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.
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'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.
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.
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.
At the scale Apple operates at, if there's a widespread issue with the iPhone, it will be known. And not just reported about on tech nerd sites, it'll be on major news stations because it's potentially affecting your dad and many people you know. That's why bendgate and antennagate were such famous incidents.
If Apple was having hardware and software defects at the rate of recent Pixel phones scaled to the iPhone's marketshare, it would be massive news.
This is very true. Maybe it's just perception, but from the outside, it feels like Google plays the most fast and loose of the mainstream options. Samsung and Apple seem more trustworthy.
> I am getting too old to have time to fiddle with this stuff and just want something that works.
I definitely find the iPhone great.
It _generally_ just works. If shit does break there's no fiddling... it's just broken. If it doesn't work the way you want there's no fiddling... suck it up or get a new phone.
I was going to say it's like an appliance and compare it to my toaster, but I would 100% end up at my kitchen table angrily disassembling my toaster if it failed to make me breakfast one morning.
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.
Oh, I'm doing the pair process through the Garmin Connect app. I put the watch into pairing mode, then go to the app. The app sees the watch, then Android prompts for the bluetooth pairing code. That succeeds, the app goes into some sort of state of talking to the watch -- the watch switches to showing a little logo for the app even -- but then the app cacks out saying the pairing was not successful.
Something is going wrong with some internal state transitions, or it loses connectivity while doing some sort of data sync or something.
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".
Thanks for this perspective. It's mind-boggling that a company with such resources, talent and presence in the whole world is unable to innovate in such a simple thing and it seems they're going similar route Microsoft did with its smartphone, which they eventually killed.
Let's look at it from a different perspective. Google is unable to properly launch a phone worldwide and the decisions are incomprehensible to a thinking human. They support Pixel 8 in Ireland (5 million population), Norway (5.4 million), Denmark (5.9) but they don't in Poland (38 million, part of European Union for 20 years) where they bought one of the largest offices for over $600 million USD to support 2,500 employees. Poles consider Pixel's price a fair price, not an expensive one. Not to mention lack of Pixel presence in at least some Asian countries with at least several hundred millions of potential customers.
As for the technicalities, they even did not enter all radio frequencies and countries in their version of Android, so that 5G or some Wi-Fi bands don't work in some countries. When you roam from supported country to an unsupported one, you may loose part or all connectivity. They did the same in Chromecast. Multiple layoffs confirm it's all about money at Google, so why they don't reach for an easy money from smartphone market? Lack of vision, lack of knowledge, name it however you want.
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.
> 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.
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.
Yes, precisely. That puts the onus for the fix squarely on the users, who have not created the problem and who likely will mis-identify it. If it were to happen to me - it won't - it would cost me half a day and that's assuming the 'small store in the mall' will be able to do the repair on the spot, which if there is a glut of customers due to this issue may well not be the case.
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.
I don't know what you're getting at, that's clearly spelled out already. But in case you didn't get it: that's without liability for the manufacturer because you have the choice to bypass them. Presumably such a situation wouldn't occur very often because 'proprietary hardware' with 'open source software' wouldn't be proprietary for very long. The software would tell you all you need to know about how it works.
Yes, if you have a point to make you should spell it out. Google manufactures phones, has an open source OS and has a bunch of proprietary stuff that they do not release, see:
"However, most devices run on the proprietary Android version developed by Google, which ships with additional proprietary closed-source software pre-installed, most notably Google Mobile Services (GMS) which includes core apps such as Google Chrome, the digital distribution platform Google Play, and the associated Google Play Services development platform. Firebase Cloud Messaging is used for push notifications. "
> How hard would it be to revert to the previous working version?
In Qualcomm EDL firehose mode? Super simple if you have the QPST: the phone is waiting for an image to write to the flash. It's actually waiting for the image to immediately reboot once it's written.
But google doesn't release these images, so it's like having computer permanently bricked after the hard drive was corrupted because there's no install media available.
I think we (as people who are on HN and can understand the problem) have a responsibility in not letting such things happen, if only because they hurt the people who don't understand the problem, the simplicity of the solution, and may just have a phone as their only computing device.
There are several similar formats allowing to do the exact same thing with other chips: I'm most familiar with mediatek, but essentially it's always a read-only bootloader, in case the normal boot can't start.
