I'm typing this on a 3a XL that just refuses to die. Google's valuation of that device in the Store is the same, but they haven't switched it off. Guess I got lucky.
Yet when people have applied for this credit they either get no response, or told it will take several weeks (which is useless when they have just screwed your old phone)
I applied for the $100 credit more than a week ago but it is at Google's discretion, and I've never heard back from them. Even if they offer the credit, I'm not interested anymore and I'll never use a Google Pixel again.
Most believe that they're trying to prevent safety issues with overheating batteries. This update prevents the battery from being charged too much or too little.
Draining the battery from 100% to 0% in under an hour (as other commenters have mentioned) is the opposite of this, as that will necessarily dump a lot of heat.
No, it's not actually draining the battery faster. It's setting low level limits on maximum and minimum charge levels. (and also the charge rate, further controlling heat issues)
Some folks have hooked up devices between the phone and charge cable that do the coulomb counting (or similar), and (the one case I saw) showed that the phone is only taking in about 40% of the watt-hours that it was doing before the OTA update.
From what I've seen, no one can point to any actual incidents with these phones being dangerously hot. But the google FAQ did have a "Yes you can still take the pixel 4a on flights", reminiscent of the samsung phone issue several years ago...
If it is just that, they should have written so. Because what they wrote was that some devices may be affected from this optimization. Nothing general. And if this is really an issue, all those that now change to Lineage or Graphe will be an even bigger issue soon. Because in that case, Google knew, and did not say so.
I received the email from Google notifying me of this "battery performance update" for my Pixel 4A which actually drains the battery faster, so it left me scratching my head wondering what a "performance update" is for Google.
After the update, my battery was depleted at an alarming rate. I applied for the $100 voucher but I've never heard back from Google. So I decided to bite the bullet and moved to iPhone instead. Apple might not be the best, but this was the last straw for me.
I'm a weirdo who carries two pixel 4as. I'm also waiting for a response regarding the $100 voucher on one of my phones... My other one I took in for the free battery replacement, and that's doing OK.
But yeah, I was planning to go for a Pixel 9 or 9a (when that's been out for a while), but this forcing of the hand by google is absolute BS, and the alternatives are unsatisfactory.
I recently ordered a Fairphone 5, imported from the UK. Stock Android experience, replaceable battery, SD card slot, unlocked bootloader and modding is encouraged. Its basically what the Pixel (Nexus) line was originally supposed to be.
Lol this was the most blown out of proportion "gate" ever and a nothing burger really. The issue wasn't what Apple did, as it is a very common practice in the industry and I bet almost every other manufacturer did it too. The issue was that they didn't notify the user.
Would grapheneos (https://grapheneos.org/) help with this? I am using a pixel 4a as a "house phone" so it is plugged in all the time but I wonder if I should upgrade.
In the sense that it was a perfectly good phone, and still works with e.g. various bank apps or whatever... and I got tired of jail-break/customization stuff of smart devices about a decade ago... the extra work to wipe everything and explore a new world of things that might turn out to be broken isn't what I'd consider a reasonable option. :/
Things have come a long way. The GrapheneOS installation in particular is very straightforward. And most banks work just fine as apps, and if not via their website.
I use GrapheneOS on my pixel 4a ever since I got it a few years ago. Installation is straightforward and it is a best of both worlds - you can install and run android apps from the playstore in a sandbox.
> Since this is a major release, the Pixel 4a (5G) and Pixel 5 have not been ported to Android 14 QPR2 as part our initial release. We need to determine whether it makes sense to move these end-of-life devices to Android 14 QPR2 or keep them on a legacy extended support release branch based on the last Android 14 QPR1 release.
I use pixel 3 with https://calyxos.org/ as a home phone to play music, record videos, pictures etc. Calyxos is still providing extended support for 4a, but microG doesn't work as well compared to sandboxed google play services on grapheneos (which i use on my 7a). So if google services are not too important go ahead with calyxos.
Google ended security updates for the Pixel 4a in August 2023, so running this as your daily driver was already problematic. Fortunately, LineageOS officially supports the 4a, and v22 (aka Android 15) was just released for it.
For older Google phones (as well as most other Android ones) it is the standard. (AFAIU this was mostly due to Qualcomm’s policies and lack of pushback from Google et al.) Newer Google ones get 5–7 years[1], and Samsung has also switched to a similar support term (but keep in mind that only Samsung’s flagships get monthly security updates).
This attitude (and the word "problematic") is so tiring. What is the actual problem with running it as your daily driver? What specific vulnerability are you actually concerned about? Unless there's something like an arbitrary code execution bug in one of the networking/radio stacks, "there aren't updates" is a statement with approximately zero useful information.
So I'm not terribly familiar with Bluetooth. Are these something that can be exploited by an unpaired device?
"Google Android on a Pixel 4a is vulnerable to remote code execution by arbitrary nearby wireless devices" is certainly a better reason to not use one than "security updates have ended".
and you'll see that every month lots and lots of CVEs are fixed with at least high or even critical severity in various stacks. If you're running a phone that hasn't received updates since August 2023, you can assume that you have dozens of remotely exploitable bugs on your system. The security track record of Android is absolutely terrible.
That phone hacking is not a big thing is simply because it's usually much easier for a hacker to get into the cloud services people use instead through targeted phishing attacks. If that makes you feel safe using a phone without updates, then good for you, but don't claim these updates aren't actually fixing serious bugs every month.
