FP4 heat up very fast

Hi

I just bought my FP4, and when i go online and surf around on the internet, after around 10min the top and both sides become very hot.

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Hi Christophe and thanks for joining the community forum!

Just as happens after an update, a newly installed phone may show some tendency to heat (from processor activity) and high battery consumption while apps and databases get established in the background.

Are you still observing this? To go further could you confirm that your FP4 is running the latest update of FPOS
Settings > About phone > Build number
and check the power consumption of the principle apps
Settings > Battery > 3-dot menu > Battery usage

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I notice this as well on my FP4. Regular browsing, charging, basically anything makes the phone heat up now that it’s summer. This also drains the battery way faster than usual. My partner with an iPhone 13 noticed the same thing, but on a different scale. An iPhone still lasts a day. But my FP4 now needs 2 charges to keep it above 30% with just a few hours screen time (Pixel 3 performance). This may be improved with software, but best to #contactsupport to notify them if this is really bothering you.

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Hi,

I have the latest build and no apps in the Battery usage list.

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I think it may be an issue introduced in a recent update. The summer heat is gone, but my phone is still a personal heater. I’ll contact support. Can’t check with a terminal now, at least not one via ADB which shows more info.

Not sure if this is measured accurately on Android in regular user space. Maybe I cannot see the system processes and thus the average load is 0. I think ADB she’ll is really needed.

Yes, you would need superuser for this. As your phone, I guess, isn’t rooted, you don’t have them included. Same for the top command.

Are there more FP4 users with this issue? In the meantime I’ll do some debugging when I have some more time this week. But in parallel it would already help to know if this is wide spread. It may be a Firefox issue, but that’s just a wild guess because I use that app the most.

Mine does heat up quite significantly as well, but I’m on CalyxOS, so not directly comparable.

Now that you mention it, it does indeed mostly happen when using Firefox for prolonged periods of time, though I haven’t had time to further look into it either :thinking:
My previous phone did show the same behaviour with Firefox, so maybe a more general problem? Haven’t noticed anything similar with other apps I use a lot.

I found the culprit, I hope anyway. The process com.duckduckgo.mobile.android:vpn was running at 100%. But now it’s vendor.qti.power.pasrmanager@1.0-service after I disabled the anti tracking of the local DuckDuckGo “VPN”. Of course 100% means one core on a multi core device. After a reboot things calmed down. Also after enabling the app tracking protection from DDG again.

It really sucks that this isn’t a regular top program. I can’t really debug much with this limited version.

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Hmm yeah, battery usage is what made me stop using the DuckDuckGo anti-tracking. Instead I use RethinkDNS with OISD. It blocks ads, blocks most tracking, etc. Works pretty flawlessly in my opinion. And it uses less battery than Blokada!

I don’t have DDG VPN on my phone, I’m using AdAway with host-file based blocking, so we are obviously hitting different issues here.

Well, maybe this isn’t an universal problem after all :man_shrugging:

I’ve hard reset the DDG app and thus I lost the local VPN for tracking filtering (it has a waiting list I need to signup for again). Battery life also increased a lot. I would almost say 30-50%. So maybe I’ll leave it like this for now. I also noticed some notifications come in later than on my laptop, which is fine. So I guess battery saver wasn’t working well either. The device was constantly awake and had high CPU usage.

I have several times during the last week experienced that my phone gets burning hot and 25% of my battery is used during one hour.
First time I was listening to an audiobook - nothing exceptional here.
Second time I was using maps & location to find my way.
Is this common for an FP4?

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I have a similar concern. I own the phone for several months already and it’s not been an issue until around a month ago. Now seemingly moderate usage sometimes makes the phone hot and lose a lot of battery. Some examples:

  • navigating using a public transit app, listening to music via a streaming app
  • reading via Reddit app (just that)

So far I blamed this on background applications, closed all of them down or restarted the phone, but perhaps it’s a technical issue…

It is the same here - I have had the phone for 2-3 months now.
I closed down all background apps as well. But I am not sure it helped anything?
:thinking: Strange…

I moved the 3 last posts here. It may be due to different causes, but the recent update might have something to do with it.

I would advise you all to #contactsupport.

(For reference, an older topic : FP4 Getting Hot While Streaming + Battery Draining Fast)

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I don’t understand most of the causes or solutions offered.I have had my first Fairphone (4) since May and have had the issue of erratic battery life/ alarming heat from phone since the beginning. I miss my Note 8.

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If your problem is anything like mine, it could very likely be an app that’s misbehaving. Since I’ve disabled a feature in a 3rd party app that may have caused the overheating. Are you willing to do the same troubleshooting that I did? It involves installing some software and configuring your phone.

It involves these steps, if you think you’re up to it, I can guide you through them.

  • Install ADB Tools
  • Enable developer mode
  • Enable " USB debugging" in developer mode
  • Connect your phone to your computer with a USB-C cable
  • Run the command adb shell, you probably have to accept the connection on your phone
  • Then run the command top, it shows you the running processes of the whole device. You normally cannot see these because Android uses security layers, in this mode you can see more. Take 3 screenshots with 5 seconds in between and post them here
  • Make sure to disable “USB Debugging” in developer mode again

Thank you UPPERCASE. Sounds daunting, like all my interactions with Fairphone, it has taken me half an hour to navigate my way back here. I will try, but I must go now. Hope to be able to contact you again when I have more time.

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You can find these forum interactions in the notification bar, upper right corner. You also get them via mail if you didn’t change those settings here on the forum.

There is also an easier way to check battery drain, but it’s often incomplete. Go to Settings → Battery, and then tap the 3 vertical dots in the upper right corner and tap “Battery usage”. Please share that with a screenshot. After that, tap the 3 vertical dots in the upper right corner again and tap “Show full device usage”. Please share that as a screenshot as well.

Below is an example of my current battery statistics.

Which is a huge improvement on what I had before: