It’s hard to say why Google is doing this instead of a recall.
  • Moonrise2473English
    371·
    20 hours 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 😉

  • iturnedintoanewt@lemm.eeEnglish
    23·
    21 hours ago

    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?

  • PetteriPano@lemmy.worldEnglish
    10·
    18 hours ago

    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.

    • Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafeEnglish
      21·
      6 hours 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@lemmy.worldEnglish
    121·
    22 hours ago

    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?

      • AbidanYre@lemmy.worldEnglish
        31·
        9 hours ago

        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.

        • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
          2·
          6 hours 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.