My phone’s been glitchy since I bought it, and now it is frozen. I can get into whatsapp by pulling down the top menu and clicking on a message, but my home screen is blank and when I swipe it brings me into the essentials screen, even though I’m not in essentials, and when i click into any of the buttons on the essentials screen, it takes me back to the blank (green swirls) screen. When I do go into the essentials mode, it is the same deal.
Welcome to the community forum 
You’ll need to restart the phone.
If the problem continues, sounds like it might be a good idea to do a full reset. Make sure you have copies of all your files including photos and other data, since a reset would wipe the phone.
How long have you had the phone?
Could you indicate the OS Build number?
Hello, thanks for your reply.
I have had the phone since July. The Build number is FP6.QREL.15.148.0
Yes I had restarted the phone a number of times and it didn’t work.
I tried the factory reset and it worked for 1 day, I downloaded all my apps again and set up all my accounts again and then a day later, just earlier today, it returned to the same problem.
The lock screen says it’s in Essentials mode, even though the side button has not been activiated and when i swipe to unlock the screen it just goes to the blank wallpaper. I can only access apps if a notification appears and I can pull down the top bar and click on the notification.
Another possible solution I read on the forum was to take out the sim, but nothing changed, so it appears to be the operating system?
Your further help would be greatly appreciated. I go away for a month on 4th november for work and desperately need to have a working phone by that time.
Thanks,
Lynda
If the phone worked normally for a few hours until you started re-installing your apps, it sounds to me as though something in one of the apps is triggering Moments.
We can perhaps verify that by using Safe Mode. Follow the steps in the linked page, just to see if that enables you to use the standard apps of the phone “normally”. You won’t have access to the additional apps that you’ve installed: the idea is to find which one of those is causing the problem, but you’ll probably not have time to go through all the elimination procedure before you travel, and the first objective is to have a working phone.
Another approach would be to “disable” Moments completely. This can be done in two ways:
-
Go to Settings > Apps > Default apps.
Tap “Home app” and choose “Quickstep” (which is the FPOS standard launcher, or Home screen).
OR -
Go to Settings > Sound and vibration > Do Not Disturb > Schedules.
Turn off all the schedules. There may be more than one called “Essentials”.
Then go to Settings > Switch, and choose Do Not Disturb. This will effectively tell the Moments Switch to use DND, but DND has no active schedule, so the Switch should do nothing.
Either of these two methods will hopefully at least let you use the phone “normally” until the root cause of the problem can be worked out.
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Hi!
I’m having issues with the Switch on my FP6. It started a month ago when I got stuck in the Essentials without being able to escape it, I then found a post saying I could go into settings and change the Default App for Home app to Quickstep which I did and it fixed the problem temporarily. Although now I simply can’t use the Switch at all, when triggering it it just doesn’t do anything 
When setting the Default app to FP Moments it just gets the phone stuck in the essentials again, even if the switch is off. I also tried moving the switch up and down when stuck in the essentials to no avail. I got stuck in Essentials a few times again, but thankfully I knew the fix!
I also tried to reset the app by going into Fairphone Moments and deleting the storage, setting the Default App back to Moments and when switching it to Moments it instantly locks the phone into essentials!
I’d also like to change the Switch’s action to Do Not Disturb mode but when entering the settings for the Switch specifically the settings app closes immediately. Sometimes showing Switch Button Settings is not responding, sometimes not (the settings app always closes though).
Is there a fix to it?
Thanks in advance 
Welcome to the forum 
You might like to read around the forum a bit on this subject.
https://forum.fairphone.com/search?context=topic&context_id=126812&q=Switch%20moments%20order%3Alatest&skip_context=true
Please let us know if one of those topics describes your problem, so we can add your post to that topic.
EDIT 2025-10-20 - I realise that @leaj 's problem is very similar to the one reported by @LyndaS on 15 October, so I suggest we merge the two topics. As LyndaS’s is the older, I’ll move leaj’s over to LyndaS’s, but I’ll also change the title to better allude to the Switch and Moments. I hope that’s all right for both of you.
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Thank you, that did indeed solve the problem for now - I can now use my phone for my travels. Very much appreciated. I see from the comment below it may not be the end of the story, so I’ll have to come back to it when I return to get to the route of the problem.
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That’s good.
Let us know when you’re able to pick up the thread. Hopefully by then there may be some progress.
Use my handle @ in your post to make sure I see it.
Have a good trip.