New user - A couple questions about (FP4 and Android 11) usage

I’d appreciate if somebody could help me with those small issues.
Prior Samsung user, I’ve received my FP4 a couple days ago and am generally very pleased with it (a little less with the software layer though, it does have some rough edges when you’re used to Samsung’s streamlined launcher). Nothing severe though, it just needs some getting used to I hope.
Anyway:

  1. How do you turn the loudspeaker on when receiving a call (so that everybody can hear)? If I initiate the call there is a clearly labeled button on FP4’s default dialer, but when I was called yesterday there only was a stylized blue receiver to hang up. I’m even wondering if it was the same app. Strange indeed, there should be no difference, who else is handling incoming calls if not the supplied “phone” app? Now I did install “Simple Contacts Pro”, as the default “contacts” app isn’t able to handle groups and shows me all my 214 contacts in one looong alphabetical list, work, subcontractors, family, friends, all happily mixed together… But “Simple Contacts Pro” wouldn’t handle calls, would it?
    Speaking of calls, I have problems picking up a call: Phone rings, the little red and green “Reply/Reject” buttons appear, I click on the green one, both buttons disappear and the phone keeps ringing! I have to open the status drawer, to find a fresh set of Reply/Reject buttons, so I can at last pick up the call. What am I doing wrong? Why does the first set of buttons ignore me?
    There might be a connection between those two issues, as they would be easily explained by having two dialers competing over handling my phone’s calls, but how do I check (and most importantly fix!) this? I’m quite computer-savvy, but an armchair user when it comes to phones…

  2. Is there a manual for the default camera app? I spent an hour exploring it and am a little perplexed, as things never seem to work twice the same way, and menus apparently change for no clear reason (example: I found a “Hi pixel” option in the “HDR” menu, it wasn’t there later on. Besides, what’s the difference between HDR and HDR-A (“A” means “automatic” I’d guess, but what exactly does it do automatically?..).).

  3. On my previous phone I used a gallery app named Quickpic, which had the wonderful feature of working in “Explorer mode”, i.e. showing only pictures from the current folder: To see pictures from any subfolder (or another folder) you had to manually navigate to it (click).
    My problem is I have many hundreds of pictures on my phone, and if the gallery app shows them all at the same time, I am bound to scroll for hours to get to the ones I’m looking for. Does anybody know of a gallery app working like that (free or commercial)? Unfortunately Quickpic has been bought up a couple years and has severely gone down the drain since…

  4. What does the “My Fairphone” Android app do? I launched it but it immediately asked me to log in so I quit. I don’'t like being asked for things without even a mere greeting.

  5. All right, I’ll show my age: How do you turn GPS on and off in Android 11? On my old Android there was the option in “Location” to either use high precision location with GPS, or just low precision only using cell towers and WiFi, no GPS, the point being battery drain.
    I’m spending most of the day inside a building, so having the GPS receiver running would only be wasting my battery. I’d rather only turn it on when I actually need it (a couple times a year…). Is this still possible, or does GPS have to run 24/7 on modern Androids?

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You can either

  • go into Settings > Location (Einstellungen > Standort) or
  • customize the quick settings (which you get by swiping down twice from the top of the screen) with the little pencil symbol in the bottom left corner of the quick settings. You can then hold and pull new tlles (Kacheln) from the bottom into the selection at the top.

Thanks, the Settings/Location menu doesn’t seem to mention GPS, the only things I see there are apps’ location permissions, the WiFi/Bluetooth scanning option, and alert permissions.

As for turning Location off altogether (through settings or the status drawer shortcuts), this is something I don’t want to do since several apps start complaining or not working (Weather apps etc). I’d rather have location on and manually configure which apps can access it or not. But location doesn’t need GPS to know in which city I am. Cell towers and WiFi IDs are enough for that…

I’m a former user of QuickPic, too. It’s been a long time so I don’t remember if I’ve every used the explorer mode.

My guess is that you can “just” try a few different gallery apps and see which comes closest to what you need.
Personally, I have switched to https://www.piktures.app/ and there you can at least select “albums”, e.g. just camera pics, only images in the screenshots or downloads folder. It probably doesn’t correspond 1:1 to folders and it doesn’t feel like a file explorer (like the Files app or Total Commander for example).
But for me it solved the issue that other gallery apps provided no way to look at my “real/relevant” images without having them swamped by all the cover art of the 1400 mp3 albums I have on my SD card. So the use case sounds somewhat familiar.

I did that, I wasted an afternoon trying out a dozen gallery apps (noticing that many were actually the same app with a different name…). No luck, that’s why I asked here in case somebody knows about one.

My problem is they all show all the folders containing pictures at the same time, resulting in an endlessly long lineup of 60+ folders with wildly various contents, randomly sorted, making it a pain to scroll through to find the one I’m actually looking for.
My pictures are properly filed in a logical tree structure with many, many branches, and I definitely don’t want to see all the branches simultaneously! Imagine your file explorer showing every last folder on your computer at the same time - Useless… Some more sophisticated apps allow to sort by type or metadata, but that doesn’t help in this case, I need them sorted by physical path.

