Hacker News Reader

Comment by newprint | Hacker News Reader

Pixel owner here. Lately my phone been very slow or acting out. That explains it. Last year or few years ago, Google released update that broke Bluetooth on Pixels. Google's team released the update, broke things, went out for extended Christmas break and fixed things a few months later. I'm not fan of the Apple phones and the fact that they cost a fortune, but I don't recall them putting out hardware breaking updates.

View on HN

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.

Nobody's perfect, but I can't remember Apple ever shipping updates that brick their phones in two consecutive quarters.

At least Apple releases the images you need to restore your phone to a bootable state if something goes wrong during an update.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39145490

How is this bug manifesting? Do you mean literally unusable or something less serious but irritating? I ask because I have English and Spanish keyboards on my phone and don’t think I’ve noticed anything.

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.

Glad it's not justenon the finger print thing. I had to turn it off on my 6a. Utterly infuriating trying to open phone

Not really a Google fan, but the fingerprint reader on my Pixel 7a is much better then it was on my Pixel 5, when it works.

My 7a is better than my 6a, but they're both very poor compared to the dedicated scanner on my Pixel 3 (which was also able to be used for actions, like pulling down notification bar). I miss it a lot.

I was also big into Android and the Google system starting in the same era, when the Nexus 4 was taking the nerd world by storm with its crazy value. And stuck with Google devices from it, to the Nexus 5, the Nexus 6P, the first Pixel, and the Pixel 3. But the constant cancelling of service, rebranding, overhauling, and feeling like I'm paying to be a perpetual beta tester I finally bought my first iPhone in 2020 when the 12 line came out (the 12 mini was incredibly enticing)

The one thing I thought I'd regret with switching from Android was the unlimited photo backups with Google Photos, and within a few months of my switch Google announced they were axing unlimited photo backups, even when you bought a Pixel. So they don't even have that to lure me back any more.

I still keep up with what's going on in the world of Android and it seems to only be news that gives me even less reason to switch back. They're trying to turn it more into iOS but with zero of the grace of Apple, and continue to have the corporate equivalent of ADHD with their lack of being able to focus and commit to a plan.

It's no surprise more and more people -- especially young people -- are switching to an iPhone. The iPhone keeps getting better and Android keeps getting worse. For the sake of all consumers, I hope they can continue to compete in the future, but as it is, I don't know who Android is for other than people who staunchly don't want to use an Apple product.

I think you’re experiencing the fickleness of Google through their hardware.

Google is famous for killing products and constantly reinventing the wheel instead of committing to a solution.

Those software issues are seeping down to their hardware products. Of all the ginormous monopolists, it's the most likely to disappear.

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.

True, no update process is perfect. My anecdote is with the Wallet in iOS 17 - suddenly, for some reason, I could not add any new cards to my Wallet, even after removing existing cards. No matter what I tried, adding it took approximately 10 minutes before it errored with "unable to contact your bank". I did a DFU wipe-restore and restored my phone from an iCloud backup, but I still could not add any cards. The only thing that fixed this was restoring my phone and not restoring from a backup, meaning I had to set everything up again; thankfully, it did fix the issue and I was able to add all of my cards back to my wallet.

I have to imagine some update corrupted my years-old Wallet database. There is this screen[0] that should pop up if the Secure Element runs out of space, but I wasn't near the limit on cards, so I don't think this was the issue.

0: https://x.com/TapDownUnder/status/1750022004009586908?s=20

Not IOS but MacOS Sonoma made my 2019 Intel MacBook Pro close to unusable. Constant kernel panics, usb ports not consistently recognizing devices, charging not working when powered on, wouldn’t recognize displays over HDMI.

I had to roll back to Ventura and everything is fixed now. I am hoping to get another year or so before my next upgrade.

My 2018 15” MacBook Pro runs Sonoma without any issues. Only thing I notice is wake from sleep on battery seems to be a little slow. But maybe it just feels that way because of my M1 air.

Weird, yeah not sure why I had so many issues but it was an adventure to get all rolled back. Booting into recovery mode it had no issues charging or recognizing usb devices. So guessing something borked at the OS level.

Just a guess though. If I had a backup computer I would have tried to dig deeper. But atm just need a working machine.

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.

If you're low on storage space, try freeing up a few gigs. My pixel 5 was impossibly slow when I let it get under 5 gigs free.

I've often had like 20 Mb free lately....it REALLY doesn't like that. I'm also on a Pixel3. About time to upgrade lol.

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.

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.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com