Frankly, having a bug like this not being addressed with the highest priority possible is embarrassing. I would accept this type of bug from an open source project, not from a company selling quite an expensive phone that’s marketed as lasting longer than competitors thanks to its modularity. Modularity is a nice feature, but people also rely on their phones to work. Everyone has mentioned online payments and Spotify being killed while a song is playing, but I’ve also had issues with photos or videos not being saved, which is infuriating.
I work in software development and we’d never just say “yeah we’re working on it” without even a deadline in sight for something that is clearly affecting a lot of people who paid money for the product. What I’m reading about software being outsourced, if true, is terrible too.
Like others, I have made a decision to switch to a different vendor and I will warn everyone I know to be very careful about buying anything from this company.
I’ve also had a lot of problems with photos not being saved, I suppose it may also be related to this although I’d not necessarily characterised it as such. A significant portion of photos appear to be corrupt, not sure how much space they’re taking on the device. Have a feeling it may tend to happen when I switch screen off while they’re saving but I haven’t attempted to test more carefully.
Two days after the upgrade, I can report that it seems to improve, as firefox is not kill in the background.
Still after using video confrensing as google meet/ whatsup call , I still get break-ups in the audio I hear, as well as the remote partner after about ten minutes in to the call.
A bit late to the party, but when you say “corrupt”, check the size of the file by going into (something like) File Info on the image in question (on FP 5, it’s the 3 vertical dots on the top RHS of the image). I’d be interested if it’s “0 B”, which is the same problem I’m seeing on my phone.
I’d say it’s either an application (camera) or OS issue; I’d expect the camera app to report any errors from the OS (I expect a lot of things), so either the OS isn’t reporting the file save issue or the camera isn’t propagating it. Unfortunately, either way I don’t think this is a Fairphone issue; I believe this portion is just repackaged upstream Android (having seen rumblings on other phone platforms about the same issue). I guess this is the vibe coded issues our ancestors warned us about.
Exactly! The “fix” improved the situation a bit. I also feel bad for advertising the device to other people where now they face this kind of problem. We are talking about basic requirements and it’s been months since this problem exists.
This thread was started 6 months ago today! What kind of company leaves its customers stuck with products that work so poorly for so long? Worse yet, without providing any updates on the progress of the fixes, other than a “we’ve done everything we can, so don’t come piss off.”
Fairphone has been ridiculed on here for the FP4 feeling like a beta product basically since the first major Android update. This is nothing new out of the blue; this is just how Fairphone is. Sometimes they announce a fix, most of the times they don’t. In both cases the fix is incredibly late and drops out of the blue.
I’ve given up on my FP4 at this point. I can put up with a lot of things, but this and the battery drain bug broke me.
What a weird thing to say since this bug is reproducible on every Fairphone 4 (and before 1,5 Month every Fairphone 5). You just need to use apps that trigger the killing (apps with peaks in RAM-usage) and do a little bit of multitasking.
And because the bug is now fixed (after 9 months mind you) on Fairphone 5s show that, in principle, Fairphone is able to fix it (with better configuration) they just delay the fix for the Fairphone 4 for unknown reasons.
I cannot reproduce this on my FP4, and I doubt I am the only one. I do a lot of multi tasking and for me it works just fine. I know this is easily said if one does not have the problem and certainly it needs a fix. Calling it a “weird thing to say” seems weird to me
But if it would affect all users it would be much easier to analyze and debug this, as it would mean some more generic code error could be a cause. As it looks to me the faulty behavior is only triggered in certain setups on different devices (FP,4 and FP5) and hence I would not complain about FP not willing to fix it. IMHO, according to the speed of fixing this I would also assume there are not too many affected users.
As other users in this thread pointed out, it is clearly a configuration issue by Fairphone OS which can be temporarily fixed via ADB. So it is a configuration issue with the android distribution and it is likely the same as the one already fixed in Fairphone 5. According to @yvmuell the fix is already in testing for several months now (edit before that I falsely wrote fixed here) for Fairphone 4 so I don’t understand why they don’t publish it.
It depends on what apps you use or rather if they have spikes in memory usage. With the affected apps you can reproduce this faulty behavior on any device. I myself have a Fairphone 5 and I am happy that this was fixed after 9 months.
But this deemphasition of an issue that affects users to the point that they have to think of workarounds when they need two apps at the same time deeply annoys me.
Just to clarify, the adb commands seemed promising, So I decided to test them. Unfortunately, the results were not the ones expected, and the issues were still there. Maybe a slight improvement was noticed but definitely not a solution, neither temporary, nor definitely
