Fairphone

Camera

Source

Problem: The shuttersound is annoying and it should be disabled. Same for the focussing sound.

Solution: On a rooted phone, connect to the shell, remount the system partition and e.g. rename the audio files.

$ adb shell
shell@FP2:/ $ su
root@FP2:/ $ mount -o rw,remount /system
root@FP2:/ $ mv /system/media/audio/ui/camera_click.ogg /system/media/audio/ui/camera_click.ogg.bak
root@FP2:/ $ mv /system/media/audio/ui/camera_focus.ogg /system/media/audio/ui/camera_focus.ogg.bak
root@FP2:/ $ exit
shell@FP2:/$ exit

Applies to: Fairphone 2

Battery

Problem Around the time when the Update to Firmware 1.8 came out, the battery started to behave a bit weird. While at first everything seemed to be normal, after a restart of the phone ( for whatever reason I have), the battery percentage suddenly showed a drop of sometimes more than 30% after the reboot. Also the subjective feeling that the battery did not last as long as it did before became more and more real.

Solution This post in the FP-Forum suggested the following procedure:

At FP they told me that the battery has its own software inside, which sometimes needs to be reset.

  1. Use the battery up until it is below 0% (until the phone dies).
  2. Take the battery out of the phone.
  3. Plug your charger into the phone (still without battery).
  4. Insert your battery. (This will give the battery a kick)
  5. Charge your phone in one go until 100%. Do not boot.

Firmware upgrade on a rooted phone

Source

I have been doing this too often, therefore the quick recipe:

  1. Make sure there is a rootet boot image available for the target firmware version at https://fp2.retsifp.de and download it.
  2. Perform a full firmware upgrade on the phone.
  3. Connect it via USB and enable the USB debugging in the phone settings.
  4. Make sure the device is visiable to adb.

    $ sudo adb devices
    ....
    
  5. Reboot the phone into the bootloader.

    $ sudo adb reboot bootloader
    
  6. Make sure you still have a connection to the phone while being in the bootloader:

    $ sudo fastboot devices
    
  7. Upload the new bootimage:

    $ sudo fastoot flash boot <boot.img>
    
  8. Reboot the phone

    $ sudo fastboot reboot
    
  9. Usual steps to perform after upgrading and rooting the phone:

    1. Install Busybox binaries.
    2. Enable the Ad-blocker.
    3. Re-apply the firewall rules.
    4. Disable the USB debugger.

SD Card writeable

Source

With Busybox

adb shell
su
mount -o rw,remount /system
vi /system/etc/permisisons/platform.xml

Without busybox

  1. Pull the file

     $ adb pull /system/etc/permissions/platform.xml
    
  2. Edit the file according to the change below

  3. Push the file back
     $ adb push platform.xml /system/etc/permissions/platform.xml
    

Change

  <permission name="android.permission.WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE" >
      <group gid="sdcard_r" />
      <group gid="sdcard_rw" />
+     <group gid="media_rw" />
  </permission>