I still have my Fairphone 2 in daily use, but it has become really very slow. I wonder if the reason for this is perhaps the increased demands of the apps I now use. Actually, it only works if I close all running apps in between.
I also wondered if the requirements of Lineage, which I use in the latest version, would bring the device to its knees. That’s why I installed the original software again. But it didn’t help much for the speed.
Meanwhile, Bluetooth must be constantly on to use the Corona Warning app, even other apps I would like to use are obviously too performance-hungry.
A few days ago, I was checked on entering a store and it felt like minutes before I could launch my Covid pass app. Exactly the things that make my daily life easier, the phone should be able to do.
What could I do to reduce the performance requirements for my Fairphone 2?
Yes, I agree that the FP2 doesn’t feel as snappy as it felt when it was new and yes, the reason is most probably the grown demand of many apps (and the later Android versions for sure). I’m running LOS 18.1.
Since you were talking about the Corona Warn App (CWA): This app makes the phone check the received beacons against the list of warning users several times per day and I have experienced that this takes quite a while and during that time the phone is really, really slow. Also during this time (~1-2 minutes) the battery drains more than usually because the phone is not idle. So that’s probably part of the reduced battery lifetime these days… BT itself however doesn’t make a real difference wether it’s switched on or off. For the CovPass app I’ve just checked, it takes 4 seconds from tapping it until the QR code is displayed which I find okay.
On my phone I try to not have too many apps in general and even less apps that run in the background. FairEmail, Conversations and Signal are the most significant I’d say, and the memory is about half full. The most demanding apps are probably Osmand (having to load map data), Spotify and MS Teams and while the latter one really makes it hard to use other apps at the same time, the other ones are not as prohibitive.
So long story short: Without knowing which apps are causing the biggest headaches for you and your phone it’s hard to advise anything. When you reinstalled your phone with the original software, did you try it out directly afterwards, before you installed any apps? If that felt slow already we don’t have to dig into apps I fear.
In addition to what @Martin_Anderseck has said you might enable adb debugging in developer options, connect a PC via USB to the phone and start adb shell top
There you can see which processes are occupying your phone while it’s laggy…
Thank you for Your Answer. For comparison: As for the Covpass app, which takes about 11 seconds to display the QR code on a smartphone that has been restarted after an update, the updater app, e-mail and Whats app were running in the background, that was what was indicated. And that’s really not much. Still, at the moment I’m sticking to the Fairphone OS, although I really like Lineage.
What I can see is that the RAM is almost completely in use. The screenshot was taken this morning after restarting the phone after an update. The following were open: WhatsApp, Mail program (GMX), Covpass app, Updater app, general settings, alarm clock, Google News, Threema.
After closing all Apps it looks better.
No, I press the right Software-Button, switch to the end of the row an press “close all apps”.
I think I will try the adb shell again if the Phone is really slow, the problem is that happens mostly when my PC is far away
At least on those screenshots I can’t see any critical HW usage: there’s no swap used, so it doesn’t seem that something has to be swapped because of missing memory (although I’m not sure that swap is used by Android at any time…).
And idle CPU% is at more than 300%, so there seem to be enough free CPU resouces.
Maximum CPU usage of a single process is at about 7%. So there’s no process running wild…
I suppose that at that moment when you created the output your FP2 was quite “chilled”. It’d be interesting to compare it to the output at moment when you have the impression that the phone is very slow (e.g. while it’s taking minutes to launch your Covid pass app).
I’d say that is the|a problem, only 86Mb of memory left.
Can you move some data (videos, music, images) either to an external device or an externally formatted SD card. (As pointed out the figures for the RAM usage do not relate to this idea of moving data)
I am moving media out of the phone regularly, when Windows shows the drive in red. The responsiveness improves a bit after this, but not too much, thank you.
Ok? So of the 2Gb RAM used (19,202,260,000)
a) there’s a discrepancy between the two figures and
b) still an issue
c) I’ll amend the comment about moving data
As the figures were different I was thinking it was ‘memory’ but clearly not. Apologies.
I have 5.18 GB free of 25.5 GB in the FP2, according to Windows Explorer, when I connect it to the laptop. I did what you mention, backup everything and factory reset, in summer 2020, because the situation was terrible, with constant slow down and crashes. After that, in the beginning it was going smoother, although not like a new phone, but as I was installing apps I really need to work with, it started to slow down again. I am now reaching the point that I am wondering whether I should factory reset again and see, but I am avoiding it, by now (lot of work with debatable result). I also suspect the battery is too old. When the battery is drained, the phone responsiveness is very bad. I have ordered new batteries. I am still trying to keep the FP2 working, before switching to FP4 with 5G (I have been skipping FP1 and PF3, just by chance). But I still don’t see the need to switch. I am keeping a second FP2 as backup since some time ago. I use it also to charge backup batteries I take away with me when I plan to be outside home for long. That device has not been touched since I factory reset it in summer 2020. It indicates 20.1 GB free of 25.4 GB and it still has Android 7:
adb shell top -n 1
User 4%, System 14%, IOW 1%, IRQ 0%
User 3 + Nice 0 + Sys 10 + Idle 53 + IOW 1 + IRQ 0 + SIRQ 0 = 67
PID USER PR NI CPU% S #THR VSS RSS PCY Name
26927 shell 20 0 14% R 1 4544K 1572K fg top
26058 u0_a89 20 0 13% S 59 1407104K 106464K bg org.mozilla.fennec_fdroid
1818 system 18 -2 2% S 146 1851260K 151324K fg system_server
270 system -2 -8 2% S 14 121016K 9512K fg /system/bin/surfaceflinger
3186 u0_a33 20 0 1% S 40 1245776K 133772K fg com.android.systemui
4062 root 13 -7 1% S 6 9988K 1452K fg /system/bin/mpdecision
…
I will switch to the backup phone as primary phone if the situation gets really bad (and I will update it to Android 9). I have reached the conclusion that the only way to have a highly reliable FP2 is to have two of them (and to carry spare batteries, because they get drained very fast now).
