This just makes it worst. If the issues are across FP 4, 5 and 6, why didnt they pick this up before rolling out the update?
Why cant they fix it even quicker because its affecting all their flagship phones?
We dont want the latest Android updates. Just security and stability patches. If it aint broke dont fix it.
Alas this update has made using the phone lot more annoying than it should be.
Better communication from the company is the bare minimum. Its been 3 months of investigation. This aint some deep conspiracy. Tell us whats wrong. Offer interim solutions or rollback patch (oh wait, you cant because you cant downgrade from A15 to a lower Android)
Any way to roll back to Android 13? That was stable for me at least, nowadays it’s a pain to try and listen to Spotify. If I lock the phone with something playing, it might continue to play, or it’ll kill the app in a few mins. But what most certainly will kill it is playing something while you try to open a different app, say Snapshat, Discrod, Reddit etc.
Still having very irritating issues with Strava being killed after allowing “Unrestricted” background usage. At least if it’s music that’s playing, you notice (obviously still very annoying), but in this case you only notice when you realise it hasn’t been tracking you for the past x-hours.
Android 15 has turned an amazing phone into one I wouldn’t recommend to anyone. Love the hardware but 15 has broken my phone!
Mine’s still being killed all the time - can’t use 2fa to make purchases, music / audio players randomly stopping / not all photos saving / constantly (at least once per day) dropping the permission of Zepp to send notifications to my watch.
Also found I can’t pair my Bluetooth with any device that uses pincode matching.
Found the below help page on how to roll back to a previous version of Android - that’s going to keep me busy this week.
I’m sure they did pick it up. They just didn’t care. Even before Android 15 landed on the FP4 this issue was reported in the closed beta group. The answer boils down to
“While it does appear to be related to default Android 15 behavior, we haven’t reached a final conclusion yet. We’re still actively collecting feedback and data to thoroughly understand what’s happening and whether any tuning or improvements are possible on our end.”
So they may or may not plan on doing anything about it, because I refuse to believe that this is unfixable.
Thanks for the link - I really don’t have time to be spending on this, but may have to make some time somehow, since as of now I haven’t noticed any particular benefit from the new Android and the current behaviour is making the device less than adequate.
Me too. We would had heard if every Android phone sold since A15 (September 2024) was unusable. It’s more likely a feature of the OS which wasn’t handled correctly (somehow. I’m not a developer). After all this issue apparently affects the FP5 and FP6 too, which means it’s not a quaint old FP4 issue, it has something to do with Fairphone’s A15 implementation.
And Fairphone’s silence is so deafening it doesn’t bode too well, does it.
I have the same issue. Very annoying when running with Strava and Spotify. Very annoying when verifying payments and switching from bank app back to a crashed chrome. I had to use a laptop to make the payment instead of my phone.
It was the straw that broke the camels back. I’ve bought a different phone.
I don’t know if this is related to this issue, but at the beginning of the month Fairphone announced they are working on some fixes for FP4 on Android 15:
Hopefully they are actively working on the app kills problem.
I don’t think they’re close to solving the memory issues. The bugs they’re talking about are those that rendered some phones unbootable with 15.15.2 update.
I am VERY pleased to report that flashing to Lineage 23 i.e Android 16, has solved the issue.
I can finally listen uninterrupted to music and podcasts. I can also bloody have sleep music on and type without lag.
Please email or DM if you want help to flash. It took me approx an hour due to some technical issues and I would say I’m pretty competent with CMD prompt so ye. There you go!
Trick is “ fastboot flashing unlock” after you boot to bootloader/OEM unlock which isn’t included in the Lineage instructions.
To other people coming through here who want to make the change, over heard swapping /e/ OS can help fix this issue, and making this swap is much more use friendly, I think it can even be done automatically through a web browser when doing it to a Fair phone. Info about Fairphone The Fairphone (Gen. 6) - FP6
After a few days of use, can say that battery life has also improved with Android 16. Though I suspect its more to do with less bloatware and also less memory leak issues from A15 that force killed so many apps.
Would recommend flashing to Lineage OS if you have the time! I don’t see a official FP response on this issue that has been ongoing for nearly half a year…
Amazing experience during the first week : incredible battery life, no background app killing anymore.
After one week though I noticed podcast app getting killed when screen is off But even with that I have no regret, this is still way better.
A few warnings :
unlocking the bootloader to flash lineage will make your phone unsecure and you won’t be able to use Google pay and similar, or some other apps like authy. Banking apps work without issue if they are not payment apps.
Also, this is obvious for experienced people but for beginners know that you will have a hard time with apps backup and restore. You can use sms backup and restore for your sms, apps like WhatsApp and messenger restore automatically from cloud, but other than that you’ll have to reinstall every app manually. You will lose app data for most apps so be careful and prepare carefully by saving what you can beforehand.
But even with that I have no regret, this is still way better.