The fact that their bulletins say that there are high and critical vulnerabilities every month is sort of my point. Is this thing actually critical? Can you only send the vulnerable commands after you have paired? [0] suggests these are used after pairing, but like I said I'm not familiar enough with BT. If that's the case though, "User interaction is not needed for exploitation" is misleading; I'm not going to pair with random devices, so I'm not concerned. I see that with other vulnerabilities too. e.g. CVE-2024-31320 from last year is "critical", and says "there is a possible way to establish a companion device association without any confirmation due to CDM. User interaction is not needed for exploitation." Except if I'm understanding correctly, you need to install a malicious app, and what it does is let that app use a bluetooth device without asking. Big whoop, that's how everything works on desktop, and it's fine.
The problem is the security industry has such a low signal:noise ratio that it makes sense to just ignore everything they say as a user. They're constantly lying and saying there are important security updates when there aren't, and that everything is high/critical severity when it isn't. In a corporate setting, you just unthinkingly update to check boxes, but as an individual, it makes no sense to do that. And with Android, you have to take possibly undesirable feature updates to get kernel or system library updates. For some products, security updates are to "secure" the device against its owner! Advisories are often lacking enough information to be able to evaluate impact, which further makes it clear that the people publishing them are to be viewed with a skeptical eye.
It should be immediately obvious whether this is exploitable by random passersby (if it actually is) without me having to go learn how bluetooth works at a protocol level. "Don't think about it and just update, install a new OS, or buy new devices" is not a useful attitude.
Things don't become end of life when they stop receiving updates. They become finished. Whether and for what purposes they continue to be useful requires ongoing judgement.
It seems to me that at this point for the normal person, the biggest security issue is not that some hacker will hack their phone to steal their data and render their device unusable, but rather that Google will
I assume its a responsibility thing. If your bank login gets hacked on a no longer supported phone, you cannot point at other issues since you were not uptodate anymore. Even if it doesn't matter.
There's been a lot of activity on Reddit and Android tech news websites. /r/Pixel4a has been absolutely busy with activity lately, lots of people asking for help.
My experience was kid dropped my old phone on holiday, we tried to remember why my spouse's old phone got replaced, and remembered she had a pixel 4a and the battery life had gotten really poor.
There was some news at the time that the 4a would be getting a 'battery performance update' and that it would result in some users getting a warning about their battery performing poorly and some would be eligible for $50 or a repair.
When I eventually got around to prepping the phone for the kid, lo and behold, the update was ready, I did it, and the battery was bad, and it linked me to the battery performance campaign page...
Which needed the IMEI, then said I could get $50, a $100 coupon or bring it in for repair, and there was a shop reasonably near me. I brought it in and they swapped the battery in about 2 hours with no extra drama.
I don't know why you would throw your phone out from this update... Although I wouldn't be surprised if you had already thrown it out because the battery performance was an issue before the update too.
(EDIT: Just to be clear, and which is also mentioned in that post: unlocking the bootloader will reset the device. If your device is already unlocked though, you will be able to keep the data.)
Of course, I would just advise to switch to LineageOS directly, since Google has stopped providing security updates for the Pixel 4a already in August 2023. I've run LineageOS for years on the Pixel 4a and it has worked pretty much perfectly for me:
Well, they are good enough for me, but to be honest, I'm not particularly picky... As said in a parallel post, you can get GCam in APK form (I run LineageOS without GApps) but I hear it's a bit trial&error to find one that works and I haven't bothered.
I'd also be interested to know if a Google Camera app installed post-facto to LineageOS is compatible with the remote control & viewfinder of the Pixel Watch.
Best phone I've ever used. Still going great after 4 years. Don't know how long it will last. There doesn't seem to be anything available with similar form factor.
The 8a is 3mm wider, 8mm taller, and 45g heavier. Perhaps that's not a huge difference, but I already consider the 4a too big. I will likely continue not upgrading as long as LineageOS and the hardware remain usable.
FWIW I was on Pixel 3a until last month; bought Pixel 6 in the meantime, but it was too big and heavy to carry around, so I only used it as a "tablet", only at home.
Just updated to Pixel 8 and it fits the hand very well (including Spigen Liquid Air cover), and doesn't feel too heavy. Have a few friends who got Pixel 8 last month on sale as well and they all confirm.
I switched from 4a to 8a. The weight difference is substantial and really noticable at first. I've gotten used to it now and it runs great with GrapheneOS, but it marked an end of an era of smaller, lighter phones for me.
> Headphone jacks in phones are (sadly) gone forever i'm afraid.
Maybe from Google phones, for now? Possibly on smaller phones. But Best Buy sells 7 models with 5g and a headphone jack. There's almost certainly more if you shop a retailer with more variety, using Best Buy because they have decent filtering.
I like the parametric search, but searching a US retailer helps me focus on phones that are reasonable to source and use in the US. I could manage when GSM was two bands in the US, and usually two bands overseas and if you wanted a really neat phone you hoped it was quad band or at least tri band, because the really neat phones that were dual band were dual band on EU frequencies... now GSM Arena inevitably points me at phones intended for use in Japan and usually have a pretty poor match up with bands I'm likely to use while remaining flexible for use on other carriers in case it becomes a hand me down and the recipient isn't on the same carrier as me.
I looked into this because I find I want something I can stuff into a trouser pocket. The only reasonably viable android option was a Sony Xperia XZ2 compact, from 2018 on android 10. You can put lineage on it which is currently maintained, but that has the downsides of not passing device integrity which some apps will check, or being willing to constantly play cat and mouse to spoof it. Sony also apparently wipe a partition with a little DRM blob for the camera, which degrades some aspect of its post processing capabilities so image quality might be less. There's also the iPhone SE3 which is currently in support
I ended up getting a 'regular' sized samsung only slightly larger than the one it's replacing, but at least modern phones seem to be getting longer software support periods (assuming there's no nasty surprises included).
