Google Pixel 4a’s ruinous “Battery Performance” update is a bewildering mess
It’s hard to say why Google is doing this instead of a recall.
It's hard to say why Google is doing this instead of a recall.
Recall: need to spend millions
Push an automatic update that artificially limits the battery to just 1500mah: every phone now become electric waste that lasts only a few hours and surely people would even buy a new Pixel 😉
This is a shitshow. This is how you get people not to trust you and to go out of their way to disable automatic updates. Did Grapheneos also send the update?
I don't think grapheneos supports devices that old.
LSN-tagged batteries assigned the "debug" profile can see capacity reduced from 3,080 milliamp hours (mAh) to 1,539 mAh.
Two hours on a charge or less
Amazing work there Google. Perfect. No notes.
My wife avoids updating her devices for as long as possible, because "updates only break things". I think I'll keep this news to myself, because otherwise I'll never hear the end of it.
I finally nudged her from a pixel 4a to an 8a for Christmas, so it is on its way to the retirement drawer.
That's my strategy too, and after decades in IT I have the experience to prove it.
Yes, there are positive reasons for updates, but I've rarely seen unaltered systems break, never hacked (because security is a layered thing). I've seen many, many, systems taken down by updates, even after extensive lab testing. Nothing like being on an outage call for 17 hours because an update screwed the pooch on 5,000 machines.
Also, move that phone to Lineage, you won't regret it. Better battery life out of the gate. Hell, buy another 4a or 5, install Lineage, setup her stuff on it, and simply swap it out.
Time to install lineage os on that bad boy
It seems to have been built by a Google engineer "on their personal machine, not the proper buildsystem."
How does that even get pushed out as an automatic update?
It gets uploaded to the distribution system.