I checked www.piktures.app, but it doesn’t seem to do what I need, and I have no use for what it actually does (cloud, editing, secret space).
I just need an app which is capable of showing only one folder at a time, while allowing me to navigate to any existing subfolders if I want to… :frowning_face:
Thanks anyway.

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I think location is = GPS and when its off apps would not be able find a location.
You can give permissions to each app separately, in the settings of each app or at first start of the app

Did you try the Gallery from Simple Mobile Tools? I have different folders for Camera, WhatsApp, screenshots etc pp.

The Simple Mobile Tools Contact app is no dialer, this is a separate app also available from Simple Mobile Tools

The My Fairphone App does a lot for me unnesary things, the only probably helpful is that you can access your support tickets and probably easily the system tests, however you don’t need the app for this. I think there is a topic here in the forum about the app, maybe do some search.

I don’t think there is any special manual for the Camera App, however yes A always indicates automatic. There are some short video tutorials on Instagram that might provide some information.

Just checked the Simple Mobile Tools contacts app and I can create groups and either put a new contact directly in it or also add all other contacts to it later.

Btw the Simple Mobile Tools Apps are all available as Pro Version “for free” in the F-Droid Store

You didn’t waste anything, you just put some work into what you want. Now although I don’t want such I will ‘waste’ my tiem trying to help :slight_smile:

UPDATE:

Well using the Simple Gallery app I set it to show only the images I want.

For example: The gallery app will search for all images in (Camera, Documents or wherevere as show them all.

I have my own Custom folder wher I put images I want to keep and that folder has subfolders. If I select the Image folder all the rest are in the heirachy I set.

Now when I open Gallery next time, as long as I haven’t ‘cleared it from memory’ all I see is the first index of my sub folders, so you can set that from one to ***

It seems to work fine, but it you wipe the app from memory and have to open it again from scratch all that is needed is one click on your custom image folder.

So what happened to the old (fairly precise in a city) location method using cell towers and WiFi?

I did, I even have the paid version. It’s good, but it does show all the folders at the same time too, and as I said further up, it makes it unusable for quickly finding a picture. I see everything, vacation pictures, work ones, reference ones, all higgledy-piggledy in a huge bottomless list…

Yes, I saw that, still the GUI which pops up when I receive a call is different. Strange.

Uh. A manual would be nice - although a more explicit UI would be even better. It’s not like it has a lot of options, so why don’t they make them easier to guess? Anyway. I can shoot pictures, that’s the main thing.

Yet another? “Simple Contacts Pro” does create groups, and I spent an hour re-grouping my contacts yesterday. BTW I don’t mind paying if I get some value for it… I’ll check it nevertheless, I need to get my new phone to be the lean & mean efficient tool I need it to be.
– Edited: “Simple Mobile Tools contacts app” = “Simple Contacts Pro”!.. Duh. Need a dunce hat smiley…

About the Fairphone app, I tried it out after eventually finding which login it wanted. It seems useless as it is (unless I need to contact support), for the forum I’d rather use Firefox and the hardware tests have a big warning on them so I’d rather leave them alone…
Thanks!

That would be true if I eventually had found what I was looking for…

Sorry, you lost me here. What did you exactly do?
If I select the root folder, I can only navigate 2 levels deep, after that it doesn’t show (detect?) the following subfolders: If I select Root, I can see Root/sub1 and Root/sub2, but if now I click on Root/sub1, I see any pictures in there, but Root/sub1/sub1A and Root/sub1/sub1B aren’t shown. They only appear in the endless list on top level…

If you’re using the Google Phone app, after picking up the call, when you want to turn on the speaker, just hold the phone in front of you so that you can see the screen. The screen should turn on, showing various options including a “Speaker” option.

There are three buttons. Reply, Reject and a phone in between them. Slide the phone to Reply or to Reject.

In that case use the Files app instead of a Gallery app. Navigate to the required folder and tap the first image file. Once you’re seeing an image you can swipe right or left to see the other images in that folder.
To use your folders in comfort, just connect the phone to a computer by USB and use the computer’s file exploring software.
Otherwise, if you want to use gallery apps like Google Photos then you’ll be using the tools provided by the app. In particular, GP allows creation of albums which might replace your current file-system approach. See the “Library” rubric.

If you’re running the standard Android distributed with FP4 (currently FPOS FP4.FP4G.A.170) then Location will always use GPS when turned on. What you can turn off is Google Location Accuracy which in addition uses info about Wi-Fi networks, mobile networks and maybe other stuff to improve the accuracy of the estimated position.

Personally I turn Location off just about all the time. My weather app allows manual input of location data and allows configuration of more than one location. That wouldn’t help you if you move around a lot of course.

I’m using the Simple Gallery app, but it maybe that I set the folders within the app not preset on an SD card.

I see. My pics are on the SD card, and the tree is many, many levels deep. Definitely beyond the apparent parsing limit of Simple Gallery Pro. Maybe some future version will fix that (although I wouldn’t hold my breath).
Thanks nevertheless.

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I’ll try editing my SD in a PC with folders I want and try again :slight_smile:

Nah, thanks a lot but it’s okay, it doesn’t work, I tried…

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