Greatly reduced function of Camera

Help Fairphone 4
,
1

I have a FP4 with E/OS.

Used to be, everything worked, and was just a bit different from my old kraken-samsung.

Then, I think it was, when an update hit, my camera lost some functions. Around Summer time. Tried waiting for a patch, have started googling for help since.

Used to be: The standard Camera App would have a button to switch between wide angle and normal. This button was lost.

The Camera App crashes every time I swith to front Camera.

I cannot Access Camera from Signal or Whatsapp. - meaning I cannot run a Signal-Desktop-App

I’ve tried a factory reset, it might have made it even worse.

Anyhow:

Front Camera works in Open-Camera. So I assume THIS is not a hardware problem. (Open-Camera is really really slow to take a picture though, basically unusable for snapshots)

since the factory reset, the FP4 Camera doesn’t start, FOSS-Camera neither. Some QR-Scanners seem to be able to access Camera.

How can i do a (self)check if it’s hardware or software?
How can i change which camera app is the “main” ?
can i make signal access opencamera instead of eos-app ?

any other hints?

Android 13
/e/ OS 2.4.1-t-20241009439851-officialFP4

Https://forum.fairphone.com/t/greatly-reduced-function-of-camera/112973?u=neeko
Https://forum.fairphone.com/t/greatly-reduced-function-of-camera/112973?u=neeko
2

Hi,

Some suggestions (bearing in mind you’re on /e/ OS)

  • Check out the Murena community. Others have reported problems, such as here, though this topic was resolved by a factory reset and cites /e/ 2.2.
  • You may also be interested by this recent post on development and testing.
  • To perform a hardware check on the standard Fairphone OS (FPOS) you can access “hardware tests” by dialling
    * # * # 2 8 8 6 # * # *
    (use the phone app dialer pad) ; but I rather think that this won’t work with /e/ OS.
  • I’m not sure what you mean by “main” app, just launch the app you want to use. If you mean the default app launched by the “Quickly open camera” function, then
  1. Go to Settings > System > Gestures > Quickly open camera
    and enable the function.
  2. To access the camera quickly, double-press the Power button. The first time you do this, Android should ask you to choose an app from the list of apps installed on the phone.
  • You might try disabling the Camera app so as to force Android to use another app in some cases.
  • If you continue to experience problems I would recommend asking over in the Murena forum and / or filing a bug on their GitLab.
1 Like
3

I doubt it’s a SW problem as a factory reset didn’t help. Maybe the camera app uses a special “function” to activate the camera, which “Open Camera” does not use. So the latter does not crash when this “function” tries to initialize the broken camera.
Problem with camera access might have caused the said button to disappear.
On my /e/OS FP4 all cameras work perfectly fine and none of the problems happen. So I also doubt it’s a general /e/OS problem.
Did you try out the “fairphone camera” (which you can activate in settings->apps)? But as I assume a HW problem, the “fairphone camera” might have the same or similar problems.
If you have bought the FP4 from Murena, you can contact support.
If you have installed /e/OS yourself, then you might try to use a different OS to compare…

4

thank you for this feedback. i think i bought it with E-os preinstalled from fairphone directly .

so it appears:
the fairphone camera doesn’t start. crashes immediately
the e-os camera starts and works in rear mode. although it doesn’t allow to switch between wide angle and normal angle anymore (locked in wide angle it seems)

the opencamera works, lets me switch between rear and front and when taking a picture the angle seems to be somewhat corrected. so the picture gets re-specced into a regular foto. the time from pressing the button to taking the actual picture is quite long.

some qr -code-scanners work. so other apps seem to be able to access a working camera.
signal and whatsapp don’t work, so i cannot qr-code-read a pc-version or send a snap through the app.

now if it is a hardware error: is it the camera module or the front camera, or both of them, and how can i trouble-shoot this?

2868 doesn’t seem to work.
i didn’t find out how to get a crash report when the apps crash.

i will register over at murena and see if i get another answer there. meanwhile if you can help me, i’d be glad.

5

thanks for the reply!

##2886 doesn’t seem to do anything. so i might go over to murena and see if theres a key for the eos.

by “main” i meant the default camera access/ driver / interpreter that signal and whatsapp would use.

volker said it might have been a hardware error, so i try and follow this road as a possibility.

i can stop the eos-camera app, but it seems i can’t deactivate it.

6

In this case I’d recommend to contact official support.

7

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9

I had opened this topic:

but never finished it. only today was i able to solve the problem:

It was the camera main module. so althought the functionality was still somewhat there using open-camera, it was not a software problem, but a hardware-problem.

Just wanted to feedback the solution.

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10

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