Unfortunately, I have to agree. My everyday phone is now an old OnePlus 5. It just works. It’s smoother to use, and two-factor authentication works reliably. No crashes when charging. Okay, no 5G. But that’s not important at the moment, as long as 5G SA isn’t standard. I’ll use it for as long as I can. By then, the FP5 may have become usable. Will I buy another Fairphone? At the moment, I don’t think so.
The fact that so many users are reporting here is actually a good sign. They want to use a Fairphone and want nothing more than to be taken seriously as users. All these users want to give Fairphone another chance, otherwise they would simply buy a new device and quietly disappear. All those complaining are disappointed, but not yet lost as users or customers. Fairphone! Seize the opportunity! Unfortunately, they are not reading this. My support request on this issue only received a meaningless standard response that did not address the problem. FP seems to be completely unaware of this phenomenon.
I just created an account to say this issue has gotten worse since the last update.
Memory usage profiling doesn’t help with anything, restarting doesn’t help, and now my music app crashes even a minute after I lock the phone and stop touching it.
I already dissuaded all my friends from buying a Fairphone because of this. This issue is absolutely unbearable and being treated like this as a customer is a complete deal-breaker for ever buying another.
Well, I would say that Fairphone is actually very responsible. Just as other affected brands are responsible for providing their customers with functioning devices (since that is what they were sold as). If something goes wrong, well, that’s just the way it is. But then it should be fixed. And if it happens with other manufacturers too, you can’t say it’s just the imagination of oversensitive Fairphone users. What does Fairphone say about this? I haven’t received a reply to my support request (apart from the confirmation of receipt). I almost said: as usual.
Like it has been reported in this thread (Android 15 improves battery life), AccuBattery is both reporting that a task killer is stopping the measurements (even when I placed the app in Unrestricted mode on battery optimization) and charging and discharging sessions often display multiple consecutive small charging/discharging sessions (as seen on the attached screenshot).
These seem to show Fairphone is not the only brand to suffer from this. Android is clearly becoming more and more aggressive with memory and battery management.
That said, the problem does not seem as big on bare androids or pixels. So yeah, there is also a component coming from each manufacturer’s software overlay, like buggy implementations or features removed by the manufacturers’ développers.
In the case of the FP5, I did not have this annoying problem on Android 14. And it seems FP5 on Android 15 is missing some features to deactivate background app killing, so the Fairphone devs should at least get that feature back in…
Factory Reset doesn’t fix it. My FP5 Mainboard had to be swapped but no change.
Android 14 had the same memory wipe problem
Using a Google Camera port will always trigger a memory wipe
Also charging the phone seems to trigger a memory wipe
I like my Fairphone 5. The hardware is fine for everyday use. Battery life is okayish when using Battery Saver.
But the FairphoneOS not working correctly even being a slightly modified Vanilla Android is not acceptable.
I would have changed to a Custom Rom already but dealing with SafetyNet/PlayIntegrity is just more annoying.
Edit:
I haven’t tested it much, but there is a setting in the Developer Options called: Suspend execution for cached apps
Disabling it could maybe help with multitasking but increase power consumption.
I don’t think it wasn’t mentioned yet.
Huh. Can confirm. GCam does kill all background apps. I never made that connection. However, I’m not noticing the same with charging.
Opening gcam while a floating youtube player is playing video, turns the video green for a few seconds, before recovering. I always assumed the camera app is just that heavy. With all that image processing and whatnot. Not to mention, it’s unofficial, so whatever issue it causes, I don’t want to blame FP for it.
I’ve had this issue for a year now (there was another thread following this problem). I upgraded to the Fairphone 6, and the new phone doesn’t have this issue. A bit of a shame though.
That is exactly what happened to me after installing that update. Phone worked fine for about 2 days and now I’m back to apps being killed as soon as I look away. But what you’re describing fits the behavior I see as well.
Hello, today I had another annoying situation related to this when trying to set up a new Rocket Chat server on the app. It went like this:
Was browsing the page with Rocket Chat server URL.
Opened/changed to Rocket Chat app, setup asked for server URL.
Swapped back to browser and it was killed, reloaded the page. Copied the URL.
Swapped to Rocket Chat, pasted the URL, proceeded and asked me to provide username and password.
Swapped to 1Password to fetch the credentials, copied username.
Swapped to Rocket Chat was killed, resumed with asking the server URL again.
Swapped to browser which was killed, reloaded the page, copied server URL.
Swapped to Rocket Chat, pasted URL, asked for username and password.
Swapped to 1Password which was killed had to search credentials again.
Quit doing this.
If we stick to only two apps switching it seems to barely work. If you push further the whole thing breaks down, seemingly.
I am just sharing my experience in order to be able to help somehow. It isn’t this that’s making me leave Fairphone, the basic still works and I hope there will be a fix/remediation for this eventually. I really like to have a repairable phone that’s concerned with sustainability, I also own a Fairbuds and I am probably buying a FP6 for my wife soon. Even if I switch to e/OS/ later on.
I am more annoyed by the increasingly faster enshittification of Android by Google (Gemini AI, personal data hoarding, several apps worsening with algorithmic dark patterns) than this, to be honest.
I am also suffering from agressive background app killing. It is getting so bad that I can barely listen to music or podcast on Spotify. I cannot use 2FA apps, nor can I use banking apps. And I am losing patience and faith in the Fairphone dev teams, which seems more focused on releasing new products, than making the existing ones meeting consumers expectations and needs.
My question is: has anyone tried and succeeded in getting a replacement phone or a refund? If yes, how long did it take to get a new phone or your money back?
A replacement wouldn’t help in this context because you would get the same phone with the same problem.
I returned my small Fairbuds over a support ticket once but this was after 2 months of usage or so. You can try to open a ticket but currently they are also very slow to process these.
I think I read in this thread and in reddit that there are users of FP5 who are not experiencing this issue. So there is reason to hope that my FP is part of a faulty batch.
Under DE law (where I bought my FP5), I am entitled to replacement or refund if my phone doesn’t fulfil basic tasks expected from it up to 12 months after purchasing it.
As I said, you can try and perhaps they will process it eventually (as they should). But I am not convinced that this issue is hardware related. I think it depends on what apps you use. For example, I usually have no problems but I mostly don’t rely on more than app running at the same time, except Spotify or Podcast Addict in the background while surfing with Firefox. But when I want to use one of my banking apps (DKB), everything else is killed, even Spotify or Podcast Addict. On the other hand DKB is killed immediately when switching to another app. In rare cases one app survives.
When I use the App from Bank Norwegian or Postbank this does not happen.
What I want to say is, if you have other apps installed that have some background services enabled it could easily be that you are affected more likely. I briefly investigated the memory usage of my phone and I think the killing starts when the memory is half full.
