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However, I am back to having to re-pair my Garmin Venu 2 Plus watch every day after some Pixel update a few months ago.
It was broken in early 2023, then they fixed it, then broke it again :( https://www.reddit.com/r/GarminWatches/comments/12hpk0c/venu...
I can't help but think they do it deliberately, in order to drive folks to the Pixel watch.
It's a damn shame, since the Pixel was really the only good phone that wasn't huge or with an awful glass back.
Android is just awful in terms of reliability I find it hard to believe anyone working for Google on Android actually uses an Android phone as their personal device I suffered all of: phone reboots 50% of the time using the camera, assistant won't answer sometimes, phone calls lock up the phone, alarm clock randomly doesn't work, it just goes on and on I had the original Android phone with Android 1.0 and had bought…
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.
Title is super misleading. I have 3 different pixels, all different versions (4, 5a, 7a) and none of them are "unusable" after the update. I'm sure others are having issues, but this isn't something that's bricking everyone's phones.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Nice sleuthing! It's incredible to me that there is no bullet proof recovery mode for this, even something as dumb as an Arduino can recover from almost every form of abuse.
There's a bullet proof recovery mode, check my comment below ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39145490 ) where I detail the steps and provide links.
The EDL firehose mode is just the phone showing up on a very unique USB-ID and waiting to be spoon fed the data to be rewritten to its flash. It needs partition specifications (think like a GPT partition table) + the binary data for each partition (think like the EFI partition for the bootloader, the Windows partition for the actual operating system etc)
It would take litteraly 1 minute for someone with access to the QPST to post it to archive.org and help all the people who've been affected by the bug.
It would take each of them about 5 minutes to restore their phone to a working state. You may object that not everyone may have the technical ability to do that, but I'm sure the small businesses fixing phones in the malls would be happy to charge for the "service" of plugging the phone on a Windows computer, double-clicking on an icon, drag and dropping the right files and clicking on another button.
IMHO, the fact this situation is allowed to persist, even after multiple reports of similar pixel phone problems in the past, can only have 2 explanation: 1) the good people at google writing this software have less understanding that you and I, 2 random HN users or 2) there's money to be made in not fixing the problem, as it will increase the update cycle (people with a dead phone will buy another phone)
I'm all for making money, but not if the consequence is creating ewaste, and forcing people who may not have deep pockets to spend more money on yet another broken-by-design phone.
It was stuff like this that made me switch to iPhone. The notable ones were the December bug and them breaking SMS. What sort of testing they use is beyond me.
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...
Don't interpret this as a slam on the individual developers from the Android team, though. They're determined to fix stuff and some of them worked with me to troubleshoot issues. At the end of the day though it was organizational priorities preventing fixes, or high level decisions resulting in trainwrecks down the road.
My favorite example is that the Nexus 5x phone I owned (bought out-of-pocket) had horrible thermal characteristics. The second-hand explanation I got was that late in the design process, they decided to put a fingerprint reader on the housing such that it sat directly on top of the main CPU package, and it turns out fingerprint readers don't work terribly well as heat sinks. The people who knew enough to protest about this decision were, it seems, overruled.
I can attest that the stupid thing overheated constantly, causing the CPUs to throttle. I had to stop using the official (also purchased from Google) case because the case further impaired heat dissipation. That was my second Google handset and the last time I will ever personally buy one.
My current employer did buy me a Pixel 4a for work use but I don't have anything positive to say about it other than "it only makes me angry some of the time".
Ah, another case of OTA murder of perfectly good devices. You have to wonder at what point regulators will step in to ensure that companies end up liable for updates that effectively cost consumers money. Updates should be to make devices safer and better, never worse. One of the devices in our house has been nagging me since forever to update and I'm just about 99% sure that if I do allow it to update I'll end up re…
Moving from android was the best decision I’ve made tech-wise.
If you can afford it, it’s totally worth its value.
Title is super misleading. I have 3 different pixels, all different versions (4, 5a, 7a) and none of them are "unusable" after the update. I'm sure others are having issues, but this isn't something that's bricking everyone's phones.