Google broke telephony for many Nexus users
code.google.com
code.google.com
Everyone gets really ranty when operators delay firmware updates. Yeah, some of them delay to force you to buy a new phone, or to stuff the ROM full of bloatware. Most, however, do extensive testing to make sure that customers don't ring up call centres making angry complaints.
Carriers (by and large) test the phone to make sure that the network portion operates correctly. They make sure that it complies with local regulations and that it's not going to interfere with the network. They also test that basic cellular functionality works. Many go further and check all standard operations of the handset.
It's been several years since I was responsible for device testing, but here's a list of problems that I remember from big name manufacturers (Nokia, HTC, Sagem) on their "final" firmware.
- 999/112/911 features not working.
- Reboots when receiving a text starting with a 0.
- Factory reset when receiving an MMS with more than one attachment.
- Inability to switch from 3G to 2G on handover.
- Caller ID always picking the first name from the SIM.
It was, frankly, an unending parade of shoddy workmanship. We'd file reports, wait for an updated firmware, test it again, see that it had more bugs, refuse to ship it.
Frankly, a few "enthusiasts" whining that they don't have a 0.1 firmware upgrade is a sensible price to pay compared to millions of customers storming your shops and demanding refunds.
Google has an atrocious attitude to customer service - it's part of their business model https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2013/02/googles-customer-contempt-c...
Listen, it is a shame the telcos get totally thrown under the bus when there's an entire supply chain full of issues, but I don't see what that has to do with this bug except in the sense that "there are bugs" not caused by the telcos.
In the EU there's a trend away from bloatware. But, again, depends on your country / market.
Granted, this is kinda happening with some carriers and google voice, but the move to LTE-only with VOIP needs to happen sooner than later. The carriers seem to be fighting this because they, then, can't sell "minutes" and other old fashioned concepts. They would become a dumb internet pipe and they fear what that means from a profit perspective.
They had a chance to do that with LTE. But the entrenched players decided instead to greatly increase the size of the specification (and the over-the-air protocol) to specially support voice (VoLTE).
Granted, handoffs from 2G to 3G to 4G are quite complicated, and then throw in roaming on top of that and it gets really complicated.
However, if I had a magic wand or time travel device, I'd rather have seen LTE be data only (with good quality of service support) and IPv6 only. That would have made the protocol vastly simpler, and then it would be possible to un-bundle voice altogether... eventually.
I don't know that such a design would be in the carrier's best interests though, so who's to say it could ever have happened, even with magic.
If SIP app #474 is screwing up, I switch to SIP app #475. This all can be done in userland as an application. Changing out my GSM stack? Yeah, I can't do that.
However, you might fiddle around with various other SIP clients and find one that works for you. The other hundreds of millions of mobile phone users are not going to do that - so the problem will persist.
And yet somehow Apple is able to push updates without carrier approval and this doesn't happen.
People want to believe Apple is some magic company that can do no wrong, but that ignores the extensive amount of QA (both in house and at the telcos) that happens before any release like this (as a longish time OS X user, I should know.)
However, Apple was able to pull the update within hours and release a fix the next day.
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2014/12/09/apple-rel...
Only iPhone6 only if you updated a point release in the first hour, not that it is good.
And also links the news articles where millions of Apple customers stormed shops after updates broke their phones.
> The most important thing Apple is good at is marketing, and your comment demonstrates why.
Apple has been able to become powerful in phone market. They enough power to push the carriers around, rather than the other way round. Therefore everyone but Apple has to have their updates approved by the carrier before they get pushed out. My comment was not pro-Apple. Merely pointing out the hypocrisy in how carriers claim they have to spend months testing updates for everyone except Apple.
The CS rep that responded was a nice guy, but had no clue what to do. We started spitballing together some possible ideas, and I suggested that we just let it go and Wallet will eventually figure out that the transfer didn't go through, and deduct the money back from my Wallet account. He thought that might be a good idea, but had no further ideas beyond that.
That was Google Wallet, and that was $1,000 floating around. I can't imagine the level of customer service available to anyone who hasn't actually put money directly into the equation.
Do they actually do that thing we all saw in The Internship, where they have random engineers field support calls? Because I felt like I was talking to a random engineer.
my experience in the past made me avoid newer Google products because support in the past was non existent. last thing i bought was a nexus one. i for the bad touch screen (registers ghost touches after screen is on for a while) and i could either complain on forums and be ignored or start a return with htc that from the forums histories ended with a device on worse condition and save touch screen bug sent back...
As is, it has to be essentially non-technical people taking the calls. I can't think of why else they would respond to a complaint like "The age on my account won't update as I get older" with "Are you sure you're right about your age?"
I humbly submit that the carriers could avoid a lot of ill-will if there was more transparency in that process. I hope there aren't contractual obligations in place preventing that because it really changes the way I personally see the problem.
they sell devices that are unlocked/developer edition, that are full of disclaimers that if you unlock boot loader some guaranties do no apply etc. and instead of providing h the new images first to this users to help then test, they usually roll out to the general population and weeks (Motorola, months) later make the images officially available.
i guess there's two reasons, one is that they can get some money from operators to release first on one network or another, the second is that they have no consumer support so they couldn't care less. alternatively it's just honest incompetence.
