I’ve switched to /e/ during the holidays and all the memory issues are gone. Apps do not reload on switching and no matter how intensely I use the phone, music just won’t stop playing in background. In short: The phone behaves as all my previous non-FP did before.
I just wanted you to know, in case someone else is willing to switch OS bc of the bugs in FPOS. The memory issue is not hardware or A15 related IMO, as it is not present on /e/ (=A15) on the exact same phone.
Thanks for all the support in this forum and let’s hope FP can sort it all out in 2026
I haven’t seen any improvements to this issue including on fairphone 5, since we got the 15 update… Using the phone with certain types of apps where closing destroys whatever you’re working on, is unbearable
Hello
Following the comment of @MikVV I have moved your post to FP5 dedicated thread.
Please let me know if you intentionally posted in FP4 dedicated topic.
Hi, i dont know how many people are affected. Maybe some people do Not Post Here. So i decided to actuslly Post Here and want to say, that i am also affected. Flor me IT IS annoying, because i like to Go running with music, but often either the music Stopps or - more annoyingly - the running App stops and i can not monitor pace, distance etc.
I can confirm that I am facing the same issues. I have had the phone for almost 2 years now and this really seems to be something from the past year or so. It really is as bad as not being to enter 2FA codes in my authenticator app and switching back to the browser as the page will reload again.
I have tried multiple suggestions in this thread but none of them really worked. Sometimes after a reboot it keeps apps loaded for a few minutes but then it goes back to killing them.
For reference: my poco x3 pro with 8 gigabytes of ram on LineageOS has a memory usage of 2.8GB when opening the same apps as this Fairphone 5. The Fairphone has closer to 5.8. Fairphone 6 on E/OS also has 5.8GB in use, but as of now does not have the apps being killed.
I got my FP5 back in 2024. I upgraded to A15 as soon as it was available and at no point did I have issues as described in this post. Just wanted to say not everyone seems to be affected
I can somewhat confirm the issue. For instance when doing MFA then I often need two trials: In the first one the MFA app needs to load which makes the browser go out of the memory which is why it needs to reload when switching back to it. In the second trial it seems to help that the MFA app was already loaded from the previous trial, so I can proceed.
Running Osmand navigation and something to listen to (AntennaPod, Total Commander, Spotify) was okayish recently, navigation has never stopped in 4-5 hours and audio only sometimes (during the last trip it stopped after about 3-4 hours).
So for me it could be better, but it could be worse as well. And for the records: It’s one of the first FP5 and it has seen every update since then.
Another “me too” post I’m afraid - I’ve tried the battery manager setting and the developer options so will report back if there are any changes, but very frustrating to have this affect me in my 2nd year of being FP5 owner, and the support and ai chatbot do not live up to the hype of the brand.
I might have found a fix, at least it worked for me as I was having an issue with my Banking App always closing all other apps (so also the browser) which made it impossible to do an online purchase with my phone.
So I activated the toggle “Disable child process restrictions” in the developer settings. Now it works flawlessly without killing apps all the time.
Oh, wow, the whole phone seems faster after disabling these restrictions. Let’s see if this drains the battery or has any other disadvantages. Might be too good to be true…
For those who still want to keep using Android: we’re almost at 100 contributions on this topic, and we now know it’s software related. Maybe it’s time for the FP team to take a serious look at this? What’s the best method to raise awareness on the topic?
Thank you for this analysis, it makes perfectly sense. How the hell can a smartphone like this have such memory pressure? The memory leak issue sounds promising, but I cannot go further on this with my current Android knowledge. Anyone?
Hello
There are like fifty or so contributors to this topic and the Fairphone representative officially confirmed working on this.
The best way to raise awareness and provide more information is in my opinion to submit a ticket to support. I think it’s even more important as people are experiencing the issue differently, some can’t perform simple operations and some are doing just fine. Unfortunately I have no means to establish which group is bigger as the forum relies on individual stories. Like I hardly experience any issues and am able to confirm my operations on a phone in 99% of cases.
Keeping an eye on this though.