> Sony also apparently wipe a partition with a little DRM blob for the camera, which degrades some aspect of its post processing capabilities so image quality might be less.
I think they no longer do that since a while (a few years) ago, but don't ask me which phone model exactly was the last one affected.
Replaced my 4a with a similar sized Moto Edge 30 Neo. Overall, much better hardware quality. I had a warranty replacement for the 4a due to cracks around the headphone jack, also happened to the replacement but that wasn't replaced.
The Moto was half the price of the 4a and is still receiving updates.
It's frustrating. My phone went from 100% to 0% in under an hour. I could not rely on it for a typical workday. Thankfully my job does not require my personal phone, and thankfully the update happened on the weekend. Imagine seeing this Monday morning before work. Who has time to fiddle with firmware? And who has time to set up a new phone in the middle of a workweek, especially if you're switching to a non-Pixel phone?
The small credit does not cover the cost of inconvenience.
Same problem here (a few hours of battery life and it's very slow to charge now). This update makes no sense at all, excepted if you want to force your users to buy a new phone.
For me, it should be a RED flag on the Pixel lineup and on the confidence in Google.
This reminds me of when Google's last update to the 2012 wi-fi Nexus 7 botched its TRIM implementation, which made everyone think its shitty eMMC was to blame. I held onto mine sort of as a joke for more than a decade.
I only just found out a month ago that the Android update caused its performance to tank, then put LineageOS on it, and was shocked to find that 13-year-old tablet was not only still usable but actually kinda good.
Yeah, mine did the same and later died completely, and only now I found that the LG was refunding the full price of phones or fixing them for free if they had this specific HW issue...
My spouse had to buy a new phone because of this issue. Neither of us got any notification about the battery issue. Even if we did, what Google is offering here isn't great. We tried to get the battery replaced, but was told that the process could likely break the screen and jack up the cost to nearly the original purchase price. Sending the phone in for repair also isn't a good solution because she needs it for auth at work. What a mess.
My spouse and I have the same situation but strangely but my phone seems much better while my spouse's phone drains very quickly. We just took it in for a battery replacement at the Google store and should be picking it up soon.
I'm (we all are) constantly reminded to update our phones to latest available updates, but sh*t like this is what teaches users to instead disable and ignore updates indefinitely, under the premise of "if it works don't touch it" (addendum: "... because most probably an update will break it")
And here I am, ignoring updates on my Pixel 6a since October 2024 (there were reports of crashes or bricking, what a surprise) and planning to keep doing that for the foreseeable future.
Sucks having to choose between a potentially (even likely, seeing the trend) broken device or an unsecured one. Pick your poison.
Google 4a user here. They pushed an update while I was on a ski trip in Korea - I updated an hour before getting on my bus and.. the application launcher started crashing on unlock. I couldn't open any apps.
Thankfully, I was able to get into the settings and switch to Lawnchair without a working "desktop UI", but without a second application launcher I would have been totally screwed. I checked the Play Store afterwards and saw hundreds of people with the same issue.
On Linux I can choose which "security" updates to install, and only install those. Why can't Windows and Android provide such a feature?
Stuff like this is why I keep printing entrance tickets and the like. I don't want to end up in a situation where I have to trust software that is known to have new bugs every months to get into a place without any sort of backup.
>Stuff like this is why I keep printing entrance tickets and the like.
I almost got completely screwed by my pixel updating right before a concert while I was already out of town. Luckily my wife was able to login to my computer and forward the tickets to someone else that I was with, but it was a close call because she was walking out the door to do something herself when I managed to get ahold of her.
In this case, if you don’t have a phone that can display Ticketmaster’s code, you’re just SOL, since they decided to break being able to just print out your code.
> Why can't Windows and Android provide such a feature?
Windows does.
Android "can't" because the OS is a partition image with libraries not intended to be updated piecemeal, not a collection of loosely related external projects like Linux is.
Piecemeal updates are also absolute hell to support - they rapidly lead to an untestable combinatorial explosion of possible software loadouts. Even Ubuntu doesn't officially support installing packages from a mixture of point releases (e.g. installing Ubuntu 24.10 packages on the 24.04 LTS); it might be technically possible, but if anything breaks, you get to keep the pieces.
Desktop Linux doesn't actually do that unless you're trying to use a rolling release distribution. The way stable distributions work is that the packages largely remain the same for a given major version throughout its lifespan, but individual packages can still receive security updates.
I've had "stable" distributions fall over upgrading between their major versions.
But you missed the point that Android's system image is immutable and updates are atomic. A user can't screw it up. This is not an insignificant feature, and it's something you also get with something like Fedora Silverblue. Which then also doesn't let you pick and choose what updates to get.
Major version upgrades occasionally break things because they're a new feature release but are then trying to migrate configuration from the existing system. But the same thing happens with "atomic" upgrades if you're trying to migrate existing configuration, because the bug is really in the migration system that didn't properly handle that configuration variance, not because the packages aren't upgraded atomically. Which is why phones sometimes do break on major version upgrades for the same reason.
>Google 4a user here. They pushed an update while I was on a ski trip in Korea - I updated an hour before getting on my bus and.. the application launcher started crashing on unlock. I couldn't open any apps.
I had that happen like a year ago while I was getting ready to go to a concert in another state. Luckily I was able to call my wife have her login to my gmail and forward my digital tickets to someone else in my party.
