Phone freezes, e.g. with Telegram

Hello everyone,

I have the following problems with my Fairphone 2 (OS 19.05.3, Android 7.2):
When I open Telegram and enter a chat with a handful of animated gifs, it freezes after about 1-2 minutes. It happens even faster if I try to use the Cheetah keyboard App. When it freezes, it becomes completely unresponsive for a couple of minutes. I can’t even lock it or reboot it. Only removing the battery works. I have followed the troubleshooting guide in that I manually reinstalled the current OS, so nowadays it crashes less at least. Before that it also crashed when playing Plants vs. Zombies 2. The ads still randomly freeze, though, and this phone seems to have a habit of making freezes so that you can’t even use the buttons or the OS’s menu to tap out of the app.

Regards
Sacrebleu

Please confirm: Forcing a reboot by keeping the power button pressed for 15 to 20 seconds doesn’t work?

(Can’t say much about Telegram or freezes, sorry.)

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I’m not sure if I ever pressed it for more than 10 seconds, so I’ll try that the next time this happens.

Okay I checked it and it did reboot after pressing the button for about 15 seconds.
Also when Telegram froze, my display showed a pattern of colored dots that looked like different parts of what my screen was currently showing. It’s as if there’s a memory-leak for gif-animations or something.

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Ok, if nobody has a specific idea, then I think your options are …

Getting assistance:

  • contact fairphoneangels in your vicinity, if there are any (they are community voluntaries offering support in their spare time). They could perhaps help to identify a particular module causing the problem by swapping, or they could perhaps assist with other options.
  • contactsupport (official Fairphone support)

Generic do it yourself stuff:

Make sure you have a backup of all your important data, then

  • Disassemble the modules of the phone, you are allowed to do that without losing warranty. Clean the contacts connecting the modules with cleaning alcohol, then reassemble the phone. Here’s a nice video …
  • If that doesn’t help, try a manual re-install of the OS (“The user data will not be erased.”)…

https://support.fairphone.com/hc/en-us/articles/207914363-Manually-install-Fairphone-OS-for-the-Fairphone-2

  • If that doesn’t help, try a factory reset ("which will remove all your personal data.") …

https://support.fairphone.com/hc/en-us/articles/115001610926-How-to-make-a-Factory-reset-on-Fairphone-2-

  • If all else fails, here’s how to really start from scratch …

If the last three options (all software) don’t help, it’s most probably a hardware problem, and you would be back to getting assistance.

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Thanks, I’ll try to contact the Fairphone Angels (it’s awesome that those actually exist) and if they can’t help, I’ll send it to the customer support.

  • I don’t feel confident enough to disassemble the whole thing and clean the contacts, even with a video.
  • I already tried the manuall install. I think it helped for Plants vs. Zombies 2, but not for Telegram.
  • I didn’t do a factory reset yet. If this actually has a realistic chance of solving a problem that so many other people have had before me in the last couple of years, I guess I could try it, but my phone is barely a year old and I didn’t install any apps I hadn’t installed on my previous phone with Android 4.3.
  • Installing everything from scratch is something I haven’t tried yet either. But this is so time-consuming that I don’t want to just blindly go ahead and do that without someone confirming to me that this can actually help me.

Given that so many people had similar problems before me and that nobody seems to have ideas besides generic resetting of my OS and/or my data, I’d wager that it’s a bug in the OS, e.g. a memory leak, and that I can’t solve it on my own at all.

By now I did everything except for disassembling it.
And I also tried “lineage-16.0-20190819-microG-FP2.zip”. With lineage, the bug was still there, but the freeze no longer locked the whole OS, so I was no longer forced to reboot.
So that’s something at least, but it also shows me that it’s likely the hardware’s fault.

One question: Is your phone getting hotter than normal before it freezes? You can test this at the point on the backside in the middle of the phone beside the camera or install an app for measuring cpu temp.

@Antimailer
Hey Antimailer,
no, it’s not hotter than normal. Just now I booted it, went into Telegram, waited for a minute and then the phone was frozen, but it was just slightly warm to the touch.

Ok, so we can exclude an error of high temperature.
I recommend to go through the list except the getting hot point at: :pencil2: A little Guide to… Random Reboots
And it is really totally simple to disassemble your fairphone for cleaning contactings.
After you have done all what you can do yourself you should contact #fairphoneangels like @AnotherElk have suggested.

I already contacted an FP angel and he couldn’t help me. I sent the phone in for repairs. If they figure out what the problem is, then I’ll post it here for future reference.

I got the phone back from repairs a few days ago. The result: According to their protocol they installed the newest FP OS on my phone and did nothing else, meaning:

  1. I can’t use WLAN, because that OS bug is still there. Does anyone else have that bug, too? Or am I the only one as well, as mentioned here?
  2. The freeze bug is still there, too. I used mobile data to install Telegram and test it.

This trashy non-support was given to me by the French Cordon Group. I am very close to just returning the phone, demanding my money back and never using this phone ever again. This forum here has been awesome, but now I need someone from the company who is actually capable of doing the super complex task of including the installation of Telegram into their test procedures so that they can actually verify whether or not the bug is gone. Is it possible to get in touch with such a human being in that company? Because if not, then the Fairphone is not for me.

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