hit on for me to get my phone back into functioning!!!

I had one of those crashes this morning, and another one last week. Using a 4 g network (virgin mobile FR), and our home wifi says 5ghz (Bouygues in France). And only one SIM card, on a FP2. Not really changed anything on the delivered system.

Last week:
screen went all black and no reaction on touching screen or buttons, while I had phoned a landline number and wanted to hang up while the voicemail set in. I don’t recall having to re-set it, I think functionality simply came back a couple of moments later.
Not sure this is really related to the issue discussed here, but was a first go-black for me…

Today:
No action on my phone for a while (2 hours or so), then wanted to send an SMS and discovered my phone had gone all black with no reaction whatsoever, not even when putting it back on charge, no LED signal that it was charging again/ green or was out of charge/ red, simply nothing. (It had fully charged this morning).
Thanks to the hint to press the power-button longer than 10 seconds, I got it back into use and finally could send my SMS.

I did watch a couple of videos on websites (via wifi!) on my phone this morning, so possibly just before this happened, but cannot really say as discovered only later the unresponsive screen/phone.

No heating up for me (at least didn’t realise).

I am wondering whether it has got anything to do with the function to limit background data usage (achtergrondgegevens beperkt, in Dutch), as this was a first time this happened to me. I only recently discovered this function, and after this mornings problem it was deactivated. (Not sure this is normal after a reboot though.)

Is there something new about this bug? Couldnt find new useful information here except the trick with holding the power button for more than 10s instead of removing the battery every time. I’m having this problem for a month now and considering to ask for replacement if this keeps going on. Quite astonished that the fairphone team didnt manage to fix this although the first report of this was months ago, correct me if I’m wrong.

Hi Mathurin_Choblet
https://forum.fairphone.com/users/mathurin_choblet before
giving up try deleting your cache. My phone was crashing several times a
day and I was thinking of giving up, but I deleted my cache as part of a
couple of things to desperately try to solve something, and it improved a
lot. The other things I did were mainly deleting apps I don’t actually use.
I admit it is only anecdotal evidence, as it’s just me and I have only done
it once, but it doesn’t harm to try! (deleting the cache does not remove
any settings or chrome tabs, it just means you have to log in again to
Facebook etc)

Well, actually I don’t know how long the Fairphone team has been aware of the issue or this topic. In fact, it’s also not mentioned yet in the List of known bugs and the list of common issues

@paulakreuzer: Does this issue have enough affected users to be added to the latter at least?

A few days ago I was prepared to set up my phone again. So I did a factory reset, but the issue persisted. Hence, I flashed the complete system again and only experienced one crash during the setup while using FDroid for the first time (which made me fear that the issue persisted in this case as well). However, I haven’t experienced further crashes since then for two days now (and used internet and browsers a lot).

My setup hasn’t really changed significantly, but I wouldn’t rule out the customizations as a cause of the issue. Indeed, I can now very well imagine that my specific issues (with the huge amount of crashes) were caused by some system tweak or a particular app …

Anyway, I’ll observe this further - maybe I now still have a handful of crashes a month, as most of the affected users here do. :wink:

Thank you guys for your help! It helped a bit I would say, my phone only crashed once the last week instead of every day. In my case the phone always crashed only when screen was turned off, but now I got a new problem. Since yesterday the battery didn’t charge normally, I had to restart the phone to make it charge as usual but today it won’t charge/turn on at all! I suppose there is a correlation between these problems. Yes, I have seen the forum page where people are dealing with it although none of the tips worked, I guess I need to contact the support team. Damned this is so sad, fairphone is such a great project but apperently not viable at all yet.

This has been happening to my phone as well. Because I was using a self-compiled FP OSOS (just standard, with the 2.0.1 binary blobs, no added apps, rooting or other changes), I suspected that might have been the reason.

So I switched to the “official” FP OSOS (fastboot version), hoping that would fix the problem - but it didn’t.

I see the freezes most often in the morning after the phone was just lying on the bedside table overnight, without being plugged in for charging (I usually charge my phone while I’m at work). The screen is black, a short push of the power button does nothing - I need to long-press it so it resets. After the reset, I noticed that the battery stats are gone, as if I had powered up the phone for the very first time… I was hoping to see when it actually froze (like in @h34dbanger’s post), but so there is no information.

This is happening every two to three days at the moment. A friend of mine also owns a Fairphone 2 and said that he experienced such freezes as well, although less than once a month in the last 4 months since he owns it, which he finds acceptable.

Ever other day however is definitely not acceptable for me, so I am thinking of getting a replacement if there’s no fix soon. As I bought it from a shop (rather than from the FP website), I think I should go there with my receipt?

It seems for me the problem disappeared by disabling 4G. Now I have the phone up and running for 6 days and 15 hours without any reboot, before I had a reboot at least every 2 days and sometimes every day, without any repeatable scenario.
The only thing that changed was disabling 4G, so I vote for this :slight_smile:
I’ll try to re-enable it next week in order to do one more test, I will let you know :slight_smile:
Bye!

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I’m experiencing crashes too, about once a day. In my case, the phone freezes for about 5-10 seconds, then restarts itself. This happens while using the phone, e.g., browsing firefox or using other apps. It doesn’t seem to cause any damage or lose data, but it’s irritating. Fortunately hasn’t happened (so far) during phone calls. Any advice appreciated.

This is exactly the same behavior I had before disabling 4G, the phone freezes for some seconds and then restarts or switches off.
If you have 4G enabled try by setting 3G mode, I solved it instantly :slight_smile:
Bye!

Thanks! How do I set 3G mode? Can’t find anything in the settings of on the forum on how to change that.

update found it under settings > mobile networks. But could only change it for one sim, not the other. Let’s see if that helps.

You’ll find the options under Settings->Other->Cellular Networks and then you can select for one of the SIM cards the 3G network, while the other is automatically set to 2G.
Please note: if for example you have SIM1 set to 3G and want to switch the SIM2 to 3G, you must first set the former to 2G, otherwise the option for SIM2 will be still greyed and won’t let you select 3G (I was driving crazy the first time I wanted to switch the networks :P)
Bye! :slight_smile:

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I have the same problem. It has happened 4-5 times since I got the phone in march. I see people have this problem everyday! I think 4-5 crashes on a newly bought phone is quite bad,
It happens when the screen is shut off, i think allways wifi is on, and I cannot activate the phone. By pushing the on-botton somethimes the locked screen flashes for a second.

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My FP2 also freezes frequently and requires a reboot by pressing the power button for >10s. That makes it really unreliable to be available for callers, or to be alarmed on time.

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Same problem here… frequent crashes, sometimes with screen on, but most often when the phone is turned off.

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Interestingly, before the last update, I had random reboots all the time… they seem to have disappeared in favour of these crashes. Not really an improvement :wink:

Set my phone to 3G mode; still experiencing the same freeze and crash phenomenon, followed by the phone restarting itself. :frowning:

Same problem here, happening on average 2-3 times per day. Usually while I’m actively on the phone doing something, but no consistency on what applications. Also had this happen in the middle of a call where the call continued but the screen was black and nothing happened on pressing buttons.

Every time i have to yank the battery which gets really annoying.

Mostly mine freezes with the application open bit nothing responding, but also like others report I’ve had the black screen treatment where I find it just unresponsive with a black screen, no buttons working. Yank the battery and switch back on, all is well until the next crash.

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