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Comment by psbp | Hacker News Reader

Android 14 has been a buggy mess for me on the Pixel 7 Pro. It's confounding that Google is still pushing out buggy Android releases.

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I upgraded to 14 on my Pixel 7 Pro a few days ago and didn't notice any problem so far. What are the worst issues I am likely to encounter?

The lock screen won't show anything sometimes, and you can't unlock it. It's just a wallpaper. I had to enable face unlock and auto unlock in order to use the phone. It start the camera app with the power button, try to access photos frying there, and that gets the fingerprint to work and unlock it.

> What are the worst issues I am likely to encounter?

Complete loss of data. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/10/android-14s-ransomwa...

Back up your data while you can.

Oh fuck me. Given that I'm on automatic updates and the update has already been downloaded, next time I reboot my phone it will switch to Android 14 automatically. :(

(And yup, I'm using work profiles and all that.)

Good thing you can still back up your data. It's possible it doesn't affect everyone, I'm not sure. Lemme know how it goes when you reboot?

Or avoid rebooting somehow (if it's not automatic) in the hope they somehow fix it...

So far I've avoided rebooting but it looks like the GrapheneOS devs had already fixed the bug a while ago:

https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/111309676504712576

I've noticed that tapping notifications has a significant delay (350ms or so) before it opens any app since upgrading to 14.

If you use multiple profiles, you could potentially end up somewhere between locked out of your main account, to even soft- and hard-bricked. See siblings link from Ars.

I really liked Android, but at a certain point I just couldn't deal with the constant buggy releases, security flaws, and short update cycle anymore. Especially things like the Pixel phones crashing when calling 911 seems ridiculous in 2023. Maybe 10 years ago when I had time to play around with ROMs and nobody really needed to reach me 24/7 that would be fine, but now I need a device that "just works" and that's iPhone.

It is great that we have choice, but "just works" is not really the whole truth. It just works as long as you do exactly as Apple wants you to do. Any misstep or need for choice outside what they deem correct usage and Android "just works" much, much better. For you this might be perfect, but to me having zero choice is perfectly bad. A phone without F-droid is to me a brick.

That’s why I simply rock two old smartphones (an Android, Nexus 6P, and an iPhone SE, 1st Gen.). And as I look around, I use them much effectively than everyone I know with much more modern phones, when they have just one device. My iPhone just works (and it does it very well), while my Nexus can do whatever it wants in terms of instability, I don’t care. I use it as a pocket computer, with F-droid and its wonderful apps. On top of that I have an old low-end Samsung smartphone (someone just gave it to me), I re-flashed it with Lineage OS and it has its use-case, slightly different from Nexus. I really cannot see any need in one extra phone, as those 3 cover all my use-cases at the moment.

Pixel phones are the bleeding edge though. You are basically beta testing for the other Android vendors.

It would be nice if that's what they were advertised as, not as top end premium Android devices with polished experience as a major selling point.

But I agree, I had a Pixel 6 briefly when my S23 was in repair for a week and it was an incredibly buggy experience in comparison, although it was quite pretty.

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