Fairphone 6 factory e/os. Multiple problems, reset doesn't work

Using /e/OS Troubleshooting
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Purchased 2 phones. My partner’s generally works. Mine unfortunately is another story.

  • App lounge doesn’t work. Tried the advice from Murena to reboot. It doesn’t work. I’ve cleared the cache and storage, used logged in and anonymous mode. Rebooted and tried these in all combinations. I have tried 3 different WiFis and the network connection with all combinations. Still nothing.
  • The web browser tells me Qwant isn’t available. Won’t perform any search.
  • Final problem I’ve noticed so far is that the factory reset doesn’t work. It just loops back to the confirmation screen. As if the phone is mocking me for trying to fix it.

Issues appeared immediately on first boot. At the time it had 3.1.1-A15-20250827521151-official-FP6. An automatic update appeared and in hoping it would fix everything, I now have 3.1.4-a15-20250915526528-official-FP6.

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Well, AppLounge works as “hit and miss”… It may work on one device and fail on another device right next to it… And vice versa the next day, for example…
What I did: Place “AppLounge” icon in a folder that I named “Unused apps” or “Useless apps”, and (when AppLounge works), download and install “Aurora Store” instead. It works pretty well “most of the time”.

“Qwant” is a home made search engine provided by /e/OS. Doesn’t work on my side neither…(also FP6). But you can easily change it for “DuckDuckGo” for instance.

Factory reset: No idea for this point… But indeed, I strongly suggest to update to /e/OS 3.1.4 now.

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Thank you for the response.

  • Aurora seems to be an okay work around for somethings, but is far from a viable edit: as the only apps I can install are on the opening screen as the search doesn’t work.
  • I am already on 3.1.4 as I mentioned.

As an update, I tried making guest an other user accounts but ran into the same issues.

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weird symptoms. Do you have the hide-my-ip feature in Advanced Privacy active that routes you via Tor? known for causing network issues

  • Aurora not performing a search I’ve never seen mentioned. Also a AppLounge with a connected, dedicated Google Account should be reliable
  • murena find indeed has / had intermittent unavailability - but not like hours on end - Murena Find: don't return results due to FDN fetch_error (#8745) · Issues · e / Backlog · GitLab
  • factory-reset not being possible: is the device by accident under some device admin profile or parental control? search Settings for “device admin apps”. Do you use a secondary user?

you could try a factory reset through the recovery (a key combination on startup will go there). In doubt you could also just cycle the phone, send it back, insist on new device

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Cross-reference:

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