I’ve also noticed the behavior of the autobrightness changed a bit, yielding brighter display than before in most cases. You can also try to concentrate on that and “re-learn” the phone to use lower brightness. This morning, I was reading for about 10 minutes (wifi+data off), and the battery stayed at 85% all through - but I did decrease brightness when I started. Yesterday, when not caring about brightness, I think the battery depleted by about 2-3% in 10 minutes.
Like others, mine isn’t surviving the day at the moment since the latest Android release, I assumed the battery was on the way out so I was about to buy a new battery from the website. Glad I stopped by here first. Sounds like updating to the latest patch may improve things, let’s see
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For me the latest update FP4.TP1X.C.079 did not change the battery usage. Still I get high power consumption caused by “Cellular Connectivity” no matter if I switch on 5G or not.
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I have to correct myself, the battery life is still just as bad.
In addition, the spontaneous reboots occur again when 5G is activated.
I cannot currently recommend Fairphone
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BTW? This also happens while the phome is in flight mode
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Say situation here with my FP5. The battery is discharging very fast since a few weeks and I didn’t change my usage habits…
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You can really say that with every problem fixed by updates, more and more problems are added. It would simply have been best to stick with the stock android (11) and never install just one update.
Yes, absolutely. This is especially true, if you do not want any security fixes rolled out to your FP!
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I don’t give a sh*t about security patches if the phone at least works properly. If you’re careful on the road, you don’t need these security patches anyway. The update policy on the part of fairphone is a real cheek. Every new Android has a new major bug that makes the phone almost unusable. If you see the phone as a handicraft project, that may still be ok, but if you depend on a stable running device, you can completely forget about fairphone.
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yeah, just make sure no one discovers bugs like Stagefright or Meltdown in the software or hardware that you’re running, ever.
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Same problem here and it keeps getting unbearable. Battery drains in half a day. 5G disabled. Phone doesn’t seem to get into sleep mode and gets really warm. Just bought a new battery, but after the A13 update it keeps getting worse and worse.
That does not seem to be a wide spread issue, so there is something draining battery under special settings. Have you reviewed battery usage e.g. with the App Accu Battery? Have you tried in Safe Mode? Have you tried with out SIM? If anSD card is used how is it formatted?
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Thanks for getting back at me.
I use Accu Battery and can’t find an app that’s responsible for the drain. However, the phone uses around 10% of battery per hour and doesn’t enter deep sleep mode.
I haven’t tried Safe Mode yet. I have no SD card installed. I didn’t try without the SIM, but disabling Mobile Data seems to do the trick. Battery usage is normal without Mobile Data. I do read that some people seem to have problems related to mobile networks. I first got the impression, that the drain was better with disabling 5G. But it isn’t. So it seems to be a problem with either my carrier (german Telekom) or mobile connection in general.
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Hi all,
I experience the same issue since upgrading my FP4 to A13.
Disabling 5G didn’t help and using the built-in battery usage statistics (via settings → battery), I wasn’t able to figure out what is causing the high battery drain.
The sum of all values from that list is not even close to the percentage of battery already used…
I’m based in Germany, use an eSIM, provider is Congstar (same network as Deutsche Telekom) and I don’t have an SD-card installed.
Mobile coverage is great at home, so that’s not the cause
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Disabling 5G is not enough to forbid the phone connecting to 5G transmitters. You should also disable 4G calling to be sure the phone doesn’t try that.
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I noticed my FP4 lasts (a little) less long since A13 too. 
When checking battery consumption (not with the System app, it’s useless…), I see Quickstep is now consistently using 11-12% of my overall battery capacity. IIRC it was only around 3-4% before A13, so I’m pretty much convinced that is the reason: The 7-8% activity increase seems to cover pretty well the 7-8% decrease in battery capacity.
Fairphone must have added something in the A13 update which causes Quickstep to run for a couple seconds every minute or so (according to logs). Before that it rarely ran, and only when using some specific feature of it, now it runs all the time, all on it’s own. 
Could it be the supposed fix for the brightness (which apparently doesn’t really work for me anyway)?
For what is Quickstep? It’s not an installed app. It uses only 1% on my phone, but I do not have the battery problem.
On my brothers phone (also FP 5), Quickstep uses 4% after he deactivated 5G. That is the half of the battery usage within 4 hours. The battery went down 8% within 4 hours, after deactivating 5G.
Quickstep is a launcher, right?
I do not use it (instead I use Nova) but my battery consumption is higher, anyways. According to System2 it is caused by “Cellular Connectivity”, also in Flightmode.
And yes, 5G uses more power, too. But for me switching it off is ok, as my provider does not support 5g yet, and still does not solve the issue with the quick battery drain for me.
Quickstep is the default Fairphone launcher (on the FP4 at least).
Yes, on my phone too it used to only use a couple %, but since the A13 upgrade it is running all the time, even during the night when I sleep… Two apps run at night, “Clock” (I guess because of the alarm), and Quickstep (what for???)…
That’s exactly what I’m using too. No “cellular connectivity” for me though, which might or might not be normal: If your reception is bad (-ish), the phone does need to make more connection attempts, and thus wastes more energy. I have good connectivity here.
For the record, I use 5G all the time (very good coverage here, although I’m in the boonies). 5G didn’t cause any excess battery drain before (A11, A12), and I’d be surprised if it started now. 
5G isn’t the designated source of all evil… 
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