As someone who has the Orange bloatware (Orange Store, Orange Account management, Orange Maps etc.), it is installed only when you have an Orange SIM.
I don’t think (can’t test it) that you might catch those only because you happened to spend a vacation in France and your roaming phone connected to the Orange network (which is the heir of the former state monopoly France Telecom, and as such omnipresent in France).
Besides there are apparently people who are not on Orange and have a similar issue (the person on Swisscom for instance), so it probably isn’t that simple (it usually isn’t).
The only thing we know for sure is that it seem to have a higher occurrence with people who have or had an Orange account. We don’t even know if having an Orange SIM always triggers this problem. I’d be tempted to say no, because as I said Orange is a major player in France and we would had seen a huge flood of panicked Orange users washing over the forum.
You can think what you want while I know its exactly what happensd to 2 user, Orange bloatware after travelling (btw Orange also exist in other countries) and no Orange SIM during travel. The Orange bloatware seem to be the issue and the swisscome user did not confirm about Orange bloatware. And yes there can still be different issues, however the majority of reporta is coming from people who were connected to a Orange network at some point.
Ok, I stand corrected (and surprised). I did say “I think (can’t test it)” for a reason.
As for your suggestion about Orange users, how many of them will read your post(s) before noticing the big notification on their phone telling them A15 is there? I’ve learned to be suspicious, but most people will just say “Cool, Android 15!” and immediately hit “Install”. For the record, the update notification appeared on mine yesterday.
Then this someone is riding their luck to the extreme against any common sense by updating any electronic device under restraining circumstances.
This is not a Fairphone thing, not even a smartphone thing, goodness gracious.
What were you thinking? is quite good, but I’ll raise you a Who in their right mind even does that?
Danny_Morgant is right, this is basic beta testing… They did a big mistake, also considering that this issue was already KNOWN for FP5 who did the upgrade to Android 15 earlier. They made many FP4 unusuable with a software upgrade. That’s extremely bad. With these mistakes FP is losing costumers. That’s the sad truth AnotherElk, and we/they should acknowledge it. If FP thinks that they keep up their business model having only expert debbugers as users…it will be a failure
I installed the Android 15 upgrade on my Fairphone 4 yesterday.
Since then, QuickStep keeps crashing.
As a result, I can no longer remove apps from the home screen. Every time I try, QuickStep crashes and the removed app shortcut reappears.
@RGuatta, are you able to capture a trace with adb logcat --buffer=crash, or LogFox (with Shizuku)? I ask because it allows us to know whether this is unique.
@RGuatta, you’ll need to search for the terms online – adb is the Android Debug Bridge. (I’m a mere user when I’m not debugging a fault, too. We upskill when need be!) If you need assistance with any specific aspect, tag me.
They do beta testing. But Beta testing will not prevent all issues.
An issue slipped through. **it happens. Hopefully beta testing will cover this case next time. But then a different issue will slip through, and users will ask again “How could this even happen?”.
It happens, and you ignore this possibility at your own peril.
They did.
Almost all software vendors do that from time to time, especially with updates, and you as a user know this by concerning yourself to a minimum with the powerful yet flimsy tech in your hands/on your desk/wherever, or you just learn the hard way .
Yes, sadly.
As did other vendors before them.
As will other vendors (or Fairphone again, even if hopefully not) do after this.
Absolutely.
But this is after the fact, so it doesn’t help affected phones very much immediately.
This dumbing down really rubs me the wrong way.
You are not an expert/debugger/developer/nerd/geek/wizard/outlier by having some basic problem awareness. If it would get to this point that you indeed are, then heaven help us all.
“But users shouldn’t have to …”. Nonsense. They should. Most of them are adults responsible for their own actions and the consequences of them.
You can see where an “I’m an innocent cuddly user who doesn’t have to know anything of the world, please cushion me from any blows ” attitude gets you otherwise.
I have empathy for anybody affected. It’s not nice, nobody wants to be in this position. But as they say around my parts … The same way it sounds into the woods it resounds out of the woods. I can be the woods, I can do resound.
Don’t update under time constraints.
Don’t update when on the road.
Take your time, prepare, be comfortable.
Have an internet-capable device you can look up stuff on apart from the phone.
Beforehand, search the internet for possible trouble with the update or upgrade you are going to attempt, you almost certainly will not be the first one to do this. (But in case you by chance are, Godspeed! to you, and let others know how it went.)
Beforehand, make a backup of everything important on the phone to somewhere safe (not the phone).
Be prepared for things going wrong as best as you can.
Make backups regularly. The importance of your data can be measured by how recent the latest backup is. Your phone can break or fail you anytime, not only when updating.
Take a look into your backup. Can you take a look? Can you even restore? The importance of your data can also be measured by whether you can restore it from a backup or not.
Instead, if you’ve another device (laptop, desktop) with a desktop OS (macOS, Windows, or a non-Android Linux distribution), you’ll need to do as xda-developers.com/install-adb-windows-macos-linux describes. It’s a little tedious, but shouldn’t be massively complex.
When that’s done, run ./adb logcat --buffer=crash in the same terminal, and look for the “FATAL EXCEPTION” line above the trace that mentions QuickStep. From that point until the next “FATAL EXCEPTON”, or the end of the log, is the relevant Java trace.
Before updating everybody should reflect on their setup: Is it vanilla or is the original setup (heavily) altered? If it’s the latter be aware that bad things might happen…
Sure your suggestions are all true. Still, the point remains, how is it possible that they had this issue with FP5 in July 2025, solved it with a software update on September 2025, and now (October 2025) they release the software update for FP4 with the same bug that there was originally with FP5?? This is what drives me nuts, not learning from the mistakes already done…
We should be understandable on issues that pop-up with upgrades, but doing the same mistake twice goes beyond that.
Can you show me the source code? Show me that this is exactly the same cause for the issue? Could you at least show me, that it is exactly the same issue?
I guess you don’t, so please stop telling Fairphone did the same mistake twice.
.
” attitude gets you otherwise.