Dozen of clients entered our shop seeking help for their Fairphone 4 with /e/OS installed.
Everything is working well (ISP, network, DNS, calls, wifi, etc), but SMS reception and sending.
This problem only rose AFTER updating to /e/OS 4.0 or 4.1.
We tried EVERYTHING we could read on the forum to solve the problem: contacted ISP, wifi calling ON/OFF, airplane mode ON/OFF, refreshing on 4636 SMC, DNS, etc.
The problem is solved only temporary: as soon as the phone is restarted or turned off, the problem remains.
After deep testing (we are an IT, cybersecurity and forensics firm) we came to the conclusion that it’s a problem embedded into /e/OS, probably specific to fairphone 4.
Realistically, 200K FP4 have been sold, among which probably 8-10K have /e/OS installed, so the problem is surely big.
I hope you guys can seriously investigate this issue and release a fix in the coming 4.2 build
Thanks a lot for your effort in building /e/OS, it’s really a wonderful private OS.
Did you try to enter manually the APN of the carrier they use ?
It happens very often that the carrier or the APN used by /e/OS for that carrier changes. It is especially true for NVMO/carriers using the physical network of another bigger carrier (der Schweizer Post mit Swisscom zum Beispiel).
Those access point references , when wrong (not up to date) can break only part of the service like what you describe: only MMS or only 2G, or only 4G LTE for example.
People reported partially broken network services like you in Norway and in France, after either an /e/OS update or a carrier side change. I don’t know where /e/ OS takes its list of APN from, probably Lineage OS, so its bound to be out of date on small NVMO carriers
In addition to and supporting the comment of @GabrielT I have done a little amateur research into carriers who may not have up to date APN entries with AOSP.
The “preset” APN are organised by Carrier and country. /e/OS has made some changes to these sources this year. You will see recent apn threads exploring this specific subject.
If it is carrier related APN, is one or more carrier concerned? Please could you name them.
@wife32 I’ll reference a thread that hints in the direction that this seems a specific Fairphone 4 issue but also happens on regular Google Android. since we have a working Fairphone 4 with e/os/ in our family, it might be quite a specific dependency to the carriers. do you know if it happens with various carriers or a few specific ones?
