Phone update

Last month my Fairphone stopped charging unless I propped it upside down at a very specific angle. I tried several cables and diagnosed the problem to be with the charging port, though I can't completely rule out the battery. Anyway, it charges if pressure is applied to the point of connection from below (assuming the phone is flat on its back) and slightly to the right. This pressure can be achieved by balancing the phone upside down (the charge port is on top) against something so it is standing on the cable, but this angle also destroys cables. I can get a connection which is slightly gentler on the cable by putting something underneath the cable, and adjusting the angle of the phone just so.

Anyway this was annoying as I can't charge on the go, but I was getting along fine until a few days ago.

Switching topics for a second, a week or two ago it started complaining of no storage space. Internal memory was full, though phone memory and the SD card have plenty of GBs. I've told every app to store everything it possibly can on phone storage or the SD card, but okay. I don't really understand the difference between phone storage and internal storage. I started hitting 'clear data' for apps I could afford to regularly, and noticed that Google Play Store, Google Play Services, and the fucking Google keyboard were immediately filling back up again after I cleared them.

The last two days, the phone has been charging veeerrry slowly, and last night it was plugged in all night (and carefully balanced to maintain the connection) and the battery level had decreased by morning (from about 50% to 12%). I had just changed the cable I was using, so I switched back to one that had been working fine previously and that didn't help.

Frustrated with the no storage space problem, this morning I disabled Google Play Services and Store completely. Gmail now refuses to work, and I keep getting other random operating system error messages, but whatever.

I have just returned to my phone three hours later, and it has fully charged (in the same physical position it was in all last night).

So... it's probably somewhat a combination of things, but I suspect a recent update to Google Play Stuff was both fucking with my phone storage and battery use. Is this a thing?

Relatedly, I've had my Fairphone 1st edition for about two years, dropped it on very unforgiving surfaces a dozen times (it has fallen out of my pocket whilst running a lot, and once I dropped it on the floor and then my Thinkpad, corner-first, followed directly onto the screen), and it just has a very wee crack on one side of the screen that appeared about two months ago, so all things considered it's doing pretty damn well. When I'm back in Europe I'll probably order a new battery.