Pixel owners report problems after installing January 2024 Google Play update

6a user here. No issues.

FWIW, I'm a Pixel user (who drags his ass installing these updates, so I haven't updated yet) and I naturally assumed reading the headline that this didn't actually impact all Pixel phones. Reason being that we would've obviously heard a loud uproar if every Pixel phone was suddenly bricked.

With three phones and a one-in-eight chance of being unaffected (assuming 50% for each phone) that still leaves a very large number of phones out there that are potentially affected. 100's of millions of devices. The article is pretty clear that it doesn't seem to affect every phone, but that there are numerous complaints.

I'm always imagining 'Some' in front of headlines like these unless it says 'All'.

Same. 8p, 6a and 6p all working fine

Are you sure they all got the Google Play system update, and that you're not confusing it with the Android security update?

Totally agree, this headline is misleading and the article isn't useful. It's just blogspam for a reddit thread where some users report issues that coincide with receiving this update.

When you have an installed base as large as Google, some users are going to report problems after every update. These problems may not even have anything to do with the update contents, perhaps the update is what the user associates with the onset of their issues. It's entirely possible these "storage issues" are hardware and the i/o and reboot cycle of the update just caused it to manifest in a user visible way.

By all means I want users to hold Google accountable for mistakes but I feel like there's basically no information in this article beyond the speculation on reddit. The standard for HN should be higher than this IMO.

FYI, my pixel 5a phone has also been really slow and acting out in the last month. Crashes and extreme sluggishness in apps. Sometimes when I pull up the app-switcher, I can't get out of it without rebooting the phone.

I however am not on the Jan 2024 Google Play update detailed by this article. I am still on the recommended Nov 2023 one.

I'm sure someone will point out breaking iPhone updates that have happened in the past, but I've never been hit by one. Bad things happen, I think Apple is just REALLY aggressive about pulling updates that break things to limit the impact. That's the most important thing, IMO. Well, that and a fix for the people who got screwed.

Extreme slowness and bugginess are a pain, but what you're describing doesn't sound like the boot loops and inability to read from internal storage that people are describing from this update. I'd hazard a guess that you're suffering from something different.

I don't see myself switching to an Android phone but iPhone updates do break things. Since upgrading to latest iOS, both my phone (personal and work) keyboards are unusable if I enable both English and Vietnamese keyboards. Looks like there's a bug in their keyboard prediction engine. It's been 4 months and I don't see they fix it yet.

While I can't say that I have noticed anything out of the ordinary yet on my Pixel 7, I will say that I have been a diehard Google phone user since the Nexus 4 days and have been really disappointed with how things have turned out with the more recent iterations of Google phones. Terrible battery life, bugs, poor quality fingerprint readers, questionable design decisions in general. The phones used to be a fairly reasonable alternative to the Apple offerings, but these days I feel like there is really no competition and am very close to switching to the other side. I really want to stick with what had traditionally worked for me, but I keep getting burned year after year now.

Apple literally just settled a lawsuit brought against them for intentionally slowing down phones to force users to upgrade.

Once my girlfriend's apple watch became a $300 bracelet after an iOS update broke the watch app on her Iphone (wouldn't open). Without the app, the watch was completely unusable. And, after looking into it, this issue had been reported to Apple 4-5 months prior where Apple supposedly immediately fixed it with another update. However, my gf and multiple forums online still had the issue and Apple refused to address it (I assume they quietly fixed it in a later update).

The only way to fix it was to back up her phone and factory reset, and if we hadn't done that who knows how long it would have been before she could use the watch.

Software update broke the (already very bad) fingerprint scanner on my 6a a few updates ago and no fix in sight. It feels like they're just focused on churning out devices and the quality has suffered tremendously. It's death by a thousand cuts and after resisting for a decade I think I'm ready to try jumping to apple.

So degoogled GrapheneOS not affected.

I hear a small company called Apple is making a viable alternative.

Ah, so. I'm not the only one.

