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I jumped off when the third Nexus 5X replacement Google gave me also bootlooped. Total junk and probably the most frustrating product experience I've ever had.

I jumped off when the third Nexus 5X replacement Google gave me also bootlooped. Total junk and probably the most frustrating product experience I've ever had. The writing's on the wall when it comes to Android SOCs now anyway, Apple phones from 4 years ago perform better and still get updates. They have their own issues, but they're not existential level problems.

naasking 5y ago
> I jumped off when the third Nexus 5X replacement Google gave me also bootlooped Shame, because my Nexus 5 and Nexus 4 still run great. I don't use them as phones, but they're still solid devices I use for other projects.
fluidcruft 5y ago
This is sort of what I wonder about the Tensor in the new Pixels... but after Pixel 3 I'm not willing to gamble that much money on what looks like yet-another of Google's attempts to shift blame about why they can't support their phones. If Pixel "6a" has Tensor and is priced like a phone that will only be supported for 3 years, I'll consider it. But frankly it's really hard to justify not getting an iPhone anymore. I have three kids and they all want iPhones and all their social life is on iMessage. Not to mention that all the apps I have to use for work are better supported in iPhone and have issues on Android but IT doesn't really care. It's becoming really difficult to justify not just getting my wife and I iPhones in the next cycle and planning to hand them down.
- RHSeeger 5y ago
  Apple makes some really nice devices, but there's a lot of people (myself included) that have a strong aversion to their "you don't want this, you want this other thing that we decided" mentality. Their software commonly does something totally different than what you tell it to do, because they decided it's better. Because of that, I will never own an iphone. Its frustrating that all the big companies act like "we're big, so we'll do what we want, no matter how annoying it is to the end user" ... and the small companies really can't compete/disrupt the market because they're not big enough.
  - fluidcruft 5y ago
    I guess I'm at the point where I just don't care to futz with the device much anymore and try to limit my use of the phone. In the early days you'd load custom ROMs and tweak things and that was a lot of fun. Nowadays I just want something that is secure and works. Nexus and Pixel devices have always been very good at that for me. But now that I don't care so much about that it means the focus is on device lifetime, security and long-term cost. Apple wins those. But also so many of the people around me use iOS devices now that I end up having to learn how to use them anyway. Yikes I sound like an Apple shill... but the opposite is true. lol
    - RHSeeger 5y ago
      As a more mundane example... My wife went into iTunes and moved a bunch of songs onto her phone. Then she went out and tried to play those songs... and it tried to download them off the cloud (using data, which is a limited resource). Apparently, copying to the phone didn't _actually_ copy them, just put sort of "shortcut" there pointing at it on the cloud. That was definitely _not_ what she wanted, but the software decided otherwise.
      - SilasX 5y ago
        Similar pet peeve: how you can have a tab open on iOS Safari, even for a static page, leave it for 20 seconds, and come back, and then it has to re-download the entire page. It somehow won’t even cache what you had to local storage.
        jeromegv 5y ago
        I mean.. that's not a feature. That's a bug (likely due to RAM being full). I rarely if ever have this issue, but I do remember it happening at some point, but that's definitely not a feature that iOS thinks is better.
        SilasX 5y ago
        Really? I mean, I've seen it over ten years of usage, and it's never been any other way, so that sounds like a deliberate decision. At the very least, not using internal storage -- when RAM is needed for something else -- is a decision.
- tempnow987 5y ago
  The update period on iphones is mind boggling good if you are coming from Chinese android phones for example. I've seen android phones ship a version behind and never get an update. Apple were releasing updates to the 6s in 2021 still. That's a 7 year old device. Security updates only pretty much - but still its crazy. My wife will not upgrade her old phone as a result (I get one every year through work and just sell my old one).
  - vanilla_nut 5y ago
    The 6S (and the SE, which also uses the A9) is still receiving all the latest OS updates, not just security updates, in 2022. I for one won't "upgrade" to a bigger phone with no fingerprint sensor and no headphone jack. I don't agree with many things Apple does, but their iPhone support is pretty damn good.