Apple also has an advertising company. And they track you, but they get money by selling you stuff mostly. I’m deep into the Apple ecosystem system and they don’t force updates, try to upsell me every time updates are installed. I have no ads on the apps I use. They are quite happy for you to fork over gobs of money and call it a day.
Googles primary source of income is ads. All this stuff they do is the primary way they get money. People need to stop being surprised this is where they ended up.
> I’m deep into the Apple ecosystem system and they don’t force updates
My iPad is pretty naggy to install updates, moreso than my Pixel phone even. iOS doesn't automatically update like Android does, but if anything that seems less like it's because Apple disagrees with that and more because their update system is so shit they can't get away with it. It's inexcusably slow to apply updates.
> try to upsell me every time updates are installed
They are the only ones to have lost a lawsuit for doing literally this. Batterygate wasn't that long ago, surely you didn't forget about it already? Heck class actions about it are still happening in various countries!
Basically, Google tracks peopple everywhere. They track what news you read, where you shop, and what political party you support. Apple does none of this. No one tracks people on the Internet like Google. Facebook ...
You will get tracked by those even if you use an Apple device. The key difference between Android and iOS is that Android gives users the ability not to be tracked. iOS (even MacOS) doesn't even let you uninstall Apple News. iOS won't let you get your location or install an app without telling Apple. It won't even let you run a browser other than Safari, which has known data leaking vulnerabilities. User control is the key privacy feature.
Apple does it one way, Google does the same thing but another way. Instead of locking everything down, preventing you to use any other browser than safari for instance, they push you to use their spyware. Android might be open source, but the Google play services are not and if you ever tried to do anything without them, you'd know it's impossible.
Both tracks you by forcing you to use their app that works as spyware.
Also, you missed the point of my comment. The comment I replied to basically was saying Apple and Google are equivalent because Apple sells ads (they sell search listings in the App store search and may run an optional advertising service for apps). My point was they are not equivalent because Apple does not track people around the web like Google does. The other things is Apple has released a lot of privacy features which interfere with the advertising spying machine.
At best, Google pretends to improve privacy. Google's business is basically building a profile on each individual so they can serve the most relevant ads to that person. They make more money when they serve relevant ads (ads people will see, and maybe buy something based on the ad). Google has no interest or incentive to protect privacy because their business depends on invading privacy.
> My point was they are not equivalent because Apple does not track people around the web like Google does.
That's a pittance of privacy. Apple sells your search results out to Google, cooperates with NSA surveillance and institutes online DRM for your apps. They do not care about protecting you from tracking because tracking users is official policy for Apple in both iOS and MacOS.
It is pathetic to watch people on this site rush out to defend Apple like they aren't part of the problem. If you have witnessed Tim Cook's behavior over the past 10 years and still hold hope for Apple, you are not paying close enough attention.
> At best, Google pretends to improve privacy.
Google still published AOSP source code. That's not "pretending" to improve anything, it's an outright statement about the transparent security of their product. I hate AdSense and consider it an anticompetitive scourge on the internet, but I don't see Apple making commitments to security on the level of Google. Last I checked they were still trying to sue security researchers...
If you think Google is "pretending" to improve privacy, how can you deny that Apple pretends too? The reason people drill down on this isn't to defend Google, it's to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you do not actually know what Apple's stance is on this and cannot confirm it with hard evidence. You are repeating marketing and whitepapers, hoping that it's correct.
I think security updates are mostly BS designed to make users voluntarily give up control. Almost nobody would ever be affected by these CVEs but the ceding of control affects everyone.
I was visiting my parents for the holidays and came across this exact mindset. I usually push them to update for security, but I learned that they stopped doing that this year. Apparently some update broke/removed/changed an accessibility feature on their phone in a way that I couldn’t figure out how to revert. My mom had updated her phone first so only she was affected. My dad now refuses to update his phone and both of them have completely stopped updating for fear that something else will “break”. I can’t really blame them, but it does worry me and now I’m trying to think of what I can do to secure their devices if they’re not going to update.
Gotcha. That might help somewhat but it wouldn’t solve the “never update Android or any other app” problem. I’d also have to get them used to using a new browser. It’s a larger problem that their trust in tech was easily (possibly irreversibly) broken after years of me slowly convincing them and getting them used to letting their devices update. They are even older now and having had a stint working in the senior care tech space, I know that trying to tech the older generation to use tech safely is a very high hurdle. Now that I don’t live near them, I’m not sure that’s a hurdle that can be easily overcome.
The software industry has known how to do this for a very long time, but some companies refuse to do it. You maintain a "sustaining" branch just for security and other legitimately urgent fixes, and a main branch for everything else. Users are nudged more strongly to apply the sustaining fixes and the main update branch should be optional.
We have immensely powerful version control and branching at developers' disposal, much better than at any past time I can think of. Yet, most companies insist on having a single release that increments, and users must take everything or nothing whenever they update.
Phone/OS manufacturers are actually better than most, and both major operating systems do provide security updates in parallel with major (feature) updates, but only for a very short amount of time.
But it isn't this simple, because you wouldn't need a single "maintaining" branch. You would need one for each feature release that the user may stop at.
So if you release the feature branch every 3 months after a few years you will have a dozen maintaining branches to backport fixes to, and in which to carefully test that the fix actually works. The problem is linearly worse if you release the feature branch more often.
