I too experience random reboots with my FP2. It has been affecting me from the start and persists with all the last updates. The reboots seem to increase so that I probably encounter 2-4 a day.
But only after the last (3rd?) Update I had the freeze / black display phenomenon which really scared me, because even removing and reentering the battery didn’t solve the problem. The phone would boot up normally showing the boot screen and when entering Android turn and sty black. From vibration feedback when pressing buttons I knew the phone was still running but totally unuseful.
Same problem here, black screen and not response until removing the battery. It happens three or four times a week, sometimes using it but sometimes just resting. Once it happens while the alarm was ringing and I couldn’t stop it until I removed the battery.
Also, sometimes the phone reboots (I see the screen asking for the pin number). It’s less frequently and I think allways happen when I’m pressing it (sometimes taking the phone with my hand pressing hard the screen, sometimes carrying it in the pocket of my tight jeans)
Hello, same problem here too, with some “nice” additional features worth being shared for those trying to fix the issue.
The first crash happened this morning. The last thing I had done was to switch to “plane” mode while being in 4G. 1h30 later, I look at my phone, and the screen was grey. Holding power button for more than 10seconds did not work, so I took off the battery and after a few attempts, the screen displayed the “resting” android robot (https://fairphone.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/201654943)
For the rest of the day, the phone kept freezing the screen (grey), or rebooting on its own. Sometimes after a reboot the screen “moved” (up and down) so fast that I could not enter my pin code. Another time the screen looked normal but then all the colors changed and they looked like the negative of a photo…
All these crashes happened at least 10 times today (and never before). Yesterday I installed 3 new apps on my phone, including one to learn languages which I used a lot - do you think there could be a link? Or could it be the screen which has a problem?
I have being using a FP2 with Open OS (last update) and I have been experiencing random freezes and sometimes reboots for a while. Only a few in the beginning, one every 1-2 days in the last weeks.
I can always restart the phone pressing the button for 15 seconds.
I am trying to look for a pattern and I think I noticed that these freezes usually happen when the buttery is (almost) fully charged. When I charge my phone for quite long, the battery charge rises up to 98%, but I think never up to 100% ( i do not know if this is normal). However, freezes often happen when I remove the cable from the phone that has been on maximum charge for a while.
To resume, the steps are generally the following
I put the phone on charge (when on charge the touch-screen misbehaves, but that’s another well-known bug)
The phone charge is around 98%
I still keep the phone on charge for a while (charge never goes over 98%)
I remove the charging cable and use a phone
A few minutes later I often have a reboot
I will try to check if it does happen all the times or not, by now it is only a pattern I noticed.
I think, I’ve found the culprit of my very frequent crashes. I can reproduce that it happens after enabling the Network Log app. This also matches to the correlation of all my crashes to internet access.
Apart from that, I don’t think that this particular or other internet apps in general are also the cause for all the other people reporting here, as those descriptions don’t match to that pattern and as my crash pattern was relatively special - namely a lot of reboots all the time instead of only a few reboots in some days or weeks.
So unfortunately, I think we still need to find the root cause(s?) for all these crashes …
I get these too! Just as reported above, every 2 days or so on 1.3.6. (I have worse issues on 1.4.2, see separate thread). I have had different network setups - different wifi, and a new second sim 7 weeks ago which i use for 4g instead of my old primary sim - which have not made a difference.
My phone/system cache is up to 2.5G today. I am going to try clearing it and will watch the size and see how it goes.
Also experiencing random crashes but only seems to happen when the screen is off and i can’t get it to come on, except with a hard re-boot. I know its still on in the background because the light still flashes that i have a message, but no response from the screen.
Are you using automatic brightness? If you are, could it be that this is turning off the screen altogether in some conditions?
As you mention the phone seems to still process messages etc., I don’t think it’s crashed entirely.
I am using automatic brightness so will switch this off for a while and see if it helps, thanks. Will report back but could be a week or 2 since doesn’t happen very often but enough to be noticible/annoying.
Hmm, after installing 1.4.2 a second time as advised (and again update seemed to go fine), still getting crashes requiring the 10s power-button or battery removal to restart… The most recent one, my phone was resting on the desk, stable network environment for over an hour, wasn’t being used, when i went to use it, it was unresponsive.
My problem continues. The frequency of crashes may be a little less but it is still at least once a day, and almost all are ones where “android is updating” comes up when I force a restart, so the phone is out of action for 20-30 minutes. I noticed a software update to the Updater yesterday so when i have stable wifi today I will do the update again.
I was experiencing random crashes (mostly while the screen was off) and had to hard reboot the phone at least once a day. When the 1.3.6 update came I made a factory reset after installing the update. After that it has randomly rebooted just a few times but no more black screen locks.
I’ve been experiencing this problem for some time now, it first started happening for me after the 1.2.8 update (I am now up to date on 1.4.2). It happens randomly, about once every two or three days, sometimes on WiFi, or while connected to 3G only (I don’t have a 4G sim). I don’t remember it happening while I’m actually using the phone, it only seems to happen to me when the screen is off.
Sometimes I can reboot with a long press on the power button, other times that reboot freezes and I have to remove the battery anyway.
Recently I’ve noticed a notification seems to trigger it: today I heard it go off, went to unlock the screen, and it had gone dead, a second after the notification (I think it was WhatsApp).
This might correlate somehow with a new slightly different incident last week when I received a call, but the screen was blank and unresponsive so I had no way to pick it up. It kept on ringing far longer than it normally would, voicemail didn’t intercept it, and I had to remove the battery to make it stop.
I’m sure I cleared the cache once before, but I suppose it can’t hurt to try again. It’s a really hard issue to pin down!
A bit tentative but worth mentioning, I haven’t had this issue since i started using a different charger. I noticed the crashes were in a morning a short time after I unplugged it from charging.
I will check to see if there are any power difference ratings between the chargers i have tried.
Cheers.
I am also getting frequent crashes 3x week now, seems related to switching on wiFi or 4G. One crash happened whilst using Google Maps, another just with Google searching something. The screen becomes unresponsive and the power button too, only way to fix it is to remove the battery. I’ve only had the phone for 2 months! NOT HAPPY!
I realised that this allways happened just after I got a whatsapp notification. Another problem I had was that the contacts took a lot of time in be charged, as much in whatsapp as in the phone app. I uninstalled and reinstalled the whatsapp application and both problems never happened again!
I did that a month ago or so, just before installing the FP2 OS 1.4.2 uptade. I wait for a week to install the update just to be sure the problem was solved by unistalling and reinstalling the whatsapp app.
I also noticed a similar pattern: crashes happening shortly after charging the phone. Would you mind sharing the specifications of your previous (faulty) and your current (working) chargers?
I have been holding off mentioning anything since i still get occasional random crashes maybe 2 or 3 times a week, although this is much reduced from previously and no longer happens after charging.
The chargers i have tried all have outputs of 5v or 5.2v, so i don’t think it’s the voltage, however, the amperage seems to vary quite bit. The lower amperage outputs i tried all seemed to correlate with crashing which were 2x 0.7A and 1x 1.35A. The one which seemed to help has an output of 2.0A.
Let me know if this helps.
okay, I just read through all these posts. Seems that a lot of people have this problem and no solution has been found or no support from the FP could been given so far. Unfortunately I can’t add a lot, just describe what I tried, namely:
taking out both SIMs individually
taking out SD-Card
deleting cache
I’m using FPOS OS. Before switching from FP OS I only had the random reboots, now it’s taking out the battery / pressing power button for longer (something I still have to try out after having read this post).