  - Osiris 5y ago
    I fixed the screen on an old iPhone 7 Plus. After rebooting it, it updated to iOS 15. As an Android user that's always made me jealous.
    - tempnow987 5y ago
      I know - it's just crazy and a totally different world. It also really helps with resale value. I can't believe what I was getting for my old iphones.
  - GeekyBear 5y ago
    Apple released another security update for the 2013 iPhone 5s last September.
  - wiredfool 5y ago
    I think I got an update to my 6splus last night, it’s still supported on iOS 15. same with the original SEs, the kids have them and still supported.
  - myko 5y ago
    The difference is Apple OS updates on older devices don't always have all the features the new OS gets on newer hardware (which makes sense in many cases) while older Android phones can run most of the latest updates to Android (e.g., Jetpack Compose) A SwiftUI app vs Compose app right now is night and day, bugs from iOS 13.5 to 13.6 are catastrophic meanwhile Android devices with extremely old operating systems run the latest UI toolkit with very few issues.
johnnyb9 5y ago
My 5X died in my pocket before a year of usage. Just died and wouldn't turn on. I called support and they said to ship it out, and I would have a new one in about a week. Never mind 1) phones shouldn't just randomly die, and 2) a week without a phone??? Switched to iPhone and never looked back.
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago
  >2) a week without a phone??? Does Apple give you a replacement before sending in your existing phone? Maybe in the US, on Apple's homeland, but I doubt they do this in the EU. Would be cool if they did though. Whenever I upgrade phones, I still keep my previous device around so that when I had to send my last gen to the service, I can always quickly switch to the previous one for a couple of weeks until it's back
  - bsagdiyev 5y ago
    I'm pretty sure you can just go to an Apple store and be taken care of. No physical stores, or real people at deal with at Google, is a problem.
  - wincy 5y ago
    Normally you’d go to an Apple store and there’s a good chance they’ll just give you a new phone.
  - KennyBlanken 5y ago
    You can walk into an Apple store and walk out with a replacement. If you had backups running to your Mac or PC (which can happen over WiFi automatically when both the phone and mac are on line power), you've got a whole-device backup that will have you up and running as fast as it takes the backup to restore.
    - pjerem 5y ago
      If you backup to iCloud, you can even walk out with the phone showing a progress bar while it is restoring to the exact state you left the older.
howinteresting 5y ago
Personally, I support ecosystems where the people in power don't apply pressure on social media networks to ban any remotely sexually explicit content, or discussion of depression and PTSD. https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/29/tumblr-ios-tags-ban-apple/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/29/tumblr-ios-tags-ban-apple/ I escaped from such a world as a child. Apple's sanitization of the internet is fundamentally unethical.
- micromacrofoot 5y ago
  Let me know when you find such an ecosystem. Google bans it too, they only get a pass because you can enable sideloading.
  - howinteresting 5y ago
    Tumblr didn't have to censor its Android app last month.
xyzzyz 5y ago
From what I remember, the Nexuses 5x had a manufacturing error, which caused them to spontaneously desolder some components from the board, resulting in the bootloop. This was a problem in a lot (maybe even most) phones. Mine was in a bootloop too. There was a class action about it too, see if you may still be able to claim cash: https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/1/31/16957332/lg-bootloop-lawsuit-settlement-g4-v10-v20-nexus-5x-g5 https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/1/31/16957332/l...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- totalZero 5y ago
  I strongly doubt Google's narrative about a manufacturing defect as the root cause. Several different devices with varying manufacturers were affected. In my case, the bootloop began immediately after the upgrade to Android Oreo. Google told me, a US customer, to send my device to Huawei's nearest service center in mainland China at my own cost for diagnosis and repair. That is unacceptable for a Google-branded product designed by Google, unveiled by Google, marketed by Google, sold directly by Google, warrantied by Google, and bricked by Google. Imagine, if you will, Audi sending you to Bosch in Germany (at your own cost!) after an Audi dealership in Indiana bricks your ECU during a recall service.

