Hello,
While we have a range of Fairphones 3 in the family, I just recuperated an original Fairphone 1, of which I even had forgotten the unlocking.
I then decided to reset it entirely, as described here, and am now facing a brand new system, but I find myself unable to download anything, and even, most of the webpages I reach do not load as https doesn’t work.
Is there a way to get out of this?
I believe what I ned is some sort of F-Droid apk, from which I’d download everything I need.
Any advice to a supporter from day 1?
make sure the device’s clock is synchronised with an internet server in the phone settings, because the device knowing the exact time and date is necessary for establishing HTTPS connection.
For browsing web pages, Firefox could help as it usually comes with its own set of certificates instead of the system ones. But I’m not sure if it’s the same on mobile.
Hello @Ingo , and sorry for replying so late -I got a significant medical condition since August.
The use case I have with the FP1 is to install on it a ‘relay’ application for Briar, a P2P open source messenger that I’m using on my Fairphone 3. P2P comms are interesting but they demand both partners to be connected at the same time ( or all the time, which drains batteries).
Briar to my knowledge is the only app that solves this by proposing to use an old phone to run a relay, called “Briar Mailbox”, that just listens al: the time and downloads incoming messages without even decoding them, then relays them to one’s real instance of Briar when we go online.
The FP1 would definitely sit idle at home and perform just this task.
The situation I’m in is sad, because I did recuperate the FP1 from one of my sons (who switched like me to FP3s long ago) and everyone forgot the code to unlock it. So I decided to reset it competely, a procedure I found here.
But now I discover no connection at all is possible with the default browser, no apk installation is possible, and for instance while I managed to load a (relatively) old apk for F-Droid, it refuses to install, probably because it’s too recent…
@peci1 Thank you for this advice. I’m going to search for the oldest possible apk for Firefox, to see if it installs (I have to separately download the apks then move them to the FP1 with an USB key, that’s toe only way I have to connect to the outside! )
Thank you @noodlejetski -I just checked this and indeed it is synchronized. The strange behavior I get when trying to connect with the old prebuilt browser is the following : in some rare servers, there is indeed something that starts showing in the page (for instance, the Fairphone site that was preset at the time shows what is probably the list of links at the left) but clearly the display is grossly incomplete, and basically all the links that I click land on https urls that all announce “webpage unavailable”.
I tried to manually remove the ‘s’ in ‘https’ but this just doesn’t work, the display automatically gets bacl to https, and locks…
An alternative way to install it would be to download the APK on a computer and then install it via the adb command line tool using a USB connection between the computer and the FP1.
in the developer options of the FP1 enable “USB debugging” (or maybe it was called “ADB debugging” back then, I don’t remember)
connect the FP1 to your computer with a USB cable
type adb install mailbox.apk into the command line windows of your computer (assuming the platform tools from the earlier step have been added to the $PATH and you have changed the current working directory to the one where the APK file is stored) and press enter
on the FP1 there should then be a dialog that asks you if you want to allow access via USB; you have to grant the access
I understand, although I never needed to install the adb tool up to now.
But is this really different from what I did for F-Droid, i. e. get the apk on a computer, then copy it on an USB stick, then connect the stick to the FP1 and copy the apk there, then try to install the apk?
Because this, fails -installation is refused (my uncompetent idea is that the F-Droid apk I got is to recent, but I’m not sure)
[edit] I managed to get the ‘mailbox’ apk on the FP1 by using an utility that creates a server on the FP3 that sirves just that file. But then, the FP1 declares that the installing attempt fails (‘a problem arised when analyzing the package’)
Still, I’m going to try the same method with F-Droid ‘old’ packages… if I find some old enough…
I have to admit I don’t know if that makes any difference at all. It’s just a wild guess that maybe the adb install can bypass stuff that would block installing the APK on the phone itself.
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