Several events delayed for hours, calender alarm, sms, countdown timer

Since some weeks I noticed a new behaviour of my FP2 (still Android 6): Alarm events like calender alarm, but also SMS or even a countdown timer are delayed by hours. I tested this by sending test SMS from one SIM to the other and at the same time one from the other SIM back, and it took 3hours 40 minutes to be delivered, and the same for the other direction. Starting at 11th of january I noticed it for SMS, because I get SMS from a control system every day at 12:00 (and for some events at other times from the same system) with a time stamp, so I can check the sending time and the receiving time. The delay is sometimes less than one hour, sometimes more than ten hours. Same is for calender events, they sometimes popped up three or four hours later. And a countdown timer, which I used very often, should ring after 20 minutes, but rings about one hour later (when the app is closed).
It’s no matter of the SMS provider, because its the same for the two different providers (O2 and Vodafone), its no matter of a single app, because it happens for different apps.
It’s very anoying for two factor authentication, no system allows a delay of hours.
A reboot solved it for some time (a day or so).
I did’t install a new app at that time. The only thing is, that the memory is quite full (24 of 25,48 GB, App memory 1,8 GB, free 295 MB), but this did’t change in the last weeks.

I didn’t found anything similar in the forum, but maybe there are other people with the same problem.
And what could be the reason for that?

Roland

(I just see, that I didn’t understand the new forum structure, this should be at help/FP2, maybe someone is able to move it)

Hallo @Roland768,

first things first I would do the Upgrade to Android 7. Do you use Open OS?
Do you have the problems only at home when you are connected with your Wi-Fi?
Do you have any App with a Scheduler active?

Generally SMS are unreliable. The reliability (or unreliability) depends on the quality of your service provider’s network. This can cause delays or even delivery failures. So if your problem lasts for several days, maybe you should ask your carrier.

Kind regards
Christian

1 Like

That sounds (especially the part with the alarm) similar to

Hallo datenteiler,

regarding Android7: as long as there are the described issues, and as long as my Apps are still working with Android 6 I prefer to stick to it.
Wi-Fi: it happens with and without Wi-Fi.
I use the calender event reminder, which is not really a scheduler app, but a repeater for the alarms of the native Android calendar. And I use it from the very beginning (one of a bunch of apps I needed to get all the functionality my former Palm TX had out of the box :unamused:).
And yes, I know, SMS can be unreliable. But, as I wrote, the issue happens with different apps. And yesterday I got the ultimate proof, that it is not a problem of the provider. I noticed ten minutes past twelve, that the twelve o’clock SMS hadn’t arrived yet. So I sent a SMS from the vodafone SIM to the O2 SIM. No delivery. Then I rebooted the phone. Just before(!) I typed the first SIM-PIN, the phone gave the SMS ring, and both SMS (the twelve o’clock and the test) were to be seen. So they reached the phone before the reboot, but stayed below visibility.
By the way, in such cases, when the SMS of the last four hours popped up after reboot, it happended, that every SMS appears twice, one for each SIM, as if they were sent to both numbers, which is definitely not the case.
But it seems, that the rare anwser rate means, that this is a very special problem.

1 Like

Did you try a factory reset to start from the beginning?

Kind regards

2 Likes

A factory reset on the Fairphone 2 only deletes user data and Apps.
This helps in many cases where a fault is caused by something related to those.
But if there’s some hiccup in the OS itself, a factory reset would leave that as it is.

To start from the beginning means to really install from scratch …

Correct @AnotherElk, but maybe he can start in a first step with deleting all apps and user data because I think that an app is the cause for bis trouble. A hickup in the OS… Don’t know, maybe possible, but then he should update to Android 7.

“Always forward, never back.” :grimacing:

Some new findings on this issue:
In my first post, I wrote about the nearly full main memory, which seems strange, because I normally use the micro SD card for all bigger files, photos, videos and so on. Finally I found (with DiskUsage) that the messages app built a 12 GB cache. Why the hell needs a simple SMS App a 12 GB Cache? It’s the out of the box messages app, I refused to update to the messenger-like app offered by Google. Yes, I’m using SMS maybe a bit more than other people, about 20 SMS per Week from the mentioned supervising system, and additional about 10 SMS for second factor identification. No MMS! Very strange.
After deleting the cache, the delivery seemed to be normal again, messages seemed to work properly, but started to build a growing cache again.
And the delay started again, unpredictable.
Then I tried another SMS app (Textra). But the core function is still on Android, the cache seems to grow more slowly, but it grows.
Since the last erasing of the cache the delay disappeared! The cache is now at 7 GB, but SMS is now on time, and all other alarms are on time as well. Very strange…
Maybe it’s now time to change to Android 7…

This topic was automatically closed 182 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.