I can't imagine google forgetting to add an EDL-like reflash mode for their SoC.
I can however imagine them not providing the files needed for the reflash, since that's been true since they used Qualcomm.
I was unable to register new fingerprints or use existing registered fingerprints and my screen would randomly become unresponsive... I think it was software related because it appear to be working as expected now. (Pixel 7a)
I don't auto-update apps though, just manually update the OS.
I think it was the last time I bought a Pixel... but I am not sure because I don't know what else to buy.
My Pixel 5's camera has not been working since October 2023 (app crashed on start), and I don't seem to be the only one. No update to fix this seems in sight. Google seems to really have dropped the ball on Pixel QA.
It's a damn shame, since the Pixel was really the only good phone that wasn't huge or with an awful glass back.
If you're not yet updated to the January Google Play system, can you keep the phone from auto-updating? I know how to do this for a full Android system update, but not for Google Play Services.
I've lost so much respect for Google over the past few years. I keep having problems with the Youtube app locking up on my Pixel 4a, requiring me to force-stop the app via applications settings before it will work again. And after doing some travel with my phone, I have a difficult time believing that the Android PMs do much traveling with theirs. So many little issues that my wife didn't have with her iPhone.
This happened to my Samsung S23 after the update too. The thing would black screen spontaneously following the update. At first it would respond to an hard-reboot, then repeatedly complain about Google Play Services crashing, and eventually black-screen again. After hard-rebooting it a few times it no longer even responds to the hard-reset key combo.
That's not the first story like this. It seems like more and more often the QA is done by users who have not signed up for it. Why can't a multibillion company do a proper QA?
I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up making them money: people will replace their devices with newer ones. Once the device is sold it no longer has a function for the manufacturer until the next sale happens to the same user. So any update that bricks a percentage of the devices (or makes them effectively unusable) may well extract some more $ from the users.
Sure, but this is the past half dozen models of the phone made by the same company who makes the OS. You'd think these would be the easiest possible test cases for them to do up front.
I assume it's just a fraction of users affected, so it could be something like a service reading third-party app data and crashing due to a bug. The kind of thing that should be caught in code review, because comprehensive testing is next to impossible.
Because most test devices are likely constantly factory reset and aren't given the chance to live with multiple user profiles on them for a long period of time where cruft can build up and people can notice that using using external storage is broken.
Staffing proper QA teams went out of vogue a couple of years ago.
Turns out that the way incentives are set up at most tech companies today, nobody gets dinged for shipping major software regressions/bugs while everyone is patted on the back for shipping even completely broken features on time.
The fact that they have the ability to roll this out to a handful of users, all of whose devices stopped working, and to detect that and not proceed with the rollout is considered success, by them.
How many tons of ewaste was just created? Even the core products are hurting. The Boeingification of everything is serious risk for all the civilization.
An iPhone SE is not expensive and is supported for just as long as the flagship iPhones are.
The OG $399 iPhone SE from 2016 is currently on it's eighth year of security updates, having gotten another update just a week ago. That works out to $50 per supported year.
Or, unpopular opinion, if you don't care about brand and/or cutting edge camera quality, just buy a cheap Xiaomi phone.
I have been using the Poco X3 for 3.5 years with absolutely zero issues. Even the battery still holds through an entire day of regular usage.
It cost me 1/4 of the price of an iPhone and I get the same if not bigger value for my use cases (bigger in terms of battery life which was laughable back when I still used an iPhone 6, don't know if things have gotten better now).
I don't use smartphones but I find their software stack very interesting. I just investigated a Pixel 5a phone that was brought to me for "sudden death". The owner reported the screen showed an update attempt, then ended up bricked.
It's allegedly impossible, due to the A/B update mode. Yet it managed to end up bricked, so the question is how, and what can be done.
After investigation (you can do it very simply by looking at the USB ids), it's currently in Qualcomm EDL firehose mode: this is likely due to a failed attempted update https://xdaforums.com/t/fix-pixel-3-qusb_bulk_cid-xxxx_sn-xx...: "because the bootloader has been corrupted during an attempted update - it's in EDL mode because there's nothing else it can boot into. I'd speculate it has some link with that "clever" new approach of being able to update the OS in the background and switch to it on the next boot"
The "clever approach" that causes the problem is called the FOTA (or OTA, for "Over The Air") update, done by the carrier. This is known and documented on https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/248340373
To leave EDL mode, it needs to be fed a bootloader + an image matching its model, to flash the eMMC memory inside.
