this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2025
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top 14 comments
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[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 week ago

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 😉

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I don't think grapheneos supports devices that old.

[–] dai 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It's not so much how old - but how long the OEM (google) keeps bringing out updates for that platform (from memory)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Yes, security updates from Google, which is based on age of the device.

[–] PetteriPano 15 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

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.

[–] AbidanYre 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It gets uploaded to the distribution system.

[–] AbidanYre 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

You're saying that Google has no automation or signature verification for what gets loaded onto their pushed update server?

There should be multiple layers of security preventing something like this and I'm interested in how those all failed for this to happen.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

They have automation. Probably signature verification too.

I don't know what you're on about regarding security preventing this. It's not like it was a security compromise or rogue employee. My guess is that they just didn't have the automated build tools set up for an old device that wasn't supposed to receive any more updates, so they did it on the engineer's workstation and released that build.

[–] bokherif 7 points 1 week ago

Time to install lineage os on that bad boy

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

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.