In my case I actually can't properly pair the device at all. I hadn't used my watch (Fenix 6 X) in many months, and last time I used it was with another phone.

I went to pair with my Pixel on Android 14 and the actual bluetooth pairing works fine -- shows up in the list of Bluetooth devices -- but the Garmin app refuses to add it, thinks it can't talk to it.

So the phone / watch connection can never happen.

I suspect Google has made changes to bluetooth stack yet again and the Garmin stuff simply isn't working with it. (TBH their apps seem pretty janky)

After this I might just go back to an iPhone.

It's not just breaking changes that are a problem, UX changes just for the heck of it can cause people a lot of frustration. Pretty much every major Android version moves or changes core functionality. Changing the UI without a functional reason is the sort of thing a lot of people in tech get excited about but most people outside of the industry loathe.

Apple did the same in the past...

The funny part is that internally they get the update way earlier than anyone outside, so it should already be spotted.

https://9to5google.com/2017/04/18/google-pixel-xl-ota-dogfoo...

If Apple were to tone down their anticompetitive monopolistic bullshit by like, one notch, I would have bought an iPhone 15 Pro Max instead of the Pixel 8 Pro I would up buying.

Maybe in a few years when the EU has managed to force universal compliance for the DMA...

iPhones have plenty of issues too, I've experienced my fair share, as have others. Technology always has bugs:

https://discussions.apple.com/community/iphone

Look at the bright side: a bricked phone won't collect your personal data, you won't be able to fall for phishing scams on it, and its battery should last a really long time!

Hyperbole aside, let's remember that "better" and "safer" exist in dialectic tension. Or, "convenience" vs. "security". Often, functionality or features are removed because they were insecure, so now your device is "safer". If you've got a big feature update pending, consider how many bugs/flaws it may introduce as the software gets "better".

I've posted a small summary below, with links to consistent reports of this happening + a software course of action to unbrick the phones.

It's totally on google who's refusing to release the QPST files. It's creating ewaste for no acceptable reason.

Hopefully, someone will leak the QPST files to allow a restore from the Qualcomm EDL firehose mode.

I can already see the storm of people saying that making companies liable for the software that costs consumers money is going to kill hobbyists, because we are just casualties waiting to give everyone money without any expected right

At least they're doing updates.

> How hard would it be to revert to the previous working version?

In Qualcomm EDL firehose mode? Super simple if you have the QPST: the phone is waiting for an image to write to the flash. It's actually waiting for the image to immediately reboot once it's written.

But google doesn't release these images, so it's like having computer permanently bricked after the hard drive was corrupted because there's no install media available.

I think we (as people who are on HN and can understand the problem) have a responsibility in not letting such things happen, if only because they hurt the people who don't understand the problem, the simplicity of the solution, and may just have a phone as their only computing device.

The first thing I do with a new phone is disable all app automatic updates... Hope that also disabled the play store updates

The android pm probably wear Patagonia and use iPhones. Honestly

Even an unlimited QA budget won't catch everything. Though it is unflattering to have two major issues like this occur so close together.

The fact that they have the ability to roll this out to a handful of users, all of whose devices stopped working, and to detect that and not proceed with the rollout is considered success, by them.

You can only acquire billions of dollars if you cut corners and cheat as much as possible.

I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up making them money: people will replace their devices with newer ones. Once the device is sold it no longer has a function for the manufacturer until the next sale happens to the same user. So any update that bricks a percentage of the devices (or makes them effectively unusable) may well extract some more $ from the users.

Staffing proper QA teams went out of vogue a couple of years ago.

Turns out that the way incentives are set up at most tech companies today, nobody gets dinged for shipping major software regressions/bugs while everyone is patted on the back for shipping even completely broken features on time.

> E_WONTFIX

Where are you getting this? The article says they are looking into it.

Or, unpopular opinion, if you don't care about brand and/or cutting edge camera quality, just buy a cheap Xiaomi phone.