However, google has denied the extended warranty, even while clearly being the cause of death of the phone.
Shame on you google, for creating more e-waste by refusing to release the QPST. If anyone reading this works at google, try to do something. It's not nice to put perfectly usable phones in a landfill just because a QPST is not released.
I hope someone will leak the QPST, because for people who don't have the money, it's also serious expense.
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 every 2nd or 3rd nexus/pixel phone
now even I've switched to iOS
(and in the process of switching my entire family too)
I have used a pixel 4a and pixel 6a for many years now and haven't had any of these issues. It sounds like potentially had defective hardware, and instead of getting it repaired you just lived with it.
This can definitely be the case. I had a phone that for a year would drop out frequently doing cellular data. I assumed my provider was throttling me. Upgraded my phone and the problem went away; likeliest culprit was the cell circuit in the phone was slightly damaged and running full data comms was causing it to reboot.
GrapheneOS is literally the only thing that's keeping me on android. It has been really realiable for me, way more reliable than Samsungs or Google Pixels Android ROM.
Though if GrapheneOS dies my next option will probably a linux phone, as I'll never get along with iOS.
Switching from iOS to Graphene was a really smooth experience for me, I can install any app I've needed so far, and I don't have to deal with 200 tracking and buggy default apps.
I wish they would keep security updates going longer than the current period though.
Same here; had a Pixel 5a with Google Fi. The 1 year old Pixel randomly died one day, totally bricked. Google phone support requires them calling you (after you request it online), and the browser-based “Fi phone” was unable to receive calls from Google phone support. No other callers had this issue. When I finally got in touch with them via my wife’s phone, they wanted me to drive 1.5 hours outside of SF for a phone diagnostic. I said no thanks and switched to iPhone with AT&T.
I'm always baffled when I hear someone having an experience like this.
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.
I've been using Android since 2010 and don't remember having any stability issues for the last 6-8 years at least. Maybe it's a Pixel-thing? I've mostly owned Sony and Moto devices. They're often 1-2 versions behind on Android which could explain why they're more stable maybe.
(I like to customize my phones a lot (minimalist launcher, Termux software, Firefox with extensions) which I would hate to give up for iOS).
It's always a compromise. With Android you can get actually good typing experience in non-English languages, voice typing in non-English, proper desktop view in browsers and really good call quality or better PWM in some cases.
It depends on what is important for you. iOS is not a panacea either.
By they way, with Android, just use Samsung. Despite the duplicated apps it's just a better experience.
LineageOS followes the Android versions. There's a LineageOS 20 for Android X, but you can use LineageOS 19 if you want to stay on X-1. It usually takes a few months after Android release for LineageOS to catch up.
About 3/4 use Android, but very few have the courage to run recent builds.
It's been a frustration point up the ladder, because they feel the ~same as you: why are they the only ones filing bugs?
But it's not that. It's decayed internal culture. There's other stuff around the margins they could change*, but, the rot is deep and unlikely to be fixed.
Too focused on...non-business objectives...to be effective. Too crucial to risk reforming. And it's very unlikely they hear about it up the ladder. And that's before the morale decline of "even when you smile and nod and sing along with the antics, you can be let go at any point by a 2 AM email"
* tl;dr: make it dead simple to get a phone. Line managers were always a bit squirrely about expensing. It's a non-starter post late 2021, and there were never ever enough DVTs/EVTs for them to be meaningful. Establish "everyone is on Pixel next year's - 2", and have the VP send an org-wide email saying individuals can expense as needed.
It seems to me that the flagship device requires the beta. I had to enable beta QPRs to get features that are in the advertisements of the Pixel 8 Pro. Those features didn't exist out of the box, which was confusing.
Thankfully they mostly break the UI. Though my auto wipers got really bad recently. The body control electronics are pretty solid. I mean, you could lock/unlock, drive the car without the tablet. Not that regulators would approve of it.
Rivian, Tesla, Ford (Mustang EVs) all have had bad OTA software shipped to them. The problem will continue to get worse as cars become mostly software defined.