This was, I believe, the problem that Microsoft wanted to resolve with their gradual burndown of WSUS - a lot of shops (including one I used to work at) would selectively roll out updates based on whether they thought they were relevant, resulting in an explosion of configurations that Microsoft had absolutely never tested against, and naturally, a lot of breakage.
This doesn't really jive with reality as Windows is plenty buggy in the presence or absence of the latest updates. Microsoft has slowly eliminated end user controls over updates because it would interfere with their ability to monetize their customer base. You can't really push a telemetry update, if updates aren't being applied.
> So if you release the feature branch every 3 months after a few years you will have a dozen maintaining branches to backport fixes to, and in which to carefully test that the fix actually works. The problem is linearly worse if you release the feature branch more often.
This has been solved by LTS releases for some time. You have a newest release branch that gets feature updates immediately and an LTS branch which has a full release e.g. once every two or three years, at which point it catches up on features to the then-current newest release branch. The newest release branch doesn't have long-term support and you're expected to take the latest feature update, the LTS branch gets only security updates, the user can choose between the two or three LTS releases currently in the support window or the newest release branch.
Only if it hasn't actually been solved. LTS releases resolve the conflict between providing a stable system that receives only security updates and separately maintaining dozens of separate branches.
They don't solve the problem, though, they merely reduce its scope. Ubuntu's LTS versions only last five years for free users, and they currently have to maintain seven of them.
And now instead of having a small update every now and then that you can perhaps try to adapt to, you have a massive update every 5 years or whatever (or less if you happened to start out just before the next LTS) that'll basically guaranteed wreck everything (by design even!!) and for all intents and purposes might as well not exist cause there's no way you're upgrading to the horrible "new" mess. And we're back at people being stuck on outdated software, but now there's just absolutely no way whatsoever you'll get them to upgrade.
Never mind the problem of if you started out on a non-LTS version.
And also the problem of not getting the actually nice updates, and perhaps losing app compatibility.
Frankly, even the scarequotes around break feel misplaced. Your Mom can't use the device like she wants to. An accessibility feature is gone to the point you can't get it back. That feels pretty broken to me.
Yeah, you’re probably right. I just wanted to write my anecdotal experience in a way that would avoid the “you’re holding it wrong” crowd because the point is how this leads to broken trust, not whatever broken feature it is.
The way Google botched the Android 11 update to my Pixel 4a was the nail in the coffin in convincing me to go back to iPhone. I don't want to upgrade my Android and see a totally different UI every single time. I want consistency and I don't want Google to mess with things that already work. This is very childish on their side and just shows that Google engineers and managers don't use their own products.
It's crazy- I feel like outside of videogames, and sometimes programming languages, almost every single "update" makes things worse.
They shuffle the UI around, or put in more ads, or recently- add some new AI feature. Genuinely can't remember the last OS or App update I've been happy about.
Makes me sad to think of all the developers working long hours just to make their users upset.
If you ignore updates, you will get hacked. If you think a bad update is a problem, wait until you have to clean up a hack. It will cost more money and take more time than buying a new phone.
My advice is to buy phones from reputable manufacturers. I have had an iPhone for over 10 years and I have been very happy. The work well, last, and the performance is always good. My current goal is to keep my current phone 7 years. I will update it when Apple stops supplying updates.
> My advice is to buy phones from reputable manufacturers.
You mean those slowing down your phone on updates [0] and not providing critical security updates in time [1] while not allowing existing more secure alternative browsers [2]?
The true alternative is phones running mainline Linux. Sent from my Librem 5.
My iPhone is over 5 years old and has not slowed down. When Apple did slow down phones, it was because the battery was aging and it could not produce enough power to power the CPU at full speed. Apple had two choices:
1) Reduce the CPU speed so the phone did not crash
2) Not reduce the CPU speed and let the phone crash when the battery could not produce enough power.
I would rather have the right to know what happens with "my" phone and choose my own action. The result was that non-technical people thought the phone was too old and needed replacement.
My pixel 4a lasted about 3 hours before the update, now its about an hour. Even with the discount in the store, it was cheaper to get the pixel 8a and some cash from a local vendor. The ticket to get the reimbursement went surprisingly fast, still waiting on money though.
Yesterday I got my new 8a, installed grapheneos and it works very well! So far no massive issues. When I tried this on the 4a some years ago, netflix complained about general certificate stuff and casting was broken, microG et al was barely holding on. Now, no problems at all!
I've been running GraphiteOS on my Pixel 4a (it is a backup phone) and obviously it doesn't have the battery update but I can attest that it works great with it.
This destroyed my phone, and their appeasement process was terrible too. There was no way for me to find out whether there was a supported repair shop nearby, the $50 cash was apparently through a very dodgy company, and then $100 google store credit didn't disclose that it's "upon review within three weeks" until after you irrevocably chose the option.
The whole thing is ridiculous and poorly handled. Sadly, if my phone had just cracked or failed to turn on, I'd probably have upgraded happily and moved on with my life. As it is, now I feel like something was taken from me. So it goes
I was a Nexus/Pixel user for 10+ years. Majority of the phones I owned during that time had some quirks or issues. The worst examples were Nexus 5X and Pixel 5 – both just suddenly froze one day, shut down, and never turned back on again. After that Pixel 5 surprise I grudgingly switched to iPhone 12 mini.
I still think Google’s Android UI is the best one out there for me, and I despise a lot in the iPhone UX (such as the keyboard) but I just need a phone that works and I can get repaired or replaced easily if I need to. At least in Finland, Google’s customer service has been abysmal over the years.
