Several software problems, mainly notifications

Help Fairphone 5
1

I’ve owned my FP5 for a couple of months now, and I’m mostly happy, HOWEVER; I don’t get notifications from a few highly critical apps, no matter what I do and the OS crashes an unacceptable amount.

The problems are as follows:

Notifications:

Clock: No notifications when countdown timer is done, unless the app is open and the screen is activated. The always on display will turn on when the timer reaches zero, but no notification will show and no alarm will sound.

Calendar: No notifications of any kind. No sound, no lighting up the display, nothing on the dropdown.

Owlet care (downloaded app for “nanny cam”) : No notifications of any kind. This app is unreliable on any device, but it does work on three other android devices we own.

Phone OS:

The entire phone will simply “freeze” from time to time. Whatever I’m currently doing will keep working, but it won’t let me change apps in any way. It goes away with a restart, but I have to say I don’t find this acceptable in a brand new phone, even though it isn’t in the highest performance bracket. I’m not running anything demanding, just browsing, videos, podcasts etc. I do close apps I’m not currently using.

What have I done so far:
I’ve given the apps every possible permission, cleared cache, cleared saved data, force closed and restarted several times. I’ve checked every notification setting and turned everything on for all the apps. Everything is updated to the latest version, including the phone. I absolutely detest doing factory resets, but unless I find someone smarter than me to help me, that is the next step. I very much doubt it will help though.

What isn’t standard:
I run Nova launcher, to get rid of the search bar on the front page. The problems persists even when using the standard launcher though. I run duckduckgo as my search engine and I have opera set as my default browser, however I do still mostly use chrome. I’ve done nothing else that deviates from the factory setup.

I can’t find anything on these issues, but I might just be terrible at searching for it. Especially the notifications absolutely must start working. The most critical apps I have, are the ones that don’t work. That just can’t be. Has anyone else had issues like these, and did you find any solutions?

2

Did you install from scratch at set-up or from a back-up of another phone? I would recommend to back-up all data and do a factory reset and set-up without any other phones back-up.

2 Likes
3

Thank you for your reply! I did set it up from my old phone (Samsung s20fe), but that’s absolutely necessary though? I need ALL of my communication and note apps to retain everything, also the ones not on any cloud. The only way to do that is with a direct copy though USB-c. If reinstalling the phone from scratch, without getting everything with me, is really my only option, I’ll have to return the phone. I really don’t want to do that.

4

As far as I remember you should be abel to select what you want to transfer and I would def exclude settings then. And I hope you didnt take over (if possible) any Samsung proprietary Apps.

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5

Unfortunately I don’t remember if I imported any settings, but I doubt that I did. The only Samsung - related apps I have now are ones I need for my galaxy watch. I do need those though, as I plan on keeping my watch for the foreseeable future. I’m 100% sure I didn’t transfer any of the Samsung bloatware.

It looks like this isn’t a common issue though, right? I’ll have to talk to fairphone support then, and probably do a factory reset after all.

6

Not as far as I know.

However, bear in mind that a lot of folks round here use Google accounts and apps as little as they can, me for one. My Google Calendar app is disabled, I use Etar but there are heaps of others. I take it that you’re using the stock Android (Google) Calendar app.
But that wouldn’t be a reason for your Calendar app to fail to show notifications.
Like ymuell, I would suspect some buggy data came over from the old phone. Backup followed by a factory reset is probably quicker and cleaner than trying to sift through all the possible sources of bugs.
After you perform the reset, install apps progressively starting with the most critical, and check that Calendar, Clock and other standard stuff is working properly before adding Owlet and the watch stuff.

You can get rid of the search bar by disabling the “Google” app (if you’re not using it) after the reset. The space on the screen is then replaced simply by the date.

Have you disabled any services / system apps?
Welcome to the forum btw.

2 Likes
7

Would have high hopes support will tell you anything beside factory reset… So I would go this way and ensure to not transfer settings. If this does not help it might be a hardware issue.

The FP5 has no AoD any more, so if you really still have a always on display, its def a setting from your old phonw and I would not be surprised if this makes the phone unstable.