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.
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.
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'.
That's probably a good policy, but it isn't good English. Any formulation of X has Y characteristic where X is a group implies all members of the group unless the "some" is explicit.
It's a total clickbait headline, but you already knew that hence your policy.
> 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.
Sure, but isn't it the primary job of journalists writing about subjects like this to figure that stuff out before publishing? This is a headline that clearly implies "all" phones. Now we're in a subthread where it seems like the fraction is "<12.5%" (actually we have four in my household, so that gets us to "less than one in 12" I guess).
Do you genuinely believe that "Pixel phones unusable" is a correct characterization of the situation given the data at hand? If you were an editor, would you have published that headline?
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
> The issue is being reported by owners of numerous Pixel models, including the Google Pixel 5, 6, 6a, 7, 7a, 8, and 8 Pro, suggesting that it isn't confined to a particular hardware architecture.
> The root cause is unknown but is likely a software issue with the January 2024 Play system update that Google hasn't pinpointed or fixed yet.
> If you are still on an older update (last was November 1, 2023), it is recommended to stay on it and postpone applying the January 2024 update until the situation clears up.
> In the case of Pixels, it appears that Google performed a staged roll-out of the January 2024 Play system updates, so not every Pixel owner has received the problematic update yet.
Loved my Nexus 5x until the high power CPU cores started failing causing instabilities. Loved my pixel 2 until the battery stopped holding a charge. Liked my 4a (it is literally a faster 2 that you can't squeeze to bring up google assistant (the squeeze was my fave feature)) until the April 2023 update that ruined the battery life. They never fixed it. Pixel 7 was suffering the same issues at the time. I made the decision to switch to a Samsung S23+ and not looking back.
Build quality of the Google flagships never have been the best, but they always have issues. I am getting too old to have time to fiddle with this stuff and just want something that works.
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)
I always have to go to the gear menu on my phone, Connections -> Connectivity -> Phone -> Pair Phone to put it in pairing mode in order for the Garmin Connect app to detect it. The bluetooth pairing alone is never enough for me, it seems to pair successfully but then like you mentioned, the app never talks to it.
As much as I don't like apple's walled garden, reliability and consistency are exteremly valuable for users like my mom who's currently a pixel user.
I hate being worried about her calling from a neighbor's phone one day because her phone is unusable. I'm aware that this issue doesn't affect all pixels, but an issue like this affecting even 1% of devices is not okay.
I'm holding on to hope that google hasn't agressively pushed out this update, and my mom's phone won't auto update until this is resolved.
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.
I feel Apple does this too. The main app I use is Music and it sure feels like the UI is worse and overly complicated these days. Not to mention uglier.
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.
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...
Dogfooding there was historically kind of a joke. I had severe issues with my Nexus hardware as a Googler and none of them ever got fixed. When they offered to give us all free Nexus phones as a Christmas gift one year I refused because I wasn't about to subject myself to another one. I'd wager money that dogfooders caught this issue and reported it, and nothing was done because it either fell through the cracks or wasn't reported enough to pass the "care about it" bar.
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 regretting it. So now I'm facing a tough choice: potentially run a device with a security issue on the network here or play the update game of Russian Roulette (with 5 bullets instead of the normal single one) and hope that I still have a functional device afterwards.
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".
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.
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
I have a very simple solution for that: you get to choose: you are either the provider of commercial software and accept liability for your product or you have to open source it.
Readit News
Many people (most?) have more than one device... computer... etc.. either way, there are many other ways to contact someone.
Dead Comment
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.
I'm always imagining 'Some' in front of headlines like these unless it says 'All'.
It's a total clickbait headline, but you already knew that hence your policy.
Sure, but isn't it the primary job of journalists writing about subjects like this to figure that stuff out before publishing? This is a headline that clearly implies "all" phones. Now we're in a subthread where it seems like the fraction is "<12.5%" (actually we have four in my household, so that gets us to "less than one in 12" I guess).
Do you genuinely believe that "Pixel phones unusable" is a correct characterization of the situation given the data at hand? If you were an editor, would you have published that headline?
Where are you getting 50/50 odds of being affected? Is that cited somewhere, or just a random possible percentage?
(I own one unaffected Pixel.)
1/8 would be the chance to have all 3 affected. The chance of having at least one affected would be 1-1/8.
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
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.
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 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
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.
I however am not on the Jan 2024 Google Play update detailed by this article. I am still on the recommended Nov 2023 one.
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.
> The root cause is unknown but is likely a software issue with the January 2024 Play system update that Google hasn't pinpointed or fixed yet.
> If you are still on an older update (last was November 1, 2023), it is recommended to stay on it and postpone applying the January 2024 update until the situation clears up.
> In the case of Pixels, it appears that Google performed a staged roll-out of the January 2024 Play system updates, so not every Pixel owner has received the problematic update yet.
GOS is in a class of its own.
Build quality of the Google flagships never have been the best, but they always have issues. I am getting too old to have time to fiddle with this stuff and just want something that works.
https://www.google.com/search?q=apple+ota+update+breaks+phon...
There isn't a single manufacturer that consistently gets this right, only different shades of gray.
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.
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.
I hate being worried about her calling from a neighbor's phone one day because her phone is unusable. I'm aware that this issue doesn't affect all pixels, but an issue like this affecting even 1% of devices is not okay.
I'm holding on to hope that google hasn't agressively pushed out this update, and my mom's phone won't auto update until this is resolved.
Maybe in a few years when the EU has managed to force universal compliance for the DMA...
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".
https://discussions.apple.com/community/iphone
There’s issues with software which affect a function then there’s issues that ruin the whole phone…
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".
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.