Speaking as a Pixel 4a customer with this update:
I received the update, and like everyone else, my phone battery started draining incredibly quickly. However, after getting the free battery replacement, my phone's battery has returned to draining as normal (and on the plus side, has somewhat renewed the life of this phone).
The problem is, the Pixel 4a is not designed to have the battery be swapped and it's common to break screens and other parts of the phone in the process. You can look up what's involved and it's no surprise that this is the case.
It's basically a nice little case of hardware and software anti-consumer policies working together to break people's devices and force them to consume more.
I wonder why these "forced updates till kaputt" do not fall under (malicious) property damage.
It is not just Google: My Amazon Kindle gets less and less responsive the last years without any noteworthy functional improvements. Same for the Firestick.
There's a nice video about this from Louis Rossmann [1] that talks about this in detail and tries to find some reasons for it, and he seems to suggest that the update was never about improving the battery life as in getting more usage per charge out of the battery, but improving it as in limiting the battery full charge capacity to minimize potential problems with it, because he (and others) assume that they identified bad batches and are trying to fix potential problems with them by limiting it.
After the update from Google, my 4a did not seem to hold a charge like it did before. I read the reviews/risks and thought that my easiest options were to either roll-back the OS update, or finally give GrapheneOS a try.
I've updated a couple of weeks ago, but I already had a battery replaced last year, so I didn't notice anything untoward with the charge. I did however start to have a vertical green line on the screen that appears for a while, then disappears for a while. (it is possible the line is just a coincidence and an unrelated screen defect).
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[ 8.5 ms ] story [ 817 ms ] threadSome folks have hooked up devices between the phone and charge cable that do the coulomb counting (or similar), and (the one case I saw) showed that the phone is only taking in about 40% of the watt-hours that it was doing before the OTA update.
From what I've seen, no one can point to any actual incidents with these phones being dangerously hot. But the google FAQ did have a "Yes you can still take the pixel 4a on flights", reminiscent of the samsung phone issue several years ago...
* Send from my now charging 4a
After the update, my battery was depleted at an alarming rate. I applied for the $100 voucher but I've never heard back from Google. So I decided to bite the bullet and moved to iPhone instead. Apple might not be the best, but this was the last straw for me.
But yeah, I was planning to go for a Pixel 9 or 9a (when that's been out for a while), but this forcing of the hand by google is absolute BS, and the alternatives are unsatisfactory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batterygate
https://grapheneos.org/releases#2024030600
This happened in a few stages:
Rollout of the new release (Jan 8 or so; I got it maybe Jan 16?)
Folks showed you could get the old update (I don't recall specifics) and block the OTA URLs (developer settings I think?) to prevent re-update.
Google decided to make it harder to get the old firmware.
I couldn't be arsed to wipe my phone, so am just living with the new shitty future for now.
[1] https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/4457705
https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=2024-43096
https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2024-4377...
https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2024-4377...
https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=2024-49747
https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=2024-49748
These are just the RCE bugs without user interaction that were fixed with the January update. They are in the Bluetooth stack.
I know they pull firmware from disparate devices when possible.
https://review.lineageos.org/q/gatt_sr.cc
"Google Android on a Pixel 4a is vulnerable to remote code execution by arbitrary nearby wireless devices" is certainly a better reason to not use one than "security updates have ended".
Who knows, someone would need to write an actual exploit for these. Just quickly skim through the Android security bulletins at
https://source.android.com/docs/security/bulletin
and you'll see that every month lots and lots of CVEs are fixed with at least high or even critical severity in various stacks. If you're running a phone that hasn't received updates since August 2023, you can assume that you have dozens of remotely exploitable bugs on your system. The security track record of Android is absolutely terrible.
That phone hacking is not a big thing is simply because it's usually much easier for a hacker to get into the cloud services people use instead through targeted phishing attacks. If that makes you feel safe using a phone without updates, then good for you, but don't claim these updates aren't actually fixing serious bugs every month.
The problem is the security industry has such a low signal:noise ratio that it makes sense to just ignore everything they say as a user. They're constantly lying and saying there are important security updates when there aren't, and that everything is high/critical severity when it isn't. In a corporate setting, you just unthinkingly update to check boxes, but as an individual, it makes no sense to do that. And with Android, you have to take possibly undesirable feature updates to get kernel or system library updates. For some products, security updates are to "secure" the device against its owner! Advisories are often lacking enough information to be able to evaluate impact, which further makes it clear that the people publishing them are to be viewed with a skeptical eye.
It should be immediately obvious whether this is exploitable by random passersby (if it actually is) without me having to go learn how bluetooth works at a protocol level. "Don't think about it and just update, install a new OS, or buy new devices" is not a useful attitude.
Things don't become end of life when they stop receiving updates. They become finished. Whether and for what purposes they continue to be useful requires ongoing judgement.
[0] https://learn.adafruit.com/introduction-to-bluetooth-low-ene...
*Written from my 4a.
Decent summary post here: https://www.lambdalatitudinarians.org/techblog/2025/01/09/th...
There was some news at the time that the 4a would be getting a 'battery performance update' and that it would result in some users getting a warning about their battery performing poorly and some would be eligible for $50 or a repair.
When I eventually got around to prepping the phone for the kid, lo and behold, the update was ready, I did it, and the battery was bad, and it linked me to the battery performance campaign page...
Which needed the IMEI, then said I could get $50, a $100 coupon or bring it in for repair, and there was a shop reasonably near me. I brought it in and they swapped the battery in about 2 hours with no extra drama.
I don't know why you would throw your phone out from this update... Although I wouldn't be surprised if you had already thrown it out because the battery performance was an issue before the update too.
