I’ve recently received a Fairphone 6 I’ve directly updated to android 16. After several days of usage I’ve noticed gmail notifications are missing. I ran some test with my previous phone, a pixel 5, and the fairphone and I sent mail to this gmail account. On the pixel 5 the mail synchronisation is instant and I had the gmail notification. On the fairphone, the mail synchronisation did not occur, no mail notification and when I opened gmail app, I can see the refresh of the account (and the test mail) but no gmail notification triggered. After some checks I can notice the gmail synchronisation status was far behind the current date.
I attach some screenshots to explain the problem: one may notice the last refresh of gmail is dated from 04/08/26 and the last non read mail is dated of the 04/09/26 at 09:21 AM. A last screenshot shows the automatic sync parameter is enabled.
So my question is: do we have some gmail synchronisation issue on Android 16 ?
side note: I tried with phone migration from my pixel 5 and with a fresh cleaned device, always the same issue is noticed.
When everything is properly set-up I assume that this is the reason and I would disable wifi shortly to see if mobile data trigger a notification/synchronization
The IMAP account is on another mailbox and is not affected by the bug (refresh is periodically done and I can notice mail when I receive one). The issue affects only the Gmail accounts.
Since, you’ve already tried factory resetting the phone (if I understood you correctly), you can try going into Settings > Apps > See all apps > Gmail > App battery usage and check if background usage is enabled. If yes, then click the setting and select “Unrestricted”. This might solve the issue if it’s related to background process management.
If it doesn’t help, I don’t have any more ideas unfortunately. Maybe someone else has experienced this and will be able to help. Otherwise, I recommend reporting the issue to support through the official channels: Contact us | Fairphone
Everything is configured accordingly to the google FAQ
I suspect the notification issue is the consequence of another one: I think there is a mail synchronisation issue and the frequency of the gmail account refresh does not work. As the first screenshots show the gmail account is not refresh since multiple hours. When I force the account refresh I receive notifications of unread messages received since the previous refresh. I will continue to dig toward that and do some comparaison with my pixel 5 and another lineageOS 23 device to check if I observe the same behavior.
Do you happen to be using battery saver? That could affect background synchronization. Also make sure that auto-sync is enabled (Settings > Passwords, Passkeys and Accounts > on the bottom there is a toggle).
Well I noticed that with even Android 15. I assumed it was and Gmail bug rather than Fairphone. It sometimes still happens, and gets fixed on its own. Does not happen with any other app (like Outlook or Proton mail).
You could try to update Gmail or reinstall (I think you can remove all updates and bring them back).