naasking 5y ago

> I jumped off when the third Nexus 5X replacement Google gave me also bootlooped Shame, because my Nexus 5 and Nexus 4 still run great. I don't use them as phones, but they're still solid devices I use for other projects.

fluidcruft 5y ago

This is sort of what I wonder about the Tensor in the new Pixels... but after Pixel 3 I'm not willing to gamble that much money on what looks like yet-another of Google's attempts to shift blame about why they can't support their phones. If Pixel "6a" has Tensor and is priced like a phone that will only be supported for 3 years, I'll consider it. But frankly it's really hard to justify not getting an iPhone anymore. I have three kids and they all want iPhones and all their social life is on iMessage. Not to mention that all the apps I have to use for work are better supported in iPhone and have issues on Android but IT doesn't really care. It's becoming really difficult to justify not just getting my wife and I iPhones in the next cycle and planning to hand them down.

RHSeeger 5y ago
Apple makes some really nice devices, but there's a lot of people (myself included) that have a strong aversion to their "you don't want this, you want this other thing that we decided" mentality. Their software commonly does something totally different than what you tell it to do, because they decided it's better. Because of that, I will never own an iphone. Its frustrating that all the big companies act like "we're big, so we'll do what we want, no matter how annoying it is to the end user" ... and the small companies really can't compete/disrupt the market because they're not big enough.
- fluidcruft 5y ago
  I guess I'm at the point where I just don't care to futz with the device much anymore and try to limit my use of the phone. In the early days you'd load custom ROMs and tweak things and that was a lot of fun. Nowadays I just want something that is secure and works. Nexus and Pixel devices have always been very good at that for me. But now that I don't care so much about that it means the focus is on device lifetime, security and long-term cost. Apple wins those. But also so many of the people around me use iOS devices now that I end up having to learn how to use them anyway. Yikes I sound like an Apple shill... but the opposite is true. lol
  - RHSeeger 5y ago
    As a more mundane example... My wife went into iTunes and moved a bunch of songs onto her phone. Then she went out and tried to play those songs... and it tried to download them off the cloud (using data, which is a limited resource). Apparently, copying to the phone didn't _actually_ copy them, just put sort of "shortcut" there pointing at it on the cloud. That was definitely _not_ what she wanted, but the software decided otherwise.
    - SilasX 5y ago
      Similar pet peeve: how you can have a tab open on iOS Safari, even for a static page, leave it for 20 seconds, and come back, and then it has to re-download the entire page. It somehow won’t even cache what you had to local storage.
      - jeromegv 5y ago
        I mean.. that's not a feature. That's a bug (likely due to RAM being full). I rarely if ever have this issue, but I do remember it happening at some point, but that's definitely not a feature that iOS thinks is better.
        SilasX 5y ago
        Really? I mean, I've seen it over ten years of usage, and it's never been any other way, so that sounds like a deliberate decision. At the very least, not using internal storage -- when RAM is needed for something else -- is a decision.
tempnow987 5y ago
The update period on iphones is mind boggling good if you are coming from Chinese android phones for example. I've seen android phones ship a version behind and never get an update. Apple were releasing updates to the 6s in 2021 still. That's a 7 year old device. Security updates only pretty much - but still its crazy. My wife will not upgrade her old phone as a result (I get one every year through work and just sell my old one).
- vanilla_nut 5y ago
  The 6S (and the SE, which also uses the A9) is still receiving all the latest OS updates, not just security updates, in 2022. I for one won't "upgrade" to a bigger phone with no fingerprint sensor and no headphone jack. I don't agree with many things Apple does, but their iPhone support is pretty damn good.
- Osiris 5y ago
  I fixed the screen on an old iPhone 7 Plus. After rebooting it, it updated to iOS 15. As an Android user that's always made me jealous.
  - tempnow987 5y ago
    I know - it's just crazy and a totally different world. It also really helps with resale value. I can't believe what I was getting for my old iphones.
- GeekyBear 5y ago
  Apple released another security update for the 2013 iPhone 5s last September.
- wiredfool 5y ago
  I think I got an update to my 6splus last night, it’s still supported on iOS 15. same with the original SEs, the kids have them and still supported.
- myko 5y ago
  The difference is Apple OS updates on older devices don't always have all the features the new OS gets on newer hardware (which makes sense in many cases) while older Android phones can run most of the latest updates to Android (e.g., Jetpack Compose) A SwiftUI app vs Compose app right now is night and day, bugs from iOS 13.5 to 13.6 are catastrophic meanwhile Android devices with extremely old operating systems run the latest UI toolkit with very few issues.

