Just wanted to chip in and confirm that I’m seeing the exact behaviour described here happening on my FP4.
On A15, I can only use one or two apps simultaneously before all other (background) apps (including my third-party launcher) inevitably get killed within seconds of “inactivity”. This has NOT been an issue for me on A13, which, I believe, was the version my phone was on before (IIRC A14 was skipped).
This issue makes using music apps, banking apps, 2FA apps and to some extent even browser apps an incredibly anxious experience as I have to keep one of them in the foreground or switch between them quick enough so the process(es) won’t get killed. Suffice it to say; background media playback on this Android version is utterly worthless.
I truly hope the Fairphone team has been looking into this issue, as this update was only rolled out to me (a FP4 user) a few days ago, but FP5 users have apparently been experiencing this for at least two months already. A fix for this is long overdue.
We are in a FP5 topic here so I suggest you look for one about FP4 that’s about your background apps problems. Have a look around. If you spot one then we can move the conversation over.
Otherwise we’ll start a new topic because it’s likely there will be similar cases.
On A15, I can only use one or two apps simultaneously before all other (background) apps (including my third-party launcher) inevitably get killed within seconds of “inactivity”. This has NOT been an issue for me on A13, which, I believe, was the version my phone was on before (IIRC A14 was skipped).
This issue makes using music apps, banking apps, 2FA apps and to some extent even browser apps an incredibly anxious experience as I have to keep one of them in the foreground or switch between them quick enough so the process(es) won’t get killed. Suffice it to say; background media playback on this Android version is utterly worthless.
I truly hope the Fairphone team has been looking into this issue, as this update was only rolled out to me (a FP4 user) a few days ago, but FP5 users have apparently been experiencing this for at least two months already. A fix for this is long overdue.
It is similar here but not as aggressive. I can use Deezer to listen to music in the background but it can get killed sometimes. Using the PayPal app is near impossible since it gets killed as soon as I switch to the 2FA app to get the code.
I suspect this has been causing some of my holiday photos to corrupt (0-byte jpeg files).
I often lock my phone within a second after taking a photo, which was never an issue on Android 13. I suspect the camera app is being killed before the photo data is fully written to the (internal) storage.
The reason I don’t think this is a storage memory hardware issue is because screenshots write OK to the same internal storage. Also, this only started happening to me since the Android 15 upgrade on my FP4.
I have the same issue, this makes the phone very frustrating to operate, and sometimes even unusable (corrupted photos, payment confirmation, background music).
I do not understand how such big problems were not uncovered before deploying the updates, and why there is still no fix, or at least some official communication by Fairphone on this.
This is simply not acceptable, and this makes keeping the same phone arduous.
This justifies why no fix has been provided so far. However, if they were aware of these reported issues, this makes deployment even crasier. I just hope they realize how big of a problem this is.
Now the whole picture becomes clearer! The support department’s primary work devices are FP4 and FP5. And they’re of course testing betas. So, since early 2025, no employee of support department could successfully pass through company 2FA, so they just come to work and endlessly switch between browser and auth app
Okay, stop me if I say something dumb (I have managed to dodge A15 so far), but can’t you alleviate this by changing a couple settings?
IIRC by setting your app’s battery usage to “Allow background usage”, and its battery optimization to “unlimited” (there might be others, I’m just repeating what I’ve read and remember).
Last but not least, the app must be A15 compatible. I do my Play Store app updates manually and read the “what changed” part: A huge lot of updates lately were just for A15 compatibility, and I guess it has something to do with this. So, with the right settings, an up-to-date app should probably work like it did in A13/14.
can’t you alleviate this by changing a couple settings?
IIRC by setting your app’s battery usage to “Allow background usage”, and its battery optimization to “unlimited” (there might be others, I’m just repeating what I’ve read and remember).
Unfortunately this isn’t enough. Battery optimization is disabled for me. There is a single settings entry regarding the number of background processes, there is no “unlimited” option and it doesn’t seem to make things better when tweaking it. Some people have another entry, but this isn’t the case on my phone.
Last but not least, the app must be A15 compatible. I do my Play Store app updates manually and read the “what changed” part: A huge lot of updates lately were just for A15 compatibility, and I guess it has something to do with this.
My apps update automatically, and I just checked they are all up to date. Yet the problem is still here. But honestly if the app devs have to change their code because of android’s update, then it’s just an absolutely terrible update.
So, what would you say if because of an OS update people were forced to buy a new computer? I’m talking about Microsoft here…
Seriously now, my point is that sometimes backwards compatibility isn’t guaranteed anymore. And to get back to topic, I only mentioned this because some not yet updated apps might create problems on their own and thus muddy the waters even further.
I’ve updated with no particular issues, so has my wife.
I’ve just got a small annoyance: my apps close all the way as soon as I go to home screen or switch to another app. I did read this was a change for A15, but I didn’t imagine they close in seconds and give you no time at all to continue where you were… is this still intended, or a bug?
As an example: i was unable to put in a TAN for an app because as soon as I opened the email app, the other one in the background closed and when I had copied the TAN and switched back to the app, it opened new again and I had to request a new TAN, and so fort… I’ll work around that particular issue but is there no way to prevent apps from closing instantly?
I’m noticing the same thing with apps being killed aggressively. It doesn’t seem related to a battery thing either. Most annoyingly, it keeps occurring with my home launcher even after changing from Microsoft Launcher to Nova.
This issue is so frustrating. I listen to a podcast, phone screen locked, and after a random amount of time the stream stops but when resuming it will not be up to date with where I was in the audio so I have to manually jump through the show until I find my place. This is deeply annoying as I most often have my hands busy with chores like washing up during podcast time so have to stop what I’m doing and clean/dry just to continue the podcast.
I have also been battling this issue since I upgraded my FP4 to Android 15. The fact that this has been an acknowledged problem for over two months makes me this that this is not a high priority for Fairphone to fix despite the fact that this turns my smart phone into a dumb phone that’s only good for phone calls and text messages. I’m days away from giving up and just buying a phone from a different manufacturer and warning everyone I know against buying Fairphones. Absolutely shocking lack of QA testing and development follow up.
Which app? I use PocketCasts (with unrestricted background usage) and it stops only very rarely. And if it does, the position in the podcast is remembered correctly.
Have a look at this video, it seems that each app now has a battery optimization toggle, and you need to set each app to “Unrestricted” background usage to prevent it from being killed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPO6Fj1_Dxo
Does that fix the problem? I say this because I’m someone researching whether to pick up a FP4, and not a current owner.
