FP6 acting on its own when connected to Car over bluetooth

Help Fairphone 6
1

Hello,

first a bit of context on my phone setup : Fairphone 6 with e/os, no google apps, microG setup for 1 game that needed connection through Google to get my save, Fairphone original privacy screen protection.

I recently acquired a car with Android auto capabilities. Previously I used to connect my phone to a bluetooth to radio emitter adapter to get my music and calls during driving and never noticed anything weird.

Since I got my new car and connected it over bluetooth, I noticed that my phone started to get activity on its own. dezooming my gps view, trying to get some right or left swipes, and more concerning, getting the notification screen down, getting into settings and trying to activate/deactivate permissions for apps as if it’s trying to get something done.

I do not notice the same behavior when connected to any other bluetooth device, nor when connected to the car through usb only.

After noticing it the first time my reflex was to reboot the phone and before reconnecting it again with bluetooth deactivate adb debugging over network and usb (I had it activated because I use scrcpy and other tools on my computer).

I read the topics about ghost touch but the behavior I am noticing seems too accurate in terms of intent, the phone always ends up in the settings app trying to fumble with app permissions.

Is there any way to monitor where the instructions come from, and what are they trying to achieve ? I did try to get Android auto run on the first connection and ended up on the red error screen that told me I needed google apps, which I exited because I didn’t want them on my phone. After noticing the behavior repeating with adb disabled I went myself into the settings to disable the android auto app as I thought I might come from here, but my phone still does the same thing over and over again.

2

To be even more sure it’s no ghost touch but planned actions by some process, you might consider to (temporarily) enable this developer setting:

Screenshot_20260329-180741_Settings
Screenshot_20260329-180741_Settings1080×483 20.9 KB

3

Hello, Thank you for your answer.

I have been abroad for a week and didn’t use my car. I did connect to older cars that did not have support for modern Bluetooth capabilities other than calling and media playback. I saw no occurrence of the problem for that amount of time.

Getting back today I connected to my car and instantly saw the problem occurring again. The touches that were displayed were mostly multitouch points, some were multitouch swipes. The debugging options which show coordinates of the taps did not give any details and I did not see any indication of something special being sent like volume_up or alike.

4

Hello,

I have discovered the reason why my phone was acting this way. I noticed the difference between all the environments I tried to replicate the problem, the one where it occurred was indeed in my car but more precisely on the phone designed space which has a wireless charging system. Nothing was happening in my hands or when placed anywhere else in the car.

Maybe the wireless charging caused the phone to detect touches, and when driving and slipping it caused the swipes.