We haven't seen any major botnets infecting mobile phones yet, but I think it is just a matter of time. Desktop browsers gets updated almost instantly world wide and they still fall prey for attacks, when mobile software lags for weeks or months at a time. The more people do their online banking on their phones instead of their desktops, it gets more valuable as a target.
This problem needs a solution, and sooner rather than later.
Since I had just used the OTA updates for stock 5.0 and 5.0.1, another redditor suggested that I do a factory wipe. I haven't seen the problem recur yet, but it has only been a couple days.
Because of this and other problems (random crashes), if I see any issue again, then I'll downgrade to 4.4.4. My typical uptime for that release was measured in months, and for 5.0.1 the uptime is measured in days. I've been severely disappointed with this release. I don't see how the new look and feel provides any significant usability benefit.
I've seen errors in inbox, in google music, and most annoying in google photos where I'm unable to access some of my albums (created stories were unavailable for me for about 2 weeks - I've checked almost every day, it's fixed now).
I tried taking Google take out (downloading all of my Google data), but all I got was an e-mail that it failed to create it. And there's of course not much I can do, I'm simply out of luck (well I can google similar problems to see I'm not the only one and that others are also out of luck).
I'm still a Google fan but I'm very dissappointed with this. Of course they can exist just fine if it works only for 99% of cases, but that's not the same brand that I knew.
for example compare http://i.imgur.com/IxwQwqk.png with http://i.imgur.com/DrzdQKJ.png, it’s not like it would have been much work to implement this design, and it would have made it far nicer, but they didn’t do it.
It seems like Google is trying to save on every end and while trying to not spend a single unnecessary penny, they butcher their services.
I had to download QuickPic to do what Gallery used to do (no-nonsense viewing of media stored on my device, no I don't want your cloud). A lot of text is gone and I have to do a web search to figure out what the icons mean and what I'm supposed to touch to do what I'm trying to do. Using my Nexus now requires me to read the manual. My e-mail went unsynced for days before I figured out how to manually sync it again.
I bought a Nexus to avoid all the crapware, and now Google is churning out the crapware directly to my phone.
The phone seems to have problem exiting airplane mode (I do it every night) and only a reboot cures the problems.
It's not a phone so I can't test that but I am having a hard time connecting to WiFi manually sometime (for example if I have 2 per-saved WiFi AP's in range and I want to switch from one to the other) and only a restart seems to fix it.
The annoying part is not that it won't switch but it disconnects and refuses to connect to anything until you restart the tablet.
This release of Android is certainly full of bugs.
This is quite infuriating, and is the time I have considered moving to an iPhone or other non-Nexus device.
It seems that in the end Nexus, etc. are the beta testers for us Moto users. (Though we still get updates faster and more frequently than most other Android phones.)
Well... I'd never seen it happen at all in the previous releases. And with 5.0.1, I saw it happen twice in three days.
An indication that Google no longer considers the phone functionality of a smartphone to be all that important? Or is the Nexus 4 considered too old already? It is a little over 2 years old, which is a relatively long time in the mobile world.
I'm curious to know what the cause of this bug is.
Priority should be divided into two fields in these systems: user-submitted priority, and dev team's priority. Look at all the people who feel directly insulted by the "Priority-Small" tag - they don't know what it means or if it indicates that Google hasn't triaged it (seriously, this old, and not triaged?) , they just feel minimized and condescended to.
I cringe whenever a product fails to perform perfectly at its primary function. Other stuff I'll let slide, but if it's any kind of "phone" it better make calls flawlessly.
What's up with this Google?
"Hi, I don't think anyone from google is even looking at this since we have no resolution, upgrading of priority or even an acknowledgement response."
You act as if Apple hasn't had issues with iPhones either. Remember iOS 8 breaking a lot of phones?
I have one, but have not noticed it. Though I always use it with a BT earpiece, so that might account for the difference?
After several years of hoping Android would get its shit together, I switched to a 5S and got my wife an iPhone 6.
I have minor quibbles: No Google Calendar App. Google service push notifications seem a tad slower on the iPhone. But the experience is just so much better.
I am by no means a fan boi. I am a fan (as an infrastructure engineer with real problems to solve) of my phone just working, without factory resets, reboots, etc. The iPhone, to my chagrin, does exactly that.
I suspect neither one of us really have enough data to draw a statistical conclusion about how common this is.
And the silly thing is... it once worked! I feel like I should have never "upgraded" my Android version.
So, basically, don't answer then phone when in an app until an update cures it.
Just about what I expect as far as phones these days, people just suck at making software.
If this was a widespread issue surely there's be more than just an bug report about it?
Because with Android's update process you cannot opt to push anything but the latest update which is always an unproven by its nature.
It isn't like Windows where you can opt out of the latest service pack for a while and wait to see if it is stable. With Android you either take the latest update or you don't.
I thought that was hilarious, since at this point my baseline expectation for an Android update is for absolutely core functionality to be broken, and not be fixed for a few months if ever. Now, technically only 3 out of 6 Android devices I've ever owned ended up in that state. But it appears that it would have been just a matter of time for the Nexus 4, and it doesn't appear in those stats just due to being stolen before it was broken.
Status: Obsolete
i have the exact same symptoms since 2.3, but only when using Google voice. i.e. routing my calls though Google.
and on the report everyone says they can dial when disabling data/wifi.
i will be watching the fix for this one very closely.