From a technical standpoint, these settings would typically worsen battery life, not improve it - compaction and freezer exist specifically to avoid the battery cost of constantly killing and restarting apps.
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I’m still stuck on version FP4.QREL.15.16.1.
I saw in the developer options that it’s possible to limit the number of apps running in the background. Does anyone know if there’s a setting I can change so that apps aren’t killed when they go into the background? I have to admit that this return to a Windows 3.1-style operating mode—where only one app can run at a time—is really starting to piss me off. Especially since I’m noticing that my apps are having more and more trouble launching because of these abrupt shutdowns.
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Please. To go back to an only-one-app-at-once model you had to go back to Windows 1.0, not 3.1. 3.1 was cooperatively multitasked (among Windows programs, anyway) but it could definitely run multiple things at once without killing them like this.
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Off-topic, so please stop
Is this a typo? Because that is the most current version for the FP4 right now.
It’s not a typo, it’s just that I don’t understand why a version with so many issues was released, and why no fixes have been released yet.
Yes I know, but it was just an old developer joke about Windows. I don’t remember it exactly, but it went something like this: “Windows 95 is like a plate spinner. It tries to juggle them without breaking them.”
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Maybe because it fixes some of the most annoying issues from the preceding version?
I personally do not encounter the issue with apps being killed more aggressively and I did not have the problems with A15 as others described them, so I am happy with the security fixes not being too old…
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As Lars_Hennig said.
Remember, Fairphone always serves their new OS versions with a side dish of bugs… 
At least, being Orange users, we have been spared the first couple of A15 updates and their (much worse) bugs, we completely missed the “phone crashes/reboots” stage and went straight to the “some annoyances persist” one…
I’m switching from an Android 13 phone that was working fine to an Android 15 phone that’s constantly unstable. I no longer have confidence in the stability or security of my phone.
I don’t understand why Fairphone is taking so long to release a fixed version. Especially since the root causes of the problem have been identified by @ahla.
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Development is outsourced, which explains a lot about the quality of the OS updates for the FP4 so far.
I’m sure they will release it eventually, but in the usual Fairphone spirit they will do so out of the blue one day with zero communication.
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I don’t understand why Fairphone is taking so long to release a fixed version.
I think they come more from a sustainable hardware approach that considers software as just being available and lower priority. Which probably made totally sense in 2013 when Fairphone was founded since Android was simpler. Software engineering seems to be outsourced and the round trips seem very slow and involved and perhaps also the contracts might be limiting.
But these days you can’t think hardware and software as separate products in the mobile world.
Especially since the root causes of the problem have been identified by @ahla.
It’s not that I definitively found the root causes since I can’t really test it to be sure. These settings need a rooted device or be rolled out as an update.
I only tracked some suspicious settings in the A15 which is deployed. But I don’t have the means at the moment to root a FP4. The one I have is my daily driver and I don’t want to run a rooted device for daily necessities.
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By the way @ahla, I want to share that the adb commands from your suggested solution have (very likely) succesfully mitigated the issues I’ve been having, albeit for a short time. I tested it one evening, and by next morning, it seemed like the changes have been undone again.
So as far as I’m concerned, this is indeed something that needs to be rolled out as an update so it doesn’t get reset after a while.
But in any case, I’m now very convinced that you’ve found the root cause of this issue as well as the solution that mitigates it.
So, again, @Fairphone_CM, I’d like you to run this up the flagpole and urge for an update. If you’ve already done so, please communicate clearly this to us. It’s been nearly five months since you’ve posted in this thread, so we’d appreciate some input.
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We already shared here that a fix is being tested. Pushing again and again will not speed up things any further. While I understand its annoying when your are affected, everything that can be done is already done.
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As I wrote in my debugging session details:
These settings do not persist across reboots and may be overwritten by Google Play Services config sync.
So that service sync might overwrite it any time even if you don’t reboot.
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I do apologise if I sounded pushy. I haven’t seen any more messages from the Community Manager, but I didn’t account for the communication by the Community Moderators such as yourself, so that’s my mistake.
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These settings do not persist across reboots and may be overwritten by Google Play Services config sync.
So that service sync might overwrite it any time even if you don’t reboot.
Ah right, thank you for the clarification!
At the same time, put yourself in our shoes: switching between apps is like playing Russian roulette with them. VPNs that are constantly running crash without warning, posing security risks. The keyboard gets stuck when I type in different apps, causing me to accidentally tap on things.
I have only one wish right now: to switch to a stable phone! Since I bought it, and up until this latest update, my Fairphone was pretty stable and responsive—aside from some phantom finger issues. I can run Linux programs with Termux and Windows programs with Winlator. But everything has become unstable now.
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Release cycles take time, but it’s been about nine months since this bug was first reported. If fixing bugs this serious takes this long, Fairphone’s outsourced developers are hugely under-resourced and clearly should never have taken the contract on (and Fairphone should take it away from them and find someone who’s not bottom-of-the-barrel to do the work: while they’re about it, find developers who can actually communicate with their users, too).
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This again is off-topic here. So @all stick to the topic and dont start off-topic discussion, which in this case also have been discussed ad nauseum before multiple times.
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Did you read this post from 4 days ago:
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