These sensors are above the screen, so you just need to put your thumb onto the top of the screen to cover it.
@Martin_Anderseck now i also confirm: your second workaround too work for me 
while FP5 LCD is ON, cover top sensor for ~4-5 seconds and uncover…
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Hi.
Had my fairphone 5 for about 3 weeks and experienced exactly this problem. Last week in the sun my display was completely unreadable.
I usually reboot it to fix it, although I will continue to try the “cover the sensor” trick. However, this doesn’t always seem to work for me. That may be because I’m confused about the sensor location.
Is the light sensor part of the screen based camera ? Or is it the pinhole on the top bezel? If someone has a picture they could stick on here that would be useful.
I’ve logged this with fairphone support. I will see what they say
Pete
Brilliant. Thanks Meaghan.
I’m a newbie with my FP5 and experience this prob for a couple of days now - as this thread dates from November 23: is there a real fix in the pipeline?
hello and welcome. there is a recent video clip with @mikiballester commenting on the Linus Review (nicely done btw!), and it is mentioned they are working on it, so the patch is somewhere on the horizon
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Hi,
it seems I am not the only one with a FP5 staying at low screen brightness. Problem still exists (last update didn’t solve the issue. Current SW version is
FP5.TT46.A.144.20240205
Approx 75% of the time I can “wake up” the light sensor by covering it for about 4-6 seconds with a finger and the screen turns bright again. But sometimes it doesn’t work. Annoying. Especially in bright environments. Display becomes unreadable.
It is my first Fairphone and I do understand that things might not work as properly as with a major brand such as Samsung or Apple but this issue seems to be ongoing for quite some time now.
Many thanks for your work and the possibility to buy a more fair phone. If the brightness issue is solved I am happy with my FP5 again.
Hello and welcome. As you can see from the thread, it is a well recognized issue and the patch is being worked on.
What has been working for me, as a workaround, besides covering the sensor, was either rebooting or setting the maximum brightness and then turning off adaptive brightness feature. The latter though increases the battery usage.
Yes, I know. And as it is a known problem since '23 I think it is fair to show that this is a common issue which needs to be solved. As the phone is unreadable in bright environments with dark theme activated it is not a first world problem.
I hope for a hot fix soon.
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Although I have a decent workaround, I’m annoyed by this bug, too. But this statement
probably reaches way too far.
Well, I don’t want a hotfix and I’m certain we won’t get one. I’d rather have a well tested fix being part of one of the next updates.
I found no fix for this I would consider tolerable.
Screen brightness only works for a short time after a reboot.
It is gone rather quickly and I can only reliably get it back after a reboot.
It makes the whole phone, but especially the camera practically useless in sunlight.
If it opens on a double click of the power button, wich is also a game of chance for me, I usually can’t even tell, if the screen is on, let alone, if the camera app is ready. I had quite some frustrating times with it.
I bet, this is a software issue and could be fixed, but the time this bug has been open fills me with dread. Either there are even worse bugs to fix, that take precedent, or it won’t be fixed. Both scenarios are horrifying in their own right.
And because I realized that I commented in this discussion but didn’t have a support item yet, I opened one yesterday referring to this thread and to my workaround which should support the debugging, I’d say. I have to admit that I get annoyed by this behavior more, now that the days are getting brighter again. The workaround with covering the sensor only seems to work properly if the sensor really sees pitch-black darkness. In full sunlight my fingers or the glass of the display or both seem to let through too much light to the sensor, so that the workaround doesn’t work reliably then. I use my phone sleeve then to cover the upper part of the phone, that still works well, but of course that’s always an extra procedure to take and is annoying especially if you want to take a photo quickly.
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Same problem with my new Fairphone 5.
Under sunlight it is unusable.
This is really a major issue, I hope it will be fixed soon
Hi and welcome and please report to support. In general I have no issues to use mine in the sun, never had. Rarely it seems, the display brightness is stuck, however can easily be “fixed” as described above.
What I want to say: that does not seem to be a wide spread issue so far.
Same issue here, very annoying, I use a brightness app for now that lets me at least reset brightness via a notification. I knew what I was getting into with a small team supporting the Fairphone software and the known quirks of the previous devices. But this one is hard to ignore…
Some info that may be relevant:
The lux sensor reports 65535 (MAX_UNSIGNED_SHORT) in way too dark environments. This means that even when covered with a finger, in sunlight the sensor value does not change.
This leads me me to the assumption that the brightness is just not updating, as the value is not chainging.
The underlying issue may be a badly calibrated sensor.
I have no clue about how Android or the hardware handle this, so no idea how to fix it but the lux values I’m getting just don’t make sense, so something is off there.
As to how common this is, brightess issues were mentioned in the LTT video, a fix was promised but I’ve not heard about that since.
A public issue tracker would be great, I don’t think it’s appropriate to leave this up to the community for a 700$ phone…
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This issue got worse with the latest update.
This seem to be a different issue, or?
Here are more reports (mix of differwnt ones) some “solved” by disabling DC Dimming
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The problem still persists. As mentioned above by other users as well it sometimes leads to an unusable phone in bright environments.
The current update (FP5.TT4C.A.154.20240320) did not solve the issue. I am extremely unhappy with the situation still being an issue.
If this is not fixed with the next update the FP5 will be my first and last Fairphone. My Samsung phones never had any issues.
Release a hot fix even if this means that the battery is drained a little faster if you have to keep the sensor alive all the time to not get stuck at low or high brightnesses (yes, it very rarely also gets stuck at very high brightness in dark environments but it is at least usable).
Did you ever report this to support? Else fixing it will be difficult. It seems to be an issue affecting very few devices, so to fix this they need information.
Well and a hot fix will not happen for various reasons like Google Certification and I would not want a hot fix causing new issues probably also to user not affected by that bug.
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