I posted about it and they suggested that I keep a backup phone available at all times, thanks folks.
https://xdaforums.com/t/undo-the-january-2025-update-without...
(EDIT: Just to be clear, and which is also mentioned in that post: unlocking the bootloader will reset the device. If your device is already unlocked though, you will be able to keep the data.)
Of course, I would just advise to switch to LineageOS directly, since Google has stopped providing security updates for the Pixel 4a already in August 2023. I've run LineageOS for years on the Pixel 4a and it has worked pretty much perfectly for me:
https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/sunfish/
Android 15 (LineageOS 22) was just released for it.
Videos, on the other hand...
https://developers.google.com/android/images#sunfish
https://web.archive.org/web/20231113025141if_/https://dl.goo...
Just updated to Pixel 8 and it fits the hand very well (including Spigen Liquid Air cover), and doesn't feel too heavy. Have a few friends who got Pixel 8 last month on sale as well and they all confirm.
Maybe from Google phones, for now? Possibly on smaller phones. But Best Buy sells 7 models with 5g and a headphone jack. There's almost certainly more if you shop a retailer with more variety, using Best Buy because they have decent filtering.
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/searchpage.jsp?_dyncharset=UTF-...
Unfortunately, unlockable bootloader isn't one of the parameters available, and I consider it essential.
I ended up getting a 'regular' sized samsung only slightly larger than the one it's replacing, but at least modern phones seem to be getting longer software support periods (assuming there's no nasty surprises included).
I think they no longer do that since a while (a few years) ago, but don't ask me which phone model exactly was the last one affected.
The Moto was half the price of the 4a and is still receiving updates.
The small credit does not cover the cost of inconvenience.
For me, it should be a RED flag on the Pixel lineup and on the confidence in Google.
I filled https://www.stopobsolescence.org/.
I only just found out a month ago that the Android update caused its performance to tank, then put LineageOS on it, and was shocked to find that 13-year-old tablet was not only still usable but actually kinda good.
And here I am, ignoring updates on my Pixel 6a since October 2024 (there were reports of crashes or bricking, what a surprise) and planning to keep doing that for the foreseeable future.
Sucks having to choose between a potentially (even likely, seeing the trend) broken device or an unsecured one. Pick your poison.
Thankfully, I was able to get into the settings and switch to Lawnchair without a working "desktop UI", but without a second application launcher I would have been totally screwed. I checked the Play Store afterwards and saw hundreds of people with the same issue.
On Linux I can choose which "security" updates to install, and only install those. Why can't Windows and Android provide such a feature?
I almost got completely screwed by my pixel updating right before a concert while I was already out of town. Luckily my wife was able to login to my computer and forward the tickets to someone else that I was with, but it was a close call because she was walking out the door to do something herself when I managed to get ahold of her.
In this case, if you don’t have a phone that can display Ticketmaster’s code, you’re just SOL, since they decided to break being able to just print out your code.
Windows does.
Android "can't" because the OS is a partition image with libraries not intended to be updated piecemeal, not a collection of loosely related external projects like Linux is.
Did they? Immutable system images are a pretty solid feature to have. It's a lot less "fall over broken as shit randomly" than desktop Linux is...
But you missed the point that Android's system image is immutable and updates are atomic. A user can't screw it up. This is not an insignificant feature, and it's something you also get with something like Fedora Silverblue. Which then also doesn't let you pick and choose what updates to get.
I had that happen like a year ago while I was getting ready to go to a concert in another state. Luckily I was able to call my wife have her login to my gmail and forward my digital tickets to someone else in my party.
It is also why it is so difficult to recommend an android phone because of google being an advert company first.
(My Pixel 6 is rock solid on that by the way.)
This is the core problem - it is a roll of the dice whether your hardware will work five years from today.
I’m less concerned about the software but that is also a problem.
Meanwhile, my iPhone SE from 2016 still works as advertised.
Googles primary source of income is ads. All this stuff they do is the primary way they get money. People need to stop being surprised this is where they ended up.
My iPad is pretty naggy to install updates, moreso than my Pixel phone even. iOS doesn't automatically update like Android does, but if anything that seems less like it's because Apple disagrees with that and more because their update system is so shit they can't get away with it. It's inexcusably slow to apply updates.
> try to upsell me every time updates are installed
They are the only ones to have lost a lawsuit for doing literally this. Batterygate wasn't that long ago, surely you didn't forget about it already? Heck class actions about it are still happening in various countries!
this dead simple warning message + a switch to toggle CPU throttling is all anyone ever wanted.
However that would require them to respect their users' intelligence - not Apple's style.
I do my part to support Chinese factory workers by purchasing the latest iPhone™
https://securepubads.g.doubleclick.net/ https://news.google.com/swg/js/v1/swg.js - I found these on the Washington Post's web site.
https://fonts.gstatic.com/s/opensans/v20/cJZKeOuBrn4kERxqtaU... https://www.googletagmanager.com/static/service_worker/51n0/... - I found these on New Egg's home page.
https://cm.g.doubleclick.net/pixel?google_nid=a9&google_cm&e... - I found this going to Amazon's home page.
https://www.gstatic.com/recaptcha/releases/I0bG74fWAenNf3Z5n... https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api2/anchor?ar=1&k=6LetQiEU... https://fonts.gstatic.com/s/roboto/v18/KFOmCnqEu92Fr1Mu4mxK.... - I found all of these on democrats.org.
https://ad.doubleclick.net/activity;register_conversion=1;sr...? https://9323526.fls.doubleclick.net/activityi;src=9323526;ty...? https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api2/anchor?ar=1&k=6LdJ810b... - I found these on www.gop.com.
