It’s accessibile only to beta testers.
Some weeks ago the Fairphone developers team opened a subscription form and some of us sent the participation.
3 Likes
Thanks for the thread, I have the same issue, I do think is related to temperatures or sun exposition (light sensor?) but I have opened a support ticket.
To everybody reading and seeing this issue: open up a ticket please! We need to pump up the priority on this. It makes it unusable under the sun.
6 Likes
I also just submitted a ticket for this really nasty problem! Phone is unusable outdoors these days in spring/summer 
7 Likes
I’m the original reporter, so it’s rather hypocritical of me to not have reported this directly to Fairphone yet. My reason for taking so long, however, was that
made it problematic. I’ve properly report it at https://support.fairphone.com/hc/en-us/requests/1008154 now though. XD
1 Like
Yep, same random screen dimming problem here, with A12.
So yeah, screen dimming and ghost inputs… If it were not for the environment that I bought this phone, I would have thrown it out of the window.
4 Likes
@Dajo Please don’t throw it out of the window, that’s exactly the kind of thing we work to prevent 
Jokes aside, I’m sorry to hear that using the Fairphone 4 has been frustrating for you. Ghost inputs can really get in the way of everyday tasks.
Contact our Support team and they’ll be happy to arrange a repair for you.
Regarding the dimming screen, our Software team is currently investigating a couple of different root causes.
- Temperature - I can confirm that the screen is dimmed when one of the temperature sensors reports a high temperature. We are looking into adjusting the temperature threshold so it stops triggering under normal operating conditions.
- Proximity - We’ve received reports that sometimes direct sunlight causes the proximity sensor to report a near object, even when it’s completely unobstructed. This can be especially annoying when using apps that turn off the screen when you hold the phone by your ear (for example during phone calls).
There seems to be some overlap so we’re not sure what proportion of reports come from each issue, or both. Unfortunately, that’s all I can share right now. When I know more about when a fix is coming, I’ll post an update here.
23 Likes
Thanks for your reply, Yasen.
Good news that your team is looking into the dimming issue. To be honest, I’m confident that the dimming will be solved, as this wasn’t a problem before with A11. So no worries.
And slightly off topic;
However, I’m very concerned about the ghost input. My first FP4 had this really bad, so I got a brand-new phone. That new phone was fine for a while, but now the same ghost input again. So I’m very afraid that every single FP4 phone has this issue.
Not sure what to do any more. Yes, I’ll contact support. But honesty, I’m a little devastated at this point, to be honest with you.
4 Likes
thanks @anon64862762 , very helpful to see you 're searching for solutions. I would have appreciated such info on the ghost touch issue.
@Dajo same here, also my replacement phone started ghost touching after 2 weeks. therefore have similar fears like you.
1 Like
I understand - having two devices with the same issue can be demotivating. Our Quality team is conducting an in-depth investigation of ghost inputs. As a result, over the past few weeks we significantly improved the repair procedure for these cases.
Share your honest experience with Support and they’ll be happy to help you out.
2 Likes
@anon64862762 to be honest thats pretty late when considering how old the ghost touch thread is. My first ticket was from october 2022 (correction: September) for example.
Is this the first time a FP employee commented in a forum thread about an issue, and more importantly, will FP now finally look at the forums more often to inform themselves about issues with the devices? Would be pretty cool if that was the case.
2 Likes
Yes, it’s later than we would’ve liked. Some issues are harder to pin down than others, especially when they affect a small number of devices and can have both software and hardware causes.
It’s not the first time, I’m active here and there. We’re working on our forum presence and hope to be able to provide more of these updates.
9 Likes
It’d be even better if we could access gitlab.fairphone.com or at least use issuetracker.fairphone.com for the Fairphone 4 so that we don’t have to use a forum for reporting bugs. :<
1 Like
The forum is not for reporting ‘bugs’ that’s what official support is for
support@fairphone.com
The forum is for user chat and casual help from other users.
Generally the only input from Fairphone is a notification of update releases so don’t get off on this rare input and expect much.
1 Like
This forum is being used as an issue tracker because of a lack of a public one. That is ultimately what this conversation is. Little difference exists in a forum and issue tracker except how the posts are handled, and since this post includes technical diagnosis and potential remediations of the problem (albeit probably all wrong) this is identical to what would be posted at an issue tracker.
Despite this, I object to this too – forums should be used for discussion about all but software development issues, although overlap exists, especially when the Q&A plugin is involved. GitLab and GitHub are better suited due to issue linking and source code integration for this task.
This forum already does and shall contain big reports. They’re fundamentally no different to any other kind of technical support request, so people will continue to post them because posts like this one are useful. It’s impossible to distinguish initially between what’s a bug report and support request, because the differences appear when they’re handled.
3 Likes
To me it seems that there is much more then “only a small number of devices” as @twoexem stated…and beyond that…yes, we all accept little issues and some minor comfort features to support the general idea of a sustainable cell phone . But nevertheless the main functions of a product must be available – otherwise the product itself tents to be worthless….and having a cell phone that I cannot use outside for longer than 2-3 minutes makes it really hard being an ongoing supporter of the original product; the main advantage of a small company is the excellent support in comparison to the big players – but exactly at this point it is disappointing, that the community and the affected users are not being heard /not being supported any better….
7 Likes
@anon64862762 thanks for letting us know. I wonder two things:
-
Why have you marked this topic as solved?
-
Should we also expect some response in the beta gitlab? So far, it seems it is just a one-way communication channel for some of the issues…
2 Likes
A couple of things
-
You don’t need to tag Yashen if you have replied to their post as they will be notified as you replied to them, as I have to you. Further once a user has engaged with a topic they will be notified of any new posts unless they block them, which is unlikely in this case.
-
Regarding the notion of resolved, it may have been the original poster who tagged their topic as SOLVED in that they have a satisfactory answer to their query not necessarily that the actual issue not longer exists.
It’s nice to have a Fairphone employee respond here, but the post is extremely sobering in the end, as it states that we’ll probably have to wait a long while for a solution to the problem. It is also particularly brazen in this context that the issue was simply marked as solved here.
It shows that Fairphone currently has no idea why this problem exists and how lousily Android 12 was implemented here.
The theory with the temperature sensors is still halfway understandable, but I and several users also had the problem although the phone was not a bit warm.
The 2nd point with the proximity sensor I think is absolute nonsense, because this is to turn off the display completely and not just slightly dim.
This means that the July update will certainly not contain a fix.
I therefore ask again to offer a downgrade to Android 11 and as I said I do not care about any security patches, if I can finally use my phone outdoors again.
It is in my eyes an absolute farce that the problem has not been fixed after 4 months of Android 12 update and makes me every day just angry and this post, which should actually give hope, causes exactly the opposite.
I was so stupid to update to Android 12 and I really envy everyone who has not done so because Android 12 just brings quite a few problems with it.
7 Likes