johnnyb9 5y ago

My 5X died in my pocket before a year of usage. Just died and wouldn't turn on. I called support and they said to ship it out, and I would have a new one in about a week. Never mind 1) phones shouldn't just randomly die, and 2) a week without a phone??? Switched to iPhone and never looked back.

ChuckNorris89 5y ago
>2) a week without a phone??? Does Apple give you a replacement before sending in your existing phone? Maybe in the US, on Apple's homeland, but I doubt they do this in the EU. Would be cool if they did though. Whenever I upgrade phones, I still keep my previous device around so that when I had to send my last gen to the service, I can always quickly switch to the previous one for a couple of weeks until it's back
- bsagdiyev 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure you can just go to an Apple store and be taken care of. No physical stores, or real people at deal with at Google, is a problem.
- wincy 5y ago
  Normally you’d go to an Apple store and there’s a good chance they’ll just give you a new phone.
- KennyBlanken 5y ago
  You can walk into an Apple store and walk out with a replacement. If you had backups running to your Mac or PC (which can happen over WiFi automatically when both the phone and mac are on line power), you've got a whole-device backup that will have you up and running as fast as it takes the backup to restore.
  - pjerem 5y ago
    If you backup to iCloud, you can even walk out with the phone showing a progress bar while it is restoring to the exact state you left the older.

howinteresting 5y ago

Personally, I support ecosystems where the people in power don't apply pressure on social media networks to ban any remotely sexually explicit content, or discussion of depression and PTSD. https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/29/tumblr-ios-tags-ban-apple/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/29/tumblr-ios-tags-ban-apple/ I escaped from such a world as a child. Apple's sanitization of the internet is fundamentally unethical.

micromacrofoot 5y ago
Let me know when you find such an ecosystem. Google bans it too, they only get a pass because you can enable sideloading.
- howinteresting 5y ago
  Tumblr didn't have to censor its Android app last month.

xyzzyz 5y ago

From what I remember, the Nexuses 5x had a manufacturing error, which caused them to spontaneously desolder some components from the board, resulting in the bootloop. This was a problem in a lot (maybe even most) phones. Mine was in a bootloop too. There was a class action about it too, see if you may still be able to claim cash: https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/1/31/16957332/lg-bootloop-lawsuit-settlement-g4-v10-v20-nexus-5x-g5 https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/1/31/16957332/l...

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
totalZero 5y ago
I strongly doubt Google's narrative about a manufacturing defect as the root cause. Several different devices with varying manufacturers were affected. In my case, the bootloop began immediately after the upgrade to Android Oreo. Google told me, a US customer, to send my device to Huawei's nearest service center in mainland China at my own cost for diagnosis and repair. That is unacceptable for a Google-branded product designed by Google, unveiled by Google, marketed by Google, sold directly by Google, warrantied by Google, and bricked by Google. Imagine, if you will, Audi sending you to Bosch in Germany (at your own cost!) after an Audi dealership in Indiana bricks your ECU during a recall service.