Basically, Google tracks peopple everywhere. They track what news you read, where you shop, and what political party you support. Apple does none of this. No one tracks people on the Internet like Google. Facebook ...
Both tracks you by forcing you to use their app that works as spyware.
I've done plenty of things without them. All Amazon devices do everything they do without them. Same with all Android devices sold in China.
Also, you missed the point of my comment. The comment I replied to basically was saying Apple and Google are equivalent because Apple sells ads (they sell search listings in the App store search and may run an optional advertising service for apps). My point was they are not equivalent because Apple does not track people around the web like Google does. The other things is Apple has released a lot of privacy features which interfere with the advertising spying machine.
At best, Google pretends to improve privacy. Google's business is basically building a profile on each individual so they can serve the most relevant ads to that person. They make more money when they serve relevant ads (ads people will see, and maybe buy something based on the ad). Google has no interest or incentive to protect privacy because their business depends on invading privacy.
That's a pittance of privacy. Apple sells your search results out to Google, cooperates with NSA surveillance and institutes online DRM for your apps. They do not care about protecting you from tracking because tracking users is official policy for Apple in both iOS and MacOS.
It is pathetic to watch people on this site rush out to defend Apple like they aren't part of the problem. If you have witnessed Tim Cook's behavior over the past 10 years and still hold hope for Apple, you are not paying close enough attention.
> At best, Google pretends to improve privacy.
Google still published AOSP source code. That's not "pretending" to improve anything, it's an outright statement about the transparent security of their product. I hate AdSense and consider it an anticompetitive scourge on the internet, but I don't see Apple making commitments to security on the level of Google. Last I checked they were still trying to sue security researchers...
If you think Google is "pretending" to improve privacy, how can you deny that Apple pretends too? The reason people drill down on this isn't to defend Google, it's to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you do not actually know what Apple's stance is on this and cannot confirm it with hard evidence. You are repeating marketing and whitepapers, hoping that it's correct.
> now I’m trying to think of what I can do to secure their devices if they’re not going to update
We have immensely powerful version control and branching at developers' disposal, much better than at any past time I can think of. Yet, most companies insist on having a single release that increments, and users must take everything or nothing whenever they update.
Phone/OS manufacturers are actually better than most, and both major operating systems do provide security updates in parallel with major (feature) updates, but only for a very short amount of time.
So if you release the feature branch every 3 months after a few years you will have a dozen maintaining branches to backport fixes to, and in which to carefully test that the fix actually works. The problem is linearly worse if you release the feature branch more often.
Select: Base version that will only receive security updates. No changes in features. OR All updates
Edit: By "Base version" I mean the first software version for that device.
Of course, they also fired a lot of their testers, and seem to have thought that testing was something end users do in prod, so...
This has been solved by LTS releases for some time. You have a newest release branch that gets feature updates immediately and an LTS branch which has a full release e.g. once every two or three years, at which point it catches up on features to the then-current newest release branch. The newest release branch doesn't have long-term support and you're expected to take the latest feature update, the LTS branch gets only security updates, the user can choose between the two or three LTS releases currently in the support window or the newest release branch.
Never mind the problem of if you started out on a non-LTS version.
And also the problem of not getting the actually nice updates, and perhaps losing app compatibility.
So, no, not solved at all.
Unfortunately, that is exactly how Google rewards performance internally
They shuffle the UI around, or put in more ads, or recently- add some new AI feature. Genuinely can't remember the last OS or App update I've been happy about.
Makes me sad to think of all the developers working long hours just to make their users upset.
My advice is to buy phones from reputable manufacturers. I have had an iPhone for over 10 years and I have been very happy. The work well, last, and the performance is always good. My current goal is to keep my current phone 7 years. I will update it when Apple stops supplying updates.
You mean those slowing down your phone on updates [0] and not providing critical security updates in time [1] while not allowing existing more secure alternative browsers [2]?
The true alternative is phones running mainline Linux. Sent from my Librem 5.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2020/11/18/936268845/apple-agrees-to-pay...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42780816
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=42859836
1) Reduce the CPU speed so the phone did not crash 2) Not reduce the CPU speed and let the phone crash when the battery could not produce enough power.
I think Apple made the right choice.
Yesterday I got my new 8a, installed grapheneos and it works very well! So far no massive issues. When I tried this on the 4a some years ago, netflix complained about general certificate stuff and casting was broken, microG et al was barely holding on. Now, no problems at all!
The whole thing is ridiculous and poorly handled. Sadly, if my phone had just cracked or failed to turn on, I'd probably have upgraded happily and moved on with my life. As it is, now I feel like something was taken from me. So it goes
https://images.ctfassets.net/d9ybqgejqp0w/7hP2z3Oyn8xH4TvFJt...
You can schedule an appointment here:
https://asurion.com
A retired coworker got a 4a off eBay two years ago, and it's eligible for a free battery replacement.
I still think Google’s Android UI is the best one out there for me, and I despise a lot in the iPhone UX (such as the keyboard) but I just need a phone that works and I can get repaired or replaced easily if I need to. At least in Finland, Google’s customer service has been abysmal over the years.
The problem is, the Pixel 4a is not designed to have the battery be swapped and it's common to break screens and other parts of the phone in the process. You can look up what's involved and it's no surprise that this is the case.
It's basically a nice little case of hardware and software anti-consumer policies working together to break people's devices and force them to consume more.
Without legislation nothing will change.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xboo6sV-cJU