Do not factory reset your Pixel until at least 15 minutes after a system update | Hacker News Reader

Do not factory reset your Pixel until at least 15 minutes after a system update

support.google.com

47 pointslopkeny12ko15 comments

That's good to know, but the burning question is: why? Is this a critical but otherwise background part of the update? A clever time saving choice that didn't pan out well?

Don't worry about it. They just care about your experience and want to keep you informed.

I thought "Don't worry about it, because you won't get an answer. Also if you don't do it a specific way, things will break" was Apple's methodology.

I miss the old Google way. The geeky engineers that said "What if we delivered internet via hot-air balloon?" and "Verizon sucks ass. Let's start our own ISP". Current Google is comparitively locked the fuck down, and I hate it.

EDIT in time to say oh my god I thought you were joking. Their stance literally is "We care about your experience and want to keep you informed".

What... corporate-friendly language

>We understand that factory resetting isn't something many users do regularly, but because we care about your experience [...]

Sounds like they are apologizing not for buggy software, but for telling you about it.

Talking uninformed but considering how there’s an A/B update pattern, maybe 15 minutes is the arbitrary threshold after which an update is considered stable enough?

I had the same problem on a Pixel 4a, it worked perfectly, I performed a factory reset, immediately after it refused to boot due to "battery issue" (I don't remember the exact message). So I think Pixel 4a is also impacted by the "brick on factory reset" issue.

That's funny, I had the same issue. I always update then factory reset new phones after I buy them. The 4a was the only one that bricked after doing that. Returned it, and haven't really trusted the brand since.

My Google pixel 4xl was working, doing some backup at 1:30am a few months ago.

At ~2am the massive ATT outtage occured that lasted several hours.

By 7am when I woke up the phone had zero sign of life, can't get it to charge or indicate anything.

Weird, I know phones break. But it broke while being untouched, during a rare long term outage. Still makes me wonder.

my final straw with Android was pixel 4a stopping security updates in 2023. that phone was released in 2020. the iphone 12 released in the same year will receive security updates until 2027. from a hardware perspective my pixel 4a has a great screen, great battery, great camera, great 4g speeds, i have 0 desire for a new phone. too bad Google arbitrarily turned into an insecure piece of etrash after 3 years.

I don't really get people's obsession with security updates for a smartphone. It's not a public webserver, bro. It's a phone. You're the one who decided it was etrash.

Not only is it not reachable by anyone except your mobile provider, but every app is sandboxed anyway. Unless you're downloading random apps every day, why would you care? What do you think is going to happen? Just stick to reputable apps.

You know what I do on my still-supported phone? Set it up, then disable automatic updates, for both Android and the Play store. I update the browser weekly, but that's it. I update the whole manually after a few months or year if I feel I have a good reason to.

I learned > 10 years ago that every phone "security update" is just a patch to disable workarounds people use to root their phones. And every update unroots it. So yeah, disabling automatic updates is also the first thing I do.

Exploits such as the ones who just needed you to receive a specially crafted message already happened, it's not that simple.

A modern smartphone is a mishmash of proprietary, closed-source, burn-before-reading secret wireless stacks, and unsurprisingly they all suck.

I can’t really speak about the cellular parts. (Although the fact that your SIM—including your eSIM—is a standalone computer with over-the-air installable applications, arbitrary access to the cellular network, and zero end-user ways to inspect it fills me with dread simply on general grounds. Oh and on all networks pre 4G the base station is not authenticated. And the auth implementations on 4G are often completely broken, especially once roaming enters the picture.)

But the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth stacks are wide open to everybody within 10s to 100s of metres of you who wants to grope them, every minute of your life. And given there’ve been pretty spectacular exploits by (smart and knowledgeable) randos even with the difficulty of reverse-engineering them as a rando, I feel fairly confident in expecting them to be a horror show internally.

Pixel 4a is built on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 730G (and 4a 5G on a 765G). It is Qualcomm’s policy that consumer chips like these get 3 years of support for baseband, driver, etc. updates.

Mind you, I’m not saying we shouldn’t complain to Google if we want them to transmit some backpressure on Qualcomm, just that basically the whole ecosystem is like this due to depending on a single chipmaker.

(In other news, Pixel 6 and later get three years of version updates and five of security patches; Pixel 8 and later get seven years of both. As far as I know, this us some sort of Google-specific sweetheart deal—other phones with Qualcomm consumer chips don’t get the same treatment.)

After an update you get a notification saying something like "finishing update". It takes a while, maybe 5-10 minutes. I guess the issue is that, if you factory reset while this process is ongoing, something isn't reset properly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com