Redefining longevity: Android 9 now available for Fairphone 2

This is good news, thank you. I will be waiting for the roll outs and I asume that the rollout is going automaticly and that I dont need to do anything selves.

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After running several versions of LineageOS for the past couple of years, I returned to FairphoneOS a week ago. I had almost taken my daily random reboots for granted, but at the same time they drove me crazy. Now back to Android 7, all my apps are running fine and I had no reboot for a whole week. I hope Android 9 works well, too!

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I just installed the release candidate that became the official Android 9 release on my Fairphone 2 ā€œspare partsā€, and a mouse (some USB Logitech Wireless dongle I have lying around and a Logitech M185 mouse) works just fine via USB OTG.

(Iā€™m using /e/ on my Fairphone 2, and mouse via USB OTG worked with /e/ on Android 9 as well as on the current Android 10, too.)

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Thank you a lot, @AnotherElk! :grinning:

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@Tuvok: I meanwhile have got the USB-to-Micro-USB-adapter, attached a mouse to it - and it works fine with the new release FP OS 21.01.0-rel.1 / Android 9! So go for it if you like :slight_smile:

(For my main FP2, I personally will wait for the new FP Open OS with Android 9 :wink: )

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I have yet to receive my Android update. This seems a massive deal for Fairphone, so I imagined this thread would be really busy, and I am surprised how few people are confirming they have had the update. Is the rollout going well? It would be great if Fairphone could provide some comments.

A couple of things
a) most people donā€™t post to the forum and
b) it goes out by network so your network may be last in line.

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Thanks for the info about network allocation - I didnā€™t know this!

Apparently updates are generally sent out to a few major networks EE, Vodafone etc. who test it and give feed back. Then any problems are sorted and sent back to EE etc. If EE etc are happy then EE and Vodafone will send it out as and update. Big companies can find bugs quickly. With smaller providers it can take ages and some may never get a copy. This clearly means that some networks will have different features abilities and stability which can be very upsetting for end users. Hence the dominance of Samsung and Apple to appear more stable across networks they can sort out issue more quickly.

Somewhere on this forum there is info that nearly 500,000 test have to be done just to get Google to allow the use of their apps on the Open Source Android.

Glad thatā€™s not by job.

You may be interested in

So there is usually an alternative where you can download and install yourself.

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This applies to FP3 updates, but I would not be sure that it does to the current major FP2 upgrade. From what I remember, the rollout is based on a simple random basis in order to catch remaining problems early and avoid having them affect the whole userbase.

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I got the update on a FP2 about 2 weeks ago (and I didnā€™t bother to post it). And the update worked fine.

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@Volker Thanks for sharing! I remember battery management improved greatly when Fairphone updated from Android 6 to Android 7, it really made a difference for me. How do you find the battery in Android 9?

In the best case the battery can last very long:
grafik

But in general (when data and screen are on or even games are running) I donā€™t have the impression that battery usage is lower then before (i.e. that battery lasts longer without loading).

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On battery usage, Iā€™m finding power lasts about the same as on Android 7 - possibly even a few hours less (maybe a day and a half under A9, compared to 48 hours for A7).

I havenā€™t done enough tests to figure out if Iā€™ve installed a particular app yet, but I do notice that power is not sitting at 0-1% usage overnight much any more. More like 5-10% being used for the 8 hours Iā€™m asleep, whether Iā€™m in Airplane mode or not.

@scribe thanks for the review. I have read about battery management under Android 6, 7 and 9 and each time the system seems to become more intelligent. I am interested because I regularly work outdoors and with Android 6 deep sleep required the phone to keep still which wasnā€™t happening in my case because the phone was in my pocket. At the end of the day the battery would be very low, rendering the phone almost useless.

I read that with Android 9 the system learns your favourite apps then allocates more battery power to your favourite apps. I read that the system takes a little while to learn, so hopefully you will notice improved performance over time.

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Thanks for the tip - that will be interesting to watch. I also wonder what the difference between Android 9 and 10 is, as I have a tablet on latest Lineage which will go into deep sleep for weeks. I guess phones with way more apps on are a different thing anyway though.

ā€¦so am Iā€¦ sigh

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Hi, I updated my FP2 on Saturday, the process went smoothly (At one point I thought it had frozen but I withstood the temptation to fiddle with it and just left the phone for another couple of hours). The update significantly improves my experience of using the phone by making it much quicker to load and run apps, absence of the pauses and delays that I used to experience. Reboots seem less common (one in two days) although it is too early to tell. I am aware that others have experienced problems but from my perspective - thank you, it works!

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3 posts were split to a new topic: Battery life on FP2 with Android 9

Thank you and congratulations to everyone at FairPhone on this milestone!

Eagerly awaiting the update here. My FP2 is still going strong and Iā€™m really glad I bought it :slight_smile:

Does anyone know, with the mechanics of over-the-air updates,should we all have received the update prompt by the end of the 18th or is it then down to the mobile service providers to actually push it out?

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