Problems with starting and unlocking the phone FP1(U)

funnily, 3 days after my last post the problem happened again (phone getting slower and slower and finally fails to boot at all). i had to perform a hard reset again and this happens approx. every month.

this time, there was an issue just before the problem: the battery fell out the phone and it was unfriendly “switched off”. i don’t remember exactly, but maybe other times, a similar event might have occured before the problem started: phone running out of battery and it wasn’t able to shut down properly…

anyone made a similar observation?

i wasn’t able to read through all threads. are there any solutions to the problem so far?
i’d appreciate a resuming support article very much! (since i’m a little bit tired of performing hard resets every month :wink:

I’m adding @anon90052001, @techaddict and @keesj to make the Fairphone team aware of this issue. Apparently it affects several people.

For me, they didn’t find a solution. As I said, I sent the phone twice to repair, bur all they could do was resetting the phone again.
For me, the solution (at least until now, I just hope it doesn’t occurs again) was to choose which apps I reinstalled and which not. I didn’t install some games that could need a lot of memory. And I left out some apps I almost never used. This was apparently a good idea, since my FP works for almost 2 months without problems. Never before I’ve been able to use it for such a long time!

Hi guys,

Since my last posting my Fairphone has stopped working completely. After starting, the blue FP screen shows up for about 2 minutes, after which the phone goes black. Holding down the power button to get to the unlock screen results in nothing. Just black. I now officially consider my phone broken and I’ve meanwhile switched to my wife’s old Huawei.

My phone is about 1.5 years old, and I gotta be honest: I am very disappointed. I put up with every little glitch that happened along the way as I fully believed in the FP cause. I still do and always will. But I also need a phone that works. And since my FP can’t offer me this right now, I’ve decided to stop using it for the time being.

I’m too busy to always find new possible solutions for this or that problem. I’m not a tech guy, and frankly, I am not interested in these things. I expect FP to create a phone that normal people like myself can use.

Ok, the above came out pretty negative :innocent: Just for the record: FP is awesome and I’ll continue to try solve my the problem once in a while when I have some free time. Meanwhile, dear FP Team: Please work on this!

Thanks!!!

Hi @Chomagerider

Sounds like your phone got soft bricked.
Can you still get into Recovery Mode by holding power and volume up when the phone is shut off and unplugged?
If so you can try a hard reset, but beware that it will erase all your data. There is an option to do a backup in factory mode too, so do that first.

It’s just a hince. Please check your battery to be sure that it is not bloated.
As I found my battery was looking good, but the spintest told me that the battery was bloated.

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I would not advise to do the backup in factory mode. It makes a backup of a phone that doesn’t work. I tried this several times, but when I used the backup to get my data back, I also got the bricked phone back… :frowning:

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Hi all,

Same issues on slow startup and unlocking if password or scheme is wrong.
Must be linked to security. I have a stored ‘user certificate’ so the ‘slide’ option is not allowed for unlocking.
I regularly reset my FP, I didn’t find another solution. But with time it always finishes slowing down again.

I know that starting via the alarm is different, but I avoid it because when switching on with the ‘eye’ breaks the synchronisation process (no account can be sync properly)

If someone has a way to reset the password_fail count or any idea that can avoid a reset, I can still postpone my planned reset for some days!

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I didn’t realize this could be the cause of many of my sync problems… Every morning, I wake up this way!
(And let me just remark here it took a very long time before I learned which symbol meant what, it’s really not so clear and understandable if you’re just waking up! :wink: )

I got the same problem with the alarm breaking the sync… thanks for confirming. My solution on this is a manual restart (not switching off and on) and then the sync works again.

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It seems many of you got the exactly same issue. And I agree with @Sevan that the issue must be somehow related with security settings or certificates.
Would be good if someone of the Fairphone team could react on that - even if it is just to say that this problem is on their TODO list…

In the meantime it would be great if someone of you who is a little bit familiar with terminal commands and adb could verify my findings from 3 weeks ago (see quote above).

@danielsjohan Could you tell us with apps you didn’t reinstall - except for the games (I don’t have any games on my phone and the issue is there anyway). Maybe there was some security-related app…

Good luck, Martin

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I don’t really have many security related apps. There was an app from my insurance company, an app with a cultural events calendar and other small things like that…

For comparision sake, on my FP1:

  • No Android mail account
  • No VPN
  • K9 and Outlook app for mails
  • several social media apps
  • pin unlock (or scheme)
  • user certificate for my owncloud sync
  • battery mood screen when locked
  • fairphone os (several versions with same issue)
  • No google apps installed (never installed)
  • FP1, divided partitioning
  • Amazon appstore

I opened a bug topic now to make it easier for the software devs to help, but I need your collaboration to gather all the information we have up to now. The topic is a wiki post, so everybody can edit it and add useful information:

https://forum.fairphone.com/t/entering-wrong-pin-fills-up-system-log-and-slows-down-fp1-u-at-startup/9635?source_topic_id=8840

@MartinKrenn @danielsjohan @Sevan thank you for the great troubleshooting spirit lately! I feel that there is something going on. We are not walking on the spot! :smiley:

Thanks @Stefan!

I managed to install Android Studio and look in adb logcat : I did not find the lines mentioned by @MartinKrenn

If there are some other tests to be performed, I will be happy to perform those I can.

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Please enter the information in the Bug Report. The Fairphone team cannot be bothered with reading through the whole thread here.

Hi everyone:

It’s nice to see that I’m not alone experiencing these problems. But sad to see that no clear solution has been found for now!
I experience both parts of the problem: the Google Play Store is very very slow when accessing the “My installed apps” screen. After a while, the screen finally appears but apps’ updates take hours and are clearly not smooth at all… I thought that it was linked with the Play Store but I get 2 Play Store automatic updates recently and it didn’t solve the problem.
I also have the unlocking screen bug. I’m using the scheme option and it’s really better not to make a mistake in entering the scheme if I don’t want to wait minutes to access the phone again.
But the two problems seem not to be linked as I read in previous posts.
I recognize that I have a lot of apps installed but I try to have the minimum useful awaken. Maybe it’s important to say that my phone is secured by Sophos. I wonder if the problem did not start when I switched from Avast to Sophos but nobody seem to make the same connection. Should you wish to get more details on the apps I’ve installed, just let me know and I could give the complete list.
I did not try to make a complete clean install of the OS but maybe I will do this for the 1st birthday of my phone if the problems persist without any hope of solution.

Thank you for the help already provided and thank you in advance for anything you could do on these issues!

Thomas.

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This is probably your best chance to solve the problem. Afterwards, install apps that a possibly related one by one (like Sophos) to locate the problem.

I finally didn’t have the choice to do a complete clean install because ten days ago my Fairphone was completely stuck at startup screen.
This was a good thing because I’ve discovered that some updates were never made on apps. Moreover, now that I know how I use the phone in the daily life, I’ve adjusted the settings to better meet my requirements. And I’ve only reinstalled the apps that I consider strictly necessary at this time.
The situation is back to normal but I’ll let you know if anything goes wrong.

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