Touchscreen/App freeze on alarm/phone

I’m having occasional trouble with the Fairphone 2 Open OS freezing / hanging.
This as far as I can remember so far only happened in exactly two different but similar situations: Either when the phone rings when somebody calls, or when the alarm goes off.
In such situations, the touchscreen is unresponsive (so I cannot accept the call / turn off the alarm).
Also, the power button is not turning off the screen, it just stays on, the phone keeps ringing / the alarm keeps ringing.
In both situations, the screen is still updating, i.e. the animations indicating the expected motion are still moving).
Also, holding and pressing the power button 10-15 seconds will make the phone reboot.
Also, in one occasion, after waiting for half a minute or so, this message about an app being busy (phone in that case) was shown, I could terminate it, and the phone became responsive without restart.

It seems a bit similar to what’s described here:
https://forum.fairphone.com/t/fairphone-2-touchscreen-suddenly-freezes

But there most people describe that either the power button works (i.e. they press the power button twice to turn the screen off and on again, and then the freeze is gone - which doesn’t work in my case). Or they describe that taking out the battery, waiting a bit and replacing it is the only way to fix this for them, which also is not the case for me. One person remarked that their phone screen still rotated while frozen - cannot attest to that, as I typically have automatic screen rotation turned off. I have removed and re-attached the screen module, but the problem persists. For me this issue occurs with the phone not being plugged into the charger. It isn’t occurring that often (maybe once every 1-2 weeks) at the moment, so it’s not a big issue. I will keep a note of the occurrences as they happen, maybe a pattern turns up!

From the behaviour I see, I think it might be some specific bugs in those two apps (or maybe something to do with the “ringing” animation, it seems to be similar between phone and alarm)?
The phone does not seem to get especially warm though, so I don’t believe the apps (or the animation) are completely running amok.

Some more observations as I have had many more occurrences of such freezes:

Most often they happen on incoming telephone calls or alarms. But similar things also happen in other apps (e.g. the “c’t magazin”, Chromium and K9 app.

When it happened with these other apps, I have tried to “wait it out”, and see if the phone becomes responsive again - and it often does. I typically press the power button once (for a short time), and wait for the screen to turn off (which it typically does after ~30 seconds to 1 minute). And pressing the power button again, it sometimes turns on again to a responsive interface; though it also happens that I have to wait one or two more screen on-off-cycles for the phone to actually become responsive again.

Contrary to what I noted above, in my current observations the screen content is actually frozen (no more animations), yet sometimes the status bar will change slightly (It doesn’t really update, but it changes, like the clock disappearing or stuff like that), while this freezing state is happening.

Sometimes the phone, after being frozen for a few seconds, also decides to restart by itself.

The frequency with which it happens is also varying quite a lot. Sometimes I don’t get any freeze for a full week, sometimes I get several a day.

There might be a correlation with battery charge status (I seem to have more freezes if the phone’s charge percentage is higher), though I’m not sure of that yet. The phone being attached to a charger definitely is not a factor (I think I have not yet had a single instance of freezing while the phone was attached to a charger, though I can’t vouch for it at the moment, I did not keep track of all the times it has frozen so far, which from a rough estimation I would say are nearing a hundred times in total).

The battery itself does not seem to be the culprit - I have tried with two different ones (one from the “old” manufacturer, ond from the new one).

The good question now, is this a hardware or a software issue? It might be that those apps are running amok and blocking all interactions; though since this happens apparently randomly for several different apps, this seems to indicate to me like this is not a software issue…

What would you say, should I file a support ticket?

Yes.
Or alternatively …

Before i reported this issue, I had recently (beginning of October) completely reinstalled FP Open OS (to get rid of google apps), and it didn’t change anything. If anything, the hangs got more frequent.

I just found some people describing a very similar issue: FP2 incoming call screen freeze issue People there report that the phone app seems to hang a long time.

One more peculiar thing I noticed is that when this freeze happens, the background image is reset to the “default” gray fairphone image, instead of my custom one; no other settings seem to be affected though, and it makes no difference whether my custom background image is stored on the internal storage or on the SD card.

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