I have migrated my Fairphone 2’s Fairphone Open OS in several steps onto Android level 9.
From the beginning, FPOOS was unreliable on level 9 (on all prior levels it was rock solid!). Previously, I had occasional crashes in Quickstocks and Corona Warnapp Companion.
Now I moved to 21.12.0-rel 1, and the result is, in plain words, a nightmare.
I had much more crashes in the above mentioned apps than before, but also crashes in Corona Contact Tracing Germany, even in the Contacts, and finally in Launcher !
But this afternoon, I wanted to use Open Camera. I had no less that 36 crashes - all in two minutes! Really, more than 36. Because the closure of an app, regardless of whether it was voluntarily closed or crashed, plays a system sound, a short clicking noise. Those clicks came so frequently and close to each other, it was a crackling that lasted for more than 10 seconds.
At first I thought that this came from the Storage Access Framework, as I save the photos of Open Camera on SD card. The first crashes occured when taking a picture, thus saving it to the card. But after the first “burst” of crashes I sometimes saw that Open Camera crashed two seconds after startup, without taking any picture at all or touching any function… And then I saw even Launcher crashing…
I am a professional software tester (ISTQB certified). So I have seen many software in beta or gamma status. But release 21.12.0-rel 1 IMHO cannot even be called alpha.
So I would humbly recommend that you immediately pull this version from software delivery before anyone loses data over it…
Crashes while data is being written endangers both the data currently written and all data already in this file system. The SD card carries a non-journalling file system that can easily lose data if write access fails. Ext filesystems are more robust, but not unbreakable. This release of FP Open OS has to be considered dangerous.
Thanks.
The full qualification of this release is “fp2_sibon-userdebug 9 21.12.0-rel.1 sibon-dd018702”. Installed on a standard Fairphone 2 (with the newer camera) and 128 GBytes in a Sandisk Ultra Micro SD card, one SIM (O2 = E-Plus = Telefonica). When those crashes occured, GPS, Bluetooth and WLAN were active (for CCTG), but only a 4G network connection was active.