I have been using the Poco X3 for 3.5 years with absolutely zero issues. Even the battery still holds through an entire day of regular usage.

It cost me 1/4 of the price of an iPhone and I get the same if not bigger value for my use cases (bigger in terms of battery life which was laughable back when I still used an iPhone 6, don't know if things have gotten better now).

An iPhone SE is not expensive and is supported for just as long as the flagship iPhones are.

The OG $399 iPhone SE from 2016 is currently on it's eighth year of security updates, having gotten another update just a week ago. That works out to $50 per supported year.

About 3/4 use Android, but very few have the courage to run recent builds.

It's been a frustration point up the ladder, because they feel the ~same as you: why are they the only ones filing bugs?

But it's not that. It's decayed internal culture. There's other stuff around the margins they could change*, but, the rot is deep and unlikely to be fixed.

Too focused on...non-business objectives...to be effective. Too crucial to risk reforming. And it's very unlikely they hear about it up the ladder. And that's before the morale decline of "even when you smile and nod and sing along with the antics, you can be let go at any point by a 2 AM email"

* tl;dr: make it dead simple to get a phone. Line managers were always a bit squirrely about expensing. It's a non-starter post late 2021, and there were never ever enough DVTs/EVTs for them to be meaningful. Establish "everyone is on Pixel next year's - 2", and have the VP send an org-wide email saying individuals can expense as needed.

No chance of letting them (your family) decide for themselves?

Don't run Google's Android. I've been on Lineage OS for years now and it's awesomely stable.

I have used a pixel 4a and pixel 6a for many years now and haven't had any of these issues. It sounds like potentially had defective hardware, and instead of getting it repaired you just lived with it.

apparently I can't edit my own comment now

but for context the unreliability was always on the official Google flagship device using the update pushed to me OTA

no betas, no rooting, nothing

plain Google official Android on the official flagship device

and it sucked, hard, for multiple different devices over years

(and my family suffer the same pain on their devices too)

GrapheneOS is literally the only thing that's keeping me on android. It has been really realiable for me, way more reliable than Samsungs or Google Pixels Android ROM.

Though if GrapheneOS dies my next option will probably a linux phone, as I'll never get along with iOS.

I've been using Android since 2010 and don't remember having any stability issues for the last 6-8 years at least. Maybe it's a Pixel-thing? I've mostly owned Sony and Moto devices. They're often 1-2 versions behind on Android which could explain why they're more stable maybe.

(I like to customize my phones a lot (minimalist launcher, Termux software, Firefox with extensions) which I would hate to give up for iOS).

It's always a compromise. With Android you can get actually good typing experience in non-English languages, voice typing in non-English, proper desktop view in browsers and really good call quality or better PWM in some cases.

It depends on what is important for you. iOS is not a panacea either.

By they way, with Android, just use Samsung. Despite the duplicated apps it's just a better experience.

Your symptoms are all plausibly explained by a bad battery.

Same here; had a Pixel 5a with Google Fi. The 1 year old Pixel randomly died one day, totally bricked. Google phone support requires them calling you (after you request it online), and the browser-based “Fi phone” was unable to receive calls from Google phone support. No other callers had this issue. When I finally got in touch with them via my wife’s phone, they wanted me to drive 1.5 hours outside of SF for a phone diagnostic. I said no thanks and switched to iPhone with AT&T.

I'm always baffled when I hear someone having an experience like this.

I've been using Androids since 2010. Motorola Droid, Motorola Droid 4, Motorola Droid Turbo, Pixel 3, and now Pixel 6 Pro. I've never had anything like what you describe.

If you're having that many problems on multiple devices, it makes me question what the hell you do to your phones to make them do that.

Tesla owner here. Many stories of that with them, and the latest autosteer update was a major downgrade.

You don't need to imagine: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachE/comments/18m3ne2

Rivian, Tesla, Ford (Mustang EVs) all have had bad OTA software shipped to them. The problem will continue to get worse as